8 – The Uprising on the Amistad
In 1839 the Spanish ship Amistad was at sea off the coast of Cuba, transporting 49 Africans who had recently been kidnapped in Sierra Leone to slavery in Cuba. As the ship was low on provisions and the voyage was taking longer than expected, the ship’s cook had been taunting the Africans that they would be eaten when supplies of food ran out. On July 2, 1839, one of the captives by the name of Cinque managed to free himself from his shackles by using a file that another one of the Africans had smuggled aboard.
Having slipped his chains, Cinque released the remaining Africans, and together they rose up, killing the cook and driving two other members of the crew into lifeboats. Using the captain’s personal slave as an interpreter, they demanded that the two remaining crew members take them back to Africa. Rather than pointing the Amistad towards Africa, though, the crew sailed it up the eastern seaboard of the United States, laying anchor off of Long Island. There they were spotted by the USS Washington, which captured the Amistad.
The Captain of Washington then filed a lawsuit claiming that under salvage law he was the rightful owner of the Africans found aboard the Amistad. The two crew members of the Amistad made similar claims to the Africans, while the Africans themselves contended that they belonged to no one. In February 1841 the Amistad case came before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that because international slave trade was illegal, the Africans could not have been legally enslaved in Sierra Leone in the first place, and were therefore free. In 1842 the Africans returned to their homes in Sierra Leone.