April 6, 2011 • 23 mins
In 1839, Africans held captive by slavers revolted and ordered the Amistad's crew to return to Africa. However, the ship was captured in Long Island and the slaves were put on trial -- but that's not the end of the story. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delinea Chruck Rewarding, and today
we're going to talk about the Amistad Mutiny. It was
actually a listener suggestion, but it's the one that's kind
(00:22):
of been on my mind for a little while now.
And to most of you, am Stead probably brings to
mind that nine seven Steven Spielberg movie. I think just
about everybody though. It has Anthony Hopkins in it, He's
got some awesome mutton shops because he's playing John Quincy Adams,
has Matthew McConaughey, has Jamon Hansu playing the slave leader,
(00:43):
who are obviously going to talk about in great detail.
But I was thinking about it. I don't remember the
movie very well. It's probably been since nine then I
saw it. Yeah, same here, It was a long time ago.
I was saying, though. There is one scene though that
really stands out, and I'm not sure if it it's
just because it was so memorable, or if because I
saw it later, probably in in high school, you know,
(01:06):
as a as a demonstration of what the middle Passage
might have looked like, but that scene really stands out
in my mind. It's horrific. The slaves are beaten, they're starved,
they're murdered, all on the massive trip across the Atlantic.
But the interesting thing here is that even though the
movie Amstad turns out to be kind of a courtroom drama,
(01:28):
that scene the Middle Passage is really crucial, and it's
really crucial in the story of the Amistade in general,
because the case against the mutineers the slave Uprising, hinged
on the lie that they never experienced the Middle Passage. Yeah,
and that lie was that they were in fact Cuban
born ladinos or slaves who were born in Latin America,
(01:51):
and most crucially, that they were slaves before Spain had
banished trafficking in its empire. Yeah, that they had kind
of been grandfathered into the whole slave system. In reality,
of course, the eventual Amistad mutineers were born in Africa,
so it's Africa where we will start our story. And
of course there are lots of mutineers, so they have
(02:13):
lots of different backstories, and we have varying degrees of
information on different members of the mutiny but fortunately a
lot of the backstories are pretty similar to the leader,
Joseph Sink, who was Mende tribesmen from what is today
Sierra Leone, and in large they were mostly men young
men um. They were usually captured when they were walking
(02:36):
along a road or in their village, essentially jumped and
kidnapped and sold into slavery. Yeah. Sink in particular, who
was born sing by Pia. He was a twenty five
year old married father of three and a rice farmer
when he was captured, and his father was headman in
the village of Moni. Now his capture most sources believe
(02:57):
may have had something to do with a debt that
he But what we do know is that after a
three day march to the Portuguese slave factory on the
island of Lumboco, Sink was sold to a Spanish slaver
and loaded aboard the slave ship to Cora with hundreds
of others bound for Havannah. Yeah. In that tripe from
Africa to havannahs of course the middle passage. But once
(03:18):
the Toakora are landed or arrived in Havannah, Sink and
fifty two others were sold to two Cuban sugar planters,
and that's Jose Ruiz and Pedro Mantas, And they were
packed aboard a second ship, and that is lah Amistad.
But there's a catch with this story, and you probably
(03:39):
guessed it already with our little introduction there. But the
year was eighteen thirty nine, and the slave trade had
been illegal in the Spanish Empire for years since eighteen twenty,
in fact, due to this eighteen seventeen treaty with Great Britain.
But the Spanish don't really try very hard to follow
(04:00):
their own ban against slavery. They sort of enforce it haphazardly,
and Cuban officials could really easily be bribed to falsify
slave documents so they would make them out to be
Ladinos instead of Africans. And this is exactly what Ruis
and Montes diad. They had fake passports made for the
Africans and then set sail from Havannah. Yeah, and they
(04:21):
went to all that trouble of making fake passports for
their new slaves because they were concerned that if a
British patroller stopped them, their slaves might be confiscated. Because
even though the Spanish weren't very invested in enforcing their laws.
The British definitely were, so they, like you said, they
set sail from Havannah and they were headed to Puerto
(04:43):
Prince Pe, which was the northwestern Cuban port, and it's
there where they would have ultimately settled on the sugar plantations.
And they left, you know, trying to be all secret
before dawn j thirty nine. On board, just to give
you a picture of what the ship looked like before
the mutiny went down. There were fifty three slaves, the
(05:04):
two slavers Ruis and Montez, Captain Ramon Fairer and Ladino
cabin boy, and a mixed race slave cook. Also, judging
from later accounts, there are two ship hands on deck,
two sailors um Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don't.
You see them, sometimes you don't, except they are conspicuously missing.
