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In 1839, a group of Africans from the Mende Tribe was forcibly taken from their homeland and transported across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery.
However, their captors hadn’t anticipated that the people they had enslaved would fight back.
What began as a desperate struggle for freedom aboard a small sailing ship became an international diplomatic incident, reached the highest court in the United States, and involved a former American president.
Learn more about the remarkable story of the Amistad on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
La Amistad, which means “the friendship” was a 19th-century two-masted schooner roughly 120 feet or 37 meters long. At the time of the voyage, a Spanish national named Ramón Ferrer, who lived in Cuba, owned the ship.
La Amistad was not built like a typical slave ship, because it wasn’t one. Slave ships were large cargo ships that trafficked humans from the West African coast to the Americas. To maximize profit, ship owners transported as many enslaved people as possible. The conditions were inhumane and unhygienic, causing an average of 15% of those transported to die on the voyage.
Unlike the massive slave ships, La Amistad was significantly smaller and was not designed to transport large numbers of people.
Instead, La Amistad made shorter journeys across the Caribbean. During these trips, it may have carried cargo that included enslaved people. While the conditions were still incredibly poor, they weren’t slave ships per se.
The events on the ship that led to it being known to history began in February 1839.
At the time, the Portuguese were still actively trading slaves in West Africa. Slave catchers in present-day Sierra Leone were abducting thousands of Africans, many of whom were from the Mende ethnic group.
After the abductions, many of these captured individuals were shipped to the Spanish Colony of Cuba, where they were sold to slave traders.
However, this was illegal.
The Congress of Vienna in 1815 issued a declaration condemning the transatlantic slave trade and calling for its eventual abolition. However, it did not immediately outlaw the practice. Instead, European powers gradually negotiated treaties establishing restrictions. In 1817, Spain signed a treaty with Britain agreeing to abolish its participation in the transatlantic slave trade by 1820.
Several European superpowers, including Spain and Portugal, signed the declaration. Although Spain had prohibited the transatlantic slave trade, slavery itself remained legal in its colonies, particularly in Cuba. Slaves could still be bought, sold, and transported within the colony.
However, and this is the key point for this episode and the entire Amistad affair, importing newly enslaved Africans was illegal.
The Fifty-three Mende captives who were brought to Cuba were purchased by Spanish plantation owners Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes. Of the enslaved individuals, 49 were adult males, and the remaining four were children, three of whom were girls.
Ruiz and Montes’ plan was to take their 53 captives, who were currently in Havana, Cuba, and transport them to their plantations in Puerto Príncipe, near modern-day Camagüey, Cuba.
On June 28, 1839, Montes and Ruiz, along with Captain Ferrer, the ship’s mixed-race cook Celestino, and three other crew members boarded the ship. The crew, along with the 53 bound captives, set sail from Havana for Montes and Ruiz’s sugar plantations.
Because the ship was not built for slave transport, it lacked slave quarters. As a result, they placed half the captives in the ship’s main hold and the other half on deck.
The captives held below deck found a rusty file and used it to file through their chains. On July 1, Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinqué, freed himself and then proceeded to free others from their shackles.
From there, the now-freed captives ran onto the deck. Armed with cane knives, machete-like tools used to cut sugar cane, they attacked the Amistad’s crew and gained control of the ship.
In the scuffle, they killed Captain Ferrer and the cook Celestino. Two of the captives also died, and two of the ship’s crew members escaped using a small boat.
Celestino was mixed-race, but he had taunted the captives by saying that once they reached the plantation, they would be killed and eaten.
Ruiz, Montes, and Antonio were all spared in the attack. The new leaders of the Amistad wanted to take the ship and sail it back to Africa, and they believed the three spared crew members could help them do it.
Montes served as the navigator and had no intention of sailing the ship to Africa. Instead, he reversed the ship’s course at night, causing them to sail north instead of across the Atlantic. This meant they were sailing along the North American coast.
Unbeknownst to everyone on the ship, they stayed on the wrong course until they reached eastern Long Island, New York. On August 21, 1839, more than a month and a half after the Mende had taken over, a few New York pilot boats found the Amistad. One of ships was the Blossom, whose crew offered those aboard water and bread.
After noticing something was wrong while interacting with the people aboard the Amistad, the Blossom’s crew returned to New York. There, they reported to the Collector of the Port of New York that they believed a slave ship was nearby.
Two days later, another boat known as Gratitude came across the Amistad east of New York’s Fire Island. The captain wanted to send men aboard the Amistad but met opposition. One of the Amistad’s leaders ordered them to fire on the Gratitude, which caused it to flee.
