The Old State House and the Amistad

The building at eight hundred Main Street is the oldest state house in the United States. Designed by Charles Bulfinch, the architect who would later work on the United States Capitol, it was completed in seventeen ninety-six in Hartford brownstone, with Federal-style symmetry and a cupola visible from the river below. For more than eighty years it served as the seat of Connecticut's government.

It also served, in eighteen thirty-nine, as the opening stage of one of the most dramatic legal proceedings in American history. On July second of that year, a group of Africans who had been illegally enslaved and shipped to Cuba seized control of a Spanish schooner called La Amistad. Their leader, a man the captors called Joseph Cinqué, was from the Mende people of what is now Sierra Leone.

The Africans had killed the cook and the captain, and attempted to force the remaining crew to sail them back to Africa. Instead, they were steered north and captured by a United States Navy vessel off Long Island. The first legal proceedings began in Hartford in September of eighteen thirty-nine.

The charge was mutiny and murder. A circuit court ruled it lacked jurisdiction because the alleged acts occurred on a Spanish ship in Spanish waters. The case moved to district court, then to the Supreme Court, where former president John Quincy Adams argued on behalf of the Africans.

On March ninth, eighteen forty-one, the Supreme Court affirmed that the captives had been enslaved in violation of international law and ordered their release. Thirty-five of the Mende captives eventually returned to Sierra Leone in eighteen forty-two. The case had tested, in courts that met partly in this building, whether the legal principles Americans proclaimed to the world actually applied to people who were not white.