(05:25):
After the rebellion, you would have normally had two and
a half to three days that see to make this trip,
but storms cause a delay, which means they have to
start rationing food. The slaves who are on board only
get one banana, two potatoes, and one cup of water
per day. They're also flogged by an increasingly abusive crew,
so very bad conditions for the slaves on board here.
(05:48):
They're also naturally, if you're being flogged every day, really
scared about what awaits them when they arrive at their destination.
Sink A actually uses signs to communicate with the cook Celestino,
who indicates that the slaves will be killed, cut up, salted,
and eaten once they've landed, which I'm just imagining, like
the signals that they're using and how he would have
(06:09):
signaled cut up, salted and eaten. But I'm sure it
wasn't pleasant. I think he pointed at barrels and one
could assume he used the universal hand across the neck tumble. Yeah. Um,
but you know, so Celestino is is playing a prank
on on sink essentially trying to put him on. It
(06:29):
has a pretty terrible consequence, especially for Celestino, because this news,
plus the already bad conditions on board the ship, makes
sink A decide to act. You know, he's afraid that
his time is running short and what he's seen so
far has been so horrific, So before dawn on July two,
he uses a hidden nail that he's squirreled away to
(06:52):
break out of his iron collar, and then he goes
on to free some of the other Africans on board.
They arm themselves with Kane knives, which are really big,
scary knives, and they immediately kill the captain and the cook.
So there's the don't make practical jokes in a dire situation, guys.
If the two sailors were on board, as we mentioned before,
(07:15):
they disappeared, they weren't on board. The ship later probably
drowned right exactly, and the the slaves. They end up
sparing the Ladino cabin boy, and they decided to keep
Montes and Ruis alive as well so that they can
help the slaves navigate back to Africa. But the slavers
are pretty tricky. They actually they sail east during the day,
but then turn northward at night. So they're thinking maybe
(07:38):
the British will spot them and stop the ship. Maybe
we'll hit the North American coast and sink a and
the other. The other Africans on board just see that
they're heading towards the sun, you know, heading east during
the morning, and they think they're on their way to Africa.
But it just goes on and on and on. Like
that for a ventually two months. Uh, they run out
(08:02):
of food, there's no water, the sails are in tatters,
the rigging is in tatters. Ten Africans die from drinking
some unknown liquids aboard the ship, which proved to be poisonous.
And finally Sink realizes that he's out of luck too
and allows Mantas to land and they anchor on Long Island,
(08:25):
and Sinka goes to shore with a few other guys
to use the Spanish money on board to buy provisions.
But meanwhile, enough small ships have have seen what is
essentially a ghost ship at this point, you know, scary
tattered sails and all these knife wielding people on board.
They've seen it in the waters. They've been too afraid
(08:47):
to go close to it themselves, but they've reported back
to the United States Revenue Cutter Service about this mystery ship.
So while Sinka is going to shore, the US Cutter
Service finally catches up with them. Yeah, the USS Washington
in fact catches up with them, and they board the
(09:07):
Amistade commanding officer here is Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, and he
seizes the ship, the cargo, and the Africans. On August
thirty nine and tows the boat to New London, Connecticut,
where slavery happens to be legal at the time. Once
they're there, he alerts US Federal District Justice Andrew T. Judson,
(09:28):
But Judson can't get the whole story because the Africans
don't speak English, so he decides to refer the case
to the U. S. Circuit Court in Hartford, which is
meeting in September. Meanwhile, the Africans are sent to jail
in New Haven, so they're stuck in Connecticut. Yeah, and
this epic legal battle starts from this point. The circuit
court trial comes first, and it's largely centered on murder
(09:51):
and piracy charges against the Africans because in Spanish eyes,
they have killed crew members and stolen a and his ship.
But this trial, the circuit court trial, only lasts a
few days. The judge dismisses those charges of murder and piracy.
It says, well, the Africans are not under any U.
