ABSTRACT

The mutiny aboard the Amistad constitutes one of the most celebrated events in the history of American slavery and is a tale quickly told. It began in the early hours of July 2, 1839, when 53 African slaves being illegally transported from Havana to Puerto Príncipe rose up against their oppressors and, led by Sengbe Pieh (known in America as Joseph Cinque), killed both the Amistad’s captain, Ramόn Ferrer, and his mixed-race cook, Celestino (who was himself not only Ferrer’s slave but also reputed to be his son). The insurgents’ Spanish owners, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, were spared the same fate, the latter chiefly for his navigational experience, which the Amistads, as they came to be called, hoped to exploit in order to help steer the vessel on its journey back to their Mende homeland in Sierra Leone. Ironically, however, Ruiz and Montes contrived a mutiny of their own, albeit one far less spectacular than that carried out by their former charges: they zigzagged the slaver east by day, as Cinque ordered, but west by night, so that it could remain close to the North American coastline as such proximity kept the chance of rescue alive. After almost two months on this devious course, the Amistad was apprehended by United States naval authorities off Long Island Sound on August 26 and the 42 then-surviving Amistads were thrown into jail in New Haven, Connecticut, together with Ferrer’s African-born slave and cabin boy, Antonio. During the protracted period that ensued, their deeds and identities were debated across a series of three trials. Were the Amistads pirates and murderers who should be returned to Spanish jurisdiction in Cuba? Were they property? Or should they be seen as heroes, nobly struggling to retrieve a freedom stolen from them by a trade officially outlawed by international treaty over 20 years ago? 1 Following a concerted campaign by the Amistad Committee, formed by several prominent abolitionists on September 4, 1839 (and a famous speech at the Supreme Court by former president John Quincy Adams) the case was eventually resolved in the Amistads’ favor on March 9, 1841. They were released from custody and, after a further lengthy period of fundraising, returned to Sierra Leone, finally arriving in Freetown on January 13, 1842. Here they participated in the short-lived and ill-starred project of instructing their compatriots in the Christian religion they themselves had been taught, working under the auspices of the Union Missionary Society, founded in the previous year by another ex-slave, James W.C. Pennington.