After two months at sea, La Amistad finally met its match. At that point, a naval brig called the USS Washington was surveying the area when it discovered the ship.
They quickly took possession of the ship and everyone aboard and brought them to Connecticut, where they were jailed in New Haven. Officers on the USS Washington claimed salvage rights to La Amistad as a ship, as well as to the “human cargo” aboard.
Once imprisoned, the Africans aboard the Amistad were charged with murder and piracy. Six of the Mende died between their capture and the trial.
Meanwhile, two lawsuits arose around La Amistad. The first saw the officers of the Washington going to court over the salvage claims. The second case was held in the Connecticut courts after the state arrested Spanish traders for enslaving free Africans.
With the Cuban plantation owners being placed on trial, the Spanish foreign minister also got involved. He demanded that the Amistad, along with all its cargo, be released from custody. This included sending the “slaves” back to Cuba to receive punishment from Spanish authorities.
The Van Buren administration agreed with the Spanish argument. However, Secretary of State John Forsyth stated that the president legally could not order the release of La Amistad or its cargo.
The executive branch could not interfere because the case fell under the judicial branch. Furthermore, Van Buren could not release the Spanish prisoners in Connecticut because the state, not the federal government, had jurisdiction.
The Spanish foreign minister rebuked the United States for refusing to return the slaves and the cargo, claiming it violated a treaty made in 1795 between Spain and the United States.
a U.S. attorney appeared in U.S. District Court to argue on Spain’s behalf. They claimed that because a U.S.-owned ship recovered La Amistad, the United States was obligated by its international treaty to return the ship and all its cargo to its rightful Spanish owners.
Roger Sherman Baldwin, a prominent abolitionist, represented the Mende in the New Haven courts. The case was widely publicized and drew international attention because if the Mende captives were found guilty of mutiny, they were at risk of being executed.
The case became a rallying point amongst abolitionists in the US.
To try and avoid the accusations of slave trading, the owners of La Amistad claimed that the captives were born in Cuba and that they were sold in the domestic Spanish slave markets.
The court had to determine whether the Mende people aboard the Amistad were considered property or people who had been captured illegally. If they were captured illegally, it meant that their actions aboard the ship could be justified as them acting like free men rather than being slaves.
The defense team worked to figure out the story from the captives’ side. The problem was that no one could communicate with them because no one could even identify the language they spoke. With help from a professor from Yale University named Josiah Gibbs, they identified the language the Africans spoke.
They learned they were Mende. With this knowledge, the defense crew searched the New York waterfronts for someone who could speak their language. They eventually found a Mende speaker, who could ask the people what really happened.
The criminal charges against the Africans were dismissed because American courts lacked jurisdiction over offenses committed aboard or on a foreign vessel at sea.
However, federal courts considered competing claims of ownership while the Africans remained in custody. In January 1840, the U.S. District Court ruled that the Mende had been illegally enslaved and could not be treated as property, and a federal Circuit Court subsequently upheld that decision.
The federal government appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams joined attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin in defending the Africans.
Adams argued that the captives had been illegally enslaved and possessed a fundamental right to their freedom. On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 in favor of the Africans, determining that they had been unlawfully transported from Africa and could not legally be held as slaves. The court ordered their immediate release.
Despite being freed, the government did nothing to aid the Mende. Their return voyage was made possible through fundraising efforts organized by American abolitionists, particularly the Amistad Committee and Lewis Tappan.
Reverend James Pennington, a formerly enslaved minister himself, also played an important role in supporting the Africans and establishing the Union Missionary Society, which helped promote missionary work in West Africa.
On November 27, 1841, the 35 surviving Mende departed New York aboard the Gentleman, accompanied by American missionaries. They arrived in Sierra Leone in January 1842.
Since the La Amistad’s voyage, people have not forgotten the case or the efforts of the men aboard the ship. A memorial for the Amistad stands in front of New Haven City Hall and the County courthouse in New Haven, Connecticut.
The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, focuses on slavery, abolition, civil rights, and African Americans.
In 1997, a Steven Spielberg-directed movie told the tale of the Amistad.
Mystic Seaport in Connecticut built a replica of La Amistad and launched it in 2000. Today, the vessel serves as a floating classroom, operated by the nonprofit Discovering Amistad, which educates visitors about slavery, abolition, and the struggle for civil rights.
The story of the Amistad was about far more than a revolt aboard a ship. It became a landmark legal battle that tested the limits of American law, international diplomacy, and the meaning of freedom in a nation where slavery was still legal.
The Amistad case demonstrated that even in an era when human beings could be bought and sold as property, those who had been enslaved could successfully challenge the system that held them captive.