(10:12):
S jurisdiction for crimes committed against the Cubans, so he
refers the case to the U. S. District Court. And
by this point the story has really started to get
a lot of national attention and abolitionists have sort of
taken it up as a great way to fight slavery
in the United States as well, or at least draw
(10:32):
attention to it um. Some of the abolishists involved, Lewis Tappened,
Joshua Lovitt and Simeon Jocelyn formed the Amstad Committee and
even raised defense funds for the Africans. And this lets
them actually hire an attorney, lead attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin,
to defend them, and they get ahold of some translators too,
(10:53):
So finally the African side of the story can be told. Yeah,
and that's key because once the slaves have a void,
the sides become quite clear. The Africans argue that they're
not slaves, they're freemen who were born in Africa and
treated illegally. And Ruis and Montess on the other hand,
they argue that the slaves are actually ladinos and murderers
(11:14):
to boot. And what's interesting is that they is the
people that they have on their side. They are supported
by the Spanish government and by US President Martin Van Buren,
and he's up for re election soon. He's not necessarily
a supporter of slavery, but he wants to impress Southern
slave owners, and so he arranges for a Navy ship
to come up and be ready to return the slaves
(11:36):
to Cuba immediately after the trial, before a possible appeal
can be made. Yeah, So his plan is is he's
assuming that the court will rule in favor of the Cubans,
and as soon as they do, he's going to get
the Africans right back to Cuba before anybody can make
a fuss. But there's a third element to the story,
(11:56):
and it also has to do with property, which is
sort of the key here. Under maritime law, compensation would
go to the person who helped save a ship or
the ship's cargo from loss, even if they were just
doing the job that they were supposed to do it
for the U. S. Government like Gutney. So Getney has
filed a claim to the ship's cargo. You know, he's saying,
(12:18):
I risked my life, my crew, my ship to essentially
rescue the Amistade and rescue all of its cargo from
this mutinous situation. And he files a claim to not
just the cargo as in the material goods, but the
slaves as well, which he values the whole thing together
(12:39):
forty dollars for the slaves, so he is in it
for a very substantial profit. Yeah, and there are other
people who have things at stake here as well, or
at least think they do. Long Island Seaman for example,
that Henry Green. He files a competing salvage claim, and
Ruis and Montes, of course, with support from the Queen
of Spain Sane, are trying to get their money and
(13:01):
property back. So there are a lot of people who
are vying here for the stuff evolved. It's it's not
just about the mutiny and the murders and what happened
on the ship. It's about what the ship is worth
and that includes the people on it. So obviously this
trial turns into a sensation with with so many competing
interests and so many high profile people involved and their
(13:24):
trial trial spectators who come. They start filling up the galleries.
Newspapers cover it. There's gripping testimony from sink A and
from others detailing their lives in Africa, you know, their
lives before being captured, their capture, the Middle Passage, the
sale in Cuba, and the revolt on the ship, to
(13:45):
just sort of lay the picture of we're not Ladino,
as we are from Africa. So their defense attorney, though
pretty crucially, doesn't drift far into the moral arguments. I mean,
he lets sink A and the others tell their own
gripping stories, but he doesn't get too much into the
ethics of slavery, which, of course, this is long before
(14:08):
slavery was abolished in the United States. So he keeps
it about property, which is something that maybe people could
think about a little more clearly, and clearly it's everyone's
focus in this trial. Yeah, and his strategy really works.
In January, the court does several things. They dismiss green
salvage claim, they award some salvage rights to Getney, and
(14:30):
they rule most importantly that the Africans were not legally enslaved,
so the US government must return them to Africa. So yeah,
that's probably a pretty unexpected verdict for a lot of
these high stakes players involved, including Martin van Buren. I mean,
he's not expecting this, so he ordered an immediate appeal,
and eventually, after a few more stops along the way,
(14:53):
we're gonna, you know, skip along a bit. The case
eventually gets to the Supreme Court, and at that point
the abolitionists who are supporting the Africans knew that they
might need to bring in some new blood to to
keep up with the high profile nature of the trial.
Star power, Yeah, exactly, some celebrity lawyers um to to
(15:14):
just keep public interest going and to make it so
so high profile that Van Buren couldn't try any funny
business like having the slave suddenly disappeared to Cuba. So
the Omstuff Committee goes after none other than John Quincy
Adams to defend the Africans, along with the original defense attorney,
(15:35):
Roger Baldwin. Yeah, John Quincy Adams at this point, he's
pretty old. He's seventy three, visually impaired and out of practice.
He hasn't really acted as a lawyer in thirty plus
years or so. But he's still, as we said, really
high profile. He's a congressman, former president UM and known
as old man eloquent. So we're ready to hear him
give some really compelling speeches here. Yeah, he's a good speaker.
(15:58):
So he takes a little convince and saying, you know,
he's he's reluctant to get on board for such an
intense commitment and something that is again so high profile.
We keep using that word, but that's what it is.
But eventually he decides to go for it. He kind
of thinks it might be his last great achievement as
(16:18):
a political man um and he starts. He starts swinging
right off the bat. He raises questions about Van Buren
and his administration and whether they falsified documents relating to
the incident, and this ultimately starts a congressional inquiry, and
then by February, the Supreme Court trial US versus Amstad begins.
