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La Amistad (pronounced [la a.misˈtað]; Spanish for Friendship) was a 19th-century two-masted schooner owned by a Spaniard living in Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba, in ...
- Illegally Captured and Sold Into Slavery
- Revolt at Sea
- The Court Battle Begins
- John Quincy Adams For The Defense
- The Verdict
- Sources
The story of the Amistad began in February 1839, when Portuguese slave hunters abducted hundreds of Africans from Mendeland, in present-day Sierra Leone, and transported them to Cuba, then a Spanish colony. Though the United States, Britain, Spain and other European powers had abolished the importation of enslaved peoples by that time, the transatl...
Several days into the journey, one of the Africans—Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinque—managed to unshackle himself and his fellow captives. Armed with knives, they seized control of the Amistad, killing its Spanish captain and the ship’s cook, who had taunted the captives by telling them they would be killed and eaten when they got to the pla...
Charged with murder and piracy, Cinque and the other Africans of the Amistad were imprisoned in New Haven. Though these criminal charges were quickly dropped, they remained in prison while the courts went about deciding their legal status, as well as the competing property claims by the officers of the Washington, Montes and Ruiz and the Spanish go...
To defend the Africans in front of the Supreme Court, Tappan and his fellow abolitionists enlisted former President John Quincy Adams, who was at the time 73 years old and a member of the House of Representatives. Adams had previously argued (and won) a case before the nation’s highest court; he was also a strong antislavery voice in Congress, havi...
On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 to uphold the lower courts’ decisions in favor of the Africans of the Amistad. Justice Joseph Story delivered the majority opinion, writingthat “There does not seem to us to be any ground for doubt, that these negroes ought to be deemed free.” But the Court did not require the government to provide fund...
Educator Resources: The Amistad Case. National Archives. John Quincy Adams and the Amistad Case, 1841. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The Amistad Story. National Park Service. Joseph Cinque. Black History Now. Douglas Linder, The Amistad Trials: An Account. Famous Trials.
The schooner La Amistad is transporting black slaves off the coast of the Spanish colony of Cuba in 1839. A captive, Cinqué, leads an uprising against the crew, most of whom are killed. Two navigators, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, are spared on condition they help sail the ship to Africa.
Aug 1, 2024 · The ship La Amistad, meaning “Friendship” in Spanish, was a 19th-century schooner built in Spain. It was a relatively small vessel, measuring around 120 feet in length and capable of carrying cargo and passengers. The Amistad was not originally designed or intended for the transatlantic slave trade.
Oct 6, 2023 · Amistad is a powerful and thought-provoking film that delves into the dark history of slavery in America. Directed by the renowned filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, and released in 1997, the movie is based on the true story of the 1839 mutiny aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad.
Amistad: Directed by Steven Spielberg. With Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou. In 1839, the revolt of Mende captives aboard a Spanish owned ship causes a major controversy in the United States when the ship is captured off the coast of Long Island.
Amistad mutiny, (July 2, 1839), slave rebellion that took place on the slave ship Amistad near the coast of Cuba and had important political and legal repercussions in the American abolition movement.