(16:44):
Baldwin actually opens the case, surprisingly, I guess if you're
a John Quincy Adam's fan. But Adams eventually does spend
eight and a half maybe seven hours making his argument
before court, and in that he refers back to the
Declaration of Independent be quite moving, I would assume, as
the son of one of its signers, definitely, And in
(17:05):
the end the court upheld the previous rulings and found
for the Africans. Yeah, and by this point, I mean,
this is okay. It is it's a victory. It's certainly
a victory for the abolitionists, for the Africans. They get
to go home. But it's sad too. At this point,
they're only thirty five surviving Africans from the Almstade and
(17:26):
the committee, the Almstad Committee, raises funds for their return.
The survivors actually go on a speaking tour to sort
of help out with their own fundraising because I know
English now, they've learned English. They've had these several years
in prison by this point to learn English, and by
January eighty two they land in West Africa. But the mystery,
(17:50):
or sort of a sketchy aspect of this story doesn't
stop there. And the mystery is in what happens after, right,
I mean, when Sink returns, he finds that his wife
and three children are missing. But supposedly he bounces back
from this to become a slave trader himself, or that's
what some people say, and a wealthy one at that,
a wealthy slaver. Obviously, this is a really contentious claim,
(18:14):
one that actually got Spielberg's in flak for not including
it or mentioning it in the film. But is it
even true? Yeah, so, you know, it is a pretty
serious thing to say about somebody. And there's a really
interesting article I read in the Journal of American History
by Howard Jones that suggests a lot of the story,
a lot of the story about sinking the slaver seems
(18:36):
based in a work of historical fiction. Very surprising. Yeah,
kind of opposite of what you think would happen. Usually
you think of history some primary storties, yea, some some
primary sources in here um influencing the novel. But instead
it was the other way around, and specifically the novel
that that they're referring to as The Slave Mutiny by
(18:57):
William A. Owens. And it seems that l Owens identified
his own work as fiction. He alluded to enough tanalyzing
sources in it that historians started to take it up
as fact. In nineteen sixty nine, for example, historians see
Van Woodward even cited the story and his presentation before
the Organization of American Historians, which was something that really
stirred up a lot of controversy. Yeah. And in the
(19:20):
article I mentioned, Jones notes that Owens himself did not
start the rumor in his novel. It was mentioned, for instance,
in a nineteen six history of the American Missionary Society,
but with no source. But owens novel definitely influenced opinions
in pretty crucial ways. The sink A flavor story even
(19:42):
made it into three popular historical surveys. So it got
into enough stuff that people started thinking that this rumor
might have had Surely it must have some basis. In fact,
surely there's some primary source out there that that references
sink A becoming a flavor. That's what people started to think. Yeah.
So I guess at this point where we can't really
(20:04):
know what to think. I mean, is it rumors? Is
there hidden evidence? Ye Owen's talked about evidence being spirited
away somehow during a move, but who knows. Yeah, I
mean we were talking to me a little bit, a
little bit about it before, and it seems like doubtful
that such a big thing wouldn't have somehow made it. Yeah,
(20:25):
and it's way back well and Jones even mentions in
the article that had sink A descended into the slave trade,
the missionaries in Africa, who reported in pretty great detail
about most of what he was doing, would have mentioned
that sink A had not only become a flavor, but
a wealthy one. I mean, I'd say that's a pretty notable,
(20:46):
notable thing. Yeah, you'd probably mention it. I think you've
heard that around my letter home, So you know, it's
something to think about, but it's it's also maybe sort
of a good lesson and not to jump to a
huge conclusion. Absolutely, but regardless of what happened in Sink's
later life, the Amistad decision was clearly somewhat ironic and
that slavery was still much alive in the US. Yeah,
(21:09):
I mean, it's the eighteen forties. But it also set
a standard for using the justice system to advance causes.
So I mean, we can't really say it it helped
end slavery when it is so much so long before
the Civil War, but it definitely helped using the justice
system as as a way to get something done. Yeah,
(21:31):
so Amistad stuck around in a lot of ways for
many years. I mean, Congress would debate the case from
time to time for the next twenty years until the
Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and Spain kept
kind of they wanted a little bit of money. Know,
they didn't want to let it go. They wanted um
to be paid for the slaves and the ship and
everything that they lost. So they had passed through the
(21:53):
US from times time to time about paying up or
or working out some deal. But you mentioned this of
a war, the start of the Civil War in eighteen
sixty one, and that's actually where we're headed next, or
kind of in a way. It's not going to be
a straight up battle episode, although it is pretty bloody
and violent. So yeah, until the next episode. If you
(22:16):
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And if you want to learn a little bit more
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(22:37):
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(22:58):
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H
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delinea Chruck Rewarding, and today
we're going to talk about the Amistad Mutiny. It was
actually a listener suggestion, but it's the one that's kind
(00:22):
of been on my mind for a little while now.
And to most of you, am Stead probably brings to
mind that nine seven Steven Spielberg movie. I think just
about everybody though. It has Anthony Hopkins in it, He's
got some awesome mutton shops because he's playing John Quincy Adams,
has Matthew McConaughey, has Jamon Hansu playing the slave leader,
(00:43):
who are obviously going to talk about in great detail.
But I was thinking about it. I don't remember the
movie very well. It's probably been since nine then I
saw it. Yeah, same here, It was a long time ago.
I was saying, though. There is one scene though that
really stands out, and I'm not sure if it it's
just because it was so memorable, or if because I
saw it later, probably in in high school, you know,
(01:06):
as a as a demonstration of what the middle Passage
might have looked like, but that scene really stands out
in my mind. It's horrific. The slaves are beaten, they're starved,
they're murdered, all on the massive trip across the Atlantic.
But the interesting thing here is that even though the
movie Amstad turns out to be kind of a courtroom drama,
(01:28):
that scene the Middle Passage is really crucial, and it's
really crucial in the story of the Amistade in general,
because the case against the mutineers the slave Uprising, hinged
on the lie that they never experienced the Middle Passage. Yeah,
and that lie was that they were in fact Cuban
born ladinos or slaves who were born in Latin America,
(01:51):
and most crucially, that they were slaves before Spain had
banished trafficking in its empire. Yeah, that they had kind
of been grandfathered into the whole slave system. In reality,
of course, the eventual Amistad mutineers were born in Africa,
so it's Africa where we will start our story. And
of course there are lots of mutineers, so they have
(02:13):
lots of different backstories, and we have varying degrees of
information on different members of the mutiny but fortunately a
lot of the backstories are pretty similar to the leader,
Joseph Sink, who was Mende tribesmen from what is today
Sierra Leone, and in large they were mostly men young
men um. They were usually captured when they were walking
(02:36):
along a road or in their village, essentially jumped and
kidnapped and sold into slavery. Yeah. Sink in particular, who
was born sing by Pia. He was a twenty five
year old married father of three and a rice farmer
when he was captured, and his father was headman in
the village of Moni. Now his capture most sources believe
(02:57):
may have had something to do with a debt that
he But what we do know is that after a
three day march to the Portuguese slave factory on the
island of Lumboco, Sink was sold to a Spanish slaver
and loaded aboard the slave ship to Cora with hundreds
of others bound for Havannah. Yeah. In that tripe from
Africa to havannahs of course the middle passage. But once
(03:18):
the Toakora are landed or arrived in Havannah, Sink and
fifty two others were sold to two Cuban sugar planters,
and that's Jose Ruiz and Pedro Mantas, And they were
packed aboard a second ship, and that is lah Amistad.
But there's a catch with this story, and you probably
(03:39):
guessed it already with our little introduction there. But the
year was eighteen thirty nine, and the slave trade had
been illegal in the Spanish Empire for years since eighteen twenty,
in fact, due to this eighteen seventeen treaty with Great Britain.
But the Spanish don't really try very hard to follow
(04:00):
their own ban against slavery. They sort of enforce it haphazardly,
and Cuban officials could really easily be bribed to falsify
slave documents so they would make them out to be
Ladinos instead of Africans. And this is exactly what Ruis
and Montes diad. They had fake passports made for the
Africans and then set sail from Havannah. Yeah, and they
(04:21):
went to all that trouble of making fake passports for
their new slaves because they were concerned that if a
British patroller stopped them, their slaves might be confiscated. Because
even though the Spanish weren't very invested in enforcing their laws.
The British definitely were, so they, like you said, they
set sail from Havannah and they were headed to Puerto
(04:43):
Prince Pe, which was the northwestern Cuban port, and it's
there where they would have ultimately settled on the sugar plantations.
And they left, you know, trying to be all secret
before dawn j thirty nine. On board, just to give
you a picture of what the ship looked like before
the mutiny went down. There were fifty three slaves, the
(05:04):
two slavers Ruis and Montez, Captain Ramon Fairer and Ladino
cabin boy, and a mixed race slave cook. Also, judging
from later accounts, there are two ship hands on deck,
two sailors um Sometimes you see them, sometimes you don't.
You see them, sometimes you don't, except they are conspicuously missing.
(05:25):
After the rebellion, you would have normally had two and
a half to three days that see to make this trip,
but storms cause a delay, which means they have to
start rationing food. The slaves who are on board only
get one banana, two potatoes, and one cup of water
per day. They're also flogged by an increasingly abusive crew,
so very bad conditions for the slaves on board here.
(05:48):
They're also naturally, if you're being flogged every day, really
scared about what awaits them when they arrive at their destination.
Sink A actually uses signs to communicate with the cook Celestino,
who indicates that the slaves will be killed, cut up, salted,
and eaten once they've landed, which I'm just imagining, like
the signals that they're using and how he would have
(06:09):
signaled cut up, salted and eaten. But I'm sure it
wasn't pleasant. I think he pointed at barrels and one
could assume he used the universal hand across the neck tumble. Yeah. Um,
but you know, so Celestino is is playing a prank
on on sink essentially trying to put him on. It
(06:29):
has a pretty terrible consequence, especially for Celestino, because this news,
plus the already bad conditions on board the ship, makes
sink A decide to act. You know, he's afraid that
his time is running short and what he's seen so
far has been so horrific, So before dawn on July two,
he uses a hidden nail that he's squirreled away to
(06:52):
break out of his iron collar, and then he goes
on to free some of the other Africans on board.
They arm themselves with Kane knives, which are really big,
scary knives, and they immediately kill the captain and the cook.
So there's the don't make practical jokes in a dire situation, guys.
If the two sailors were on board, as we mentioned before,
(07:15):
they disappeared, they weren't on board. The ship later probably
drowned right exactly, and the the slaves. They end up
sparing the Ladino cabin boy, and they decided to keep
Montes and Ruis alive as well so that they can
help the slaves navigate back to Africa. But the slavers
are pretty tricky. They actually they sail east during the day,
but then turn northward at night. So they're thinking maybe
(07:38):
the British will spot them and stop the ship. Maybe
we'll hit the North American coast and sink a and
the other. The other Africans on board just see that
they're heading towards the sun, you know, heading east during
the morning, and they think they're on their way to Africa.
But it just goes on and on and on. Like
that for a ventually two months. Uh, they run out
(08:02):
of food, there's no water, the sails are in tatters,
the rigging is in tatters. Ten Africans die from drinking
some unknown liquids aboard the ship, which proved to be poisonous.
And finally Sink realizes that he's out of luck too
and allows Mantas to land and they anchor on Long Island,
(08:25):
and Sinka goes to shore with a few other guys
to use the Spanish money on board to buy provisions.
But meanwhile, enough small ships have have seen what is
essentially a ghost ship at this point, you know, scary
tattered sails and all these knife wielding people on board.
They've seen it in the waters. They've been too afraid
(08:47):
to go close to it themselves, but they've reported back
to the United States Revenue Cutter Service about this mystery ship.
So while Sinka is going to shore, the US Cutter
Service finally catches up with them. Yeah, the USS Washington
in fact catches up with them, and they board the
(09:07):
Amistade commanding officer here is Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, and he
seizes the ship, the cargo, and the Africans. On August
thirty nine and tows the boat to New London, Connecticut,
where slavery happens to be legal at the time. Once
they're there, he alerts US Federal District Justice Andrew T. Judson,
(09:28):
But Judson can't get the whole story because the Africans
don't speak English, so he decides to refer the case
to the U. S. Circuit Court in Hartford, which is
meeting in September. Meanwhile, the Africans are sent to jail
in New Haven, so they're stuck in Connecticut. Yeah, and
this epic legal battle starts from this point. The circuit
court trial comes first, and it's largely centered on murder
(09:51):
and piracy charges against the Africans because in Spanish eyes,
they have killed crew members and stolen a and his ship.
But this trial, the circuit court trial, only lasts a
few days. The judge dismisses those charges of murder and piracy.
It says, well, the Africans are not under any U.
(10:12):
S jurisdiction for crimes committed against the Cubans, so he
refers the case to the U. S. District Court. And
by this point the story has really started to get
a lot of national attention and abolitionists have sort of
taken it up as a great way to fight slavery
in the United States as well, or at least draw
(10:32):
attention to it um. Some of the abolishists involved, Lewis Tappened,
Joshua Lovitt and Simeon Jocelyn formed the Amstad Committee and
even raised defense funds for the Africans. And this lets
them actually hire an attorney, lead attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin,
to defend them, and they get ahold of some translators too,
(10:53):
So finally the African side of the story can be told. Yeah,
and that's key because once the slaves have a void,
the sides become quite clear. The Africans argue that they're
not slaves, they're freemen who were born in Africa and
treated illegally. And Ruis and Montess on the other hand,
they argue that the slaves are actually ladinos and murderers
(11:14):
to boot. And what's interesting is that they is the
people that they have on their side. They are supported
by the Spanish government and by US President Martin Van Buren,
and he's up for re election soon. He's not necessarily
a supporter of slavery, but he wants to impress Southern
slave owners, and so he arranges for a Navy ship
to come up and be ready to return the slaves
(11:36):
to Cuba immediately after the trial, before a possible appeal
can be made. Yeah, So his plan is is he's
assuming that the court will rule in favor of the Cubans,
and as soon as they do, he's going to get
the Africans right back to Cuba before anybody can make
a fuss. But there's a third element to the story,
(11:56):
and it also has to do with property, which is
sort of the key here. Under maritime law, compensation would
go to the person who helped save a ship or
the ship's cargo from loss, even if they were just
doing the job that they were supposed to do it
for the U. S. Government like Gutney. So Getney has
filed a claim to the ship's cargo. You know, he's saying,
(12:18):
I risked my life, my crew, my ship to essentially
rescue the Amistade and rescue all of its cargo from
this mutinous situation. And he files a claim to not
just the cargo as in the material goods, but the
slaves as well, which he values the whole thing together
(12:39):
forty dollars for the slaves, so he is in it
for a very substantial profit. Yeah, and there are other
people who have things at stake here as well, or
at least think they do. Long Island Seaman for example,
that Henry Green. He files a competing salvage claim, and
Ruis and Montes, of course, with support from the Queen
of Spain Sane, are trying to get their money and
(13:01):
property back. So there are a lot of people who
are vying here for the stuff evolved. It's it's not
just about the mutiny and the murders and what happened
on the ship. It's about what the ship is worth
and that includes the people on it. So obviously this
trial turns into a sensation with with so many competing
interests and so many high profile people involved and their
(13:24):
trial trial spectators who come. They start filling up the galleries.
Newspapers cover it. There's gripping testimony from sink A and
from others detailing their lives in Africa, you know, their
lives before being captured, their capture, the Middle Passage, the
sale in Cuba, and the revolt on the ship, to
(13:45):
just sort of lay the picture of we're not Ladino,
as we are from Africa. So their defense attorney, though
pretty crucially, doesn't drift far into the moral arguments. I mean,
he lets sink A and the others tell their own
gripping stories, but he doesn't get too much into the
ethics of slavery, which, of course, this is long before
(14:08):
slavery was abolished in the United States. So he keeps
it about property, which is something that maybe people could
think about a little more clearly, and clearly it's everyone's
focus in this trial. Yeah, and his strategy really works.
In January, the court does several things. They dismiss green
salvage claim, they award some salvage rights to Getney, and
(14:30):
they rule most importantly that the Africans were not legally enslaved,
so the US government must return them to Africa. So yeah,
that's probably a pretty unexpected verdict for a lot of
these high stakes players involved, including Martin van Buren. I mean,
he's not expecting this, so he ordered an immediate appeal,
and eventually, after a few more stops along the way,
(14:53):
we're gonna, you know, skip along a bit. The case
eventually gets to the Supreme Court, and at that point
the abolitionists who are supporting the Africans knew that they
might need to bring in some new blood to to
keep up with the high profile nature of the trial.
Star power, Yeah, exactly, some celebrity lawyers um to to
(15:14):
just keep public interest going and to make it so
so high profile that Van Buren couldn't try any funny
business like having the slave suddenly disappeared to Cuba. So
the Omstuff Committee goes after none other than John Quincy
Adams to defend the Africans, along with the original defense attorney,
(15:35):
Roger Baldwin. Yeah, John Quincy Adams at this point, he's
pretty old. He's seventy three, visually impaired and out of practice.
He hasn't really acted as a lawyer in thirty plus
years or so. But he's still, as we said, really
high profile. He's a congressman, former president UM and known
as old man eloquent. So we're ready to hear him
give some really compelling speeches here. Yeah, he's a good speaker.
(15:58):
So he takes a little convince and saying, you know,
he's he's reluctant to get on board for such an
intense commitment and something that is again so high profile.
We keep using that word, but that's what it is.
But eventually he decides to go for it. He kind
of thinks it might be his last great achievement as
(16:18):
a political man um and he starts. He starts swinging
right off the bat. He raises questions about Van Buren
and his administration and whether they falsified documents relating to
the incident, and this ultimately starts a congressional inquiry, and
then by February, the Supreme Court trial US versus Amstad begins.
(16:44):
Baldwin actually opens the case, surprisingly, I guess if you're
a John Quincy Adam's fan. But Adams eventually does spend
eight and a half maybe seven hours making his argument
before court, and in that he refers back to the
Declaration of Independent be quite moving, I would assume, as
the son of one of its signers, definitely, And in
(17:05):
the end the court upheld the previous rulings and found
for the Africans. Yeah, and by this point, I mean,
this is okay. It is it's a victory. It's certainly
a victory for the abolitionists, for the Africans. They get
to go home. But it's sad too. At this point,
they're only thirty five surviving Africans from the Almstade and
(17:26):
the committee, the Almstad Committee, raises funds for their return.
The survivors actually go on a speaking tour to sort
of help out with their own fundraising because I know
English now, they've learned English. They've had these several years
in prison by this point to learn English, and by
January eighty two they land in West Africa. But the mystery,
(17:50):
or sort of a sketchy aspect of this story doesn't
stop there. And the mystery is in what happens after, right,
I mean, when Sink returns, he finds that his wife
and three children are missing. But supposedly he bounces back
from this to become a slave trader himself, or that's
what some people say, and a wealthy one at that,
a wealthy slaver. Obviously, this is a really contentious claim,
(18:14):
one that actually got Spielberg's in flak for not including
it or mentioning it in the film. But is it
even true? Yeah, so, you know, it is a pretty
serious thing to say about somebody. And there's a really
interesting article I read in the Journal of American History
by Howard Jones that suggests a lot of the story,
a lot of the story about sinking the slaver seems
(18:36):
based in a work of historical fiction. Very surprising. Yeah,
kind of opposite of what you think would happen. Usually
you think of history some primary storties, yea, some some
primary sources in here um influencing the novel. But instead
it was the other way around, and specifically the novel
that that they're referring to as The Slave Mutiny by
(18:57):
William A. Owens. And it seems that l Owens identified
his own work as fiction. He alluded to enough tanalyzing
sources in it that historians started to take it up
as fact. In nineteen sixty nine, for example, historians see
Van Woodward even cited the story and his presentation before
the Organization of American Historians, which was something that really
stirred up a lot of controversy. Yeah. And in the
(19:20):
article I mentioned, Jones notes that Owens himself did not
start the rumor in his novel. It was mentioned, for instance,
in a nineteen six history of the American Missionary Society,
but with no source. But owens novel definitely influenced opinions
in pretty crucial ways. The sink A flavor story even
(19:42):
made it into three popular historical surveys. So it got
into enough stuff that people started thinking that this rumor
might have had Surely it must have some basis. In fact,
surely there's some primary source out there that that references
sink A becoming a flavor. That's what people started to think. Yeah.
So I guess at this point where we can't really
(20:04):
know what to think. I mean, is it rumors? Is
there hidden evidence? Ye Owen's talked about evidence being spirited
away somehow during a move, but who knows. Yeah, I
mean we were talking to me a little bit, a
little bit about it before, and it seems like doubtful
that such a big thing wouldn't have somehow made it. Yeah,
(20:25):
and it's way back well and Jones even mentions in
the article that had sink A descended into the slave trade,
the missionaries in Africa, who reported in pretty great detail
about most of what he was doing, would have mentioned
that sink A had not only become a flavor, but
a wealthy one. I mean, I'd say that's a pretty notable,
(20:46):
notable thing. Yeah, you'd probably mention it. I think you've
heard that around my letter home, So you know, it's
something to think about, but it's it's also maybe sort
of a good lesson and not to jump to a
huge conclusion. Absolutely, but regardless of what happened in Sink's
later life, the Amistad decision was clearly somewhat ironic and
that slavery was still much alive in the US. Yeah,
(21:09):
I mean, it's the eighteen forties. But it also set
a standard for using the justice system to advance causes.
So I mean, we can't really say it it helped
end slavery when it is so much so long before
the Civil War, but it definitely helped using the justice
system as as a way to get something done. Yeah,
(21:31):
so Amistad stuck around in a lot of ways for
many years. I mean, Congress would debate the case from
time to time for the next twenty years until the
Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and Spain kept
kind of they wanted a little bit of money. Know,
they didn't want to let it go. They wanted um
to be paid for the slaves and the ship and
everything that they lost. So they had passed through the
(21:53):
US from times time to time about paying up or
or working out some deal. But you mentioned this of
a war, the start of the Civil War in eighteen
sixty one, and that's actually where we're headed next, or
kind of in a way. It's not going to be
a straight up battle episode, although it is pretty bloody
and violent. So yeah, until the next episode. If you
(22:16):
have any comments on this one, or if you have
any ideas for future ideas you'd like us to research,
feel free to write us an email at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com, or you can look
us up on Facebook or on Twitter at miss industry.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about the eventual freedom of slaves in the United States,
(22:37):
we have an article called how the Emancipation Proclamation worked,
and you can find it by searching on our home
page for Emancipation Proclamation at www dot how stuff works
dot com. For moral this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
(22:58):
the podcast. Click on the podcast icon in the upper
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