Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / The 1839 L'Amistad Rebellion: Africans in a Connecticut Court
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know we've covered slave revolts on land, mutinies at sea, and the legal battles that followed. Today we're picking up a story that sits right at that intersection — the 1839 rebellion on the schooner La Amistad, and the remarkable legal fight that ended up in the Supreme Court. Luna: I've heard of the Amistad case, but I didn't know the rebellion itself happened at sea, not on a plantation. Lucas: Exactly right. It started on the Middle Passage, even though the Amistad wasn't technically a slave ship in the traditional sense. The captives had already been transported from Sierra Leone to Havana aboard a Portuguese slaver called the Teçora — that was the real Middle Passage crossing. Once in Havana, they were purchased by two Spanish planters, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, and loaded onto the Amistad for a short coastal voyage to another Cuban port. That's when they broke free. Luna: So the rebellion happened during a coastal run, not the transatlantic crossing. Lucas: Right. On the night of July 1, 1839, the captives — led by a man named Sengbe Pieh, whom the Americans later called Joseph Cinqué — managed to unlock their shackles using a nail they'd found. They rushed the deck, killed the captain and the cook, and took control of the ship. They spared Ruiz and Montes because they needed them to navigate — but they ordered them to sail back to Africa. Luna: But they didn't go to Africa. Lucas: No. The Spaniards tricked them. By day they sailed east, but at night they reversed course, zigzagging north along the American coast. After about two months, the Amistad ended up off Long Island, where a US Navy brig, the USS Washington, seized it. The captives were taken to New London, Connecticut, and thrown in jail in New Haven, charged with murder and piracy. Luna: But they were the ones who'd been kidnapped and enslaved. How could they be charged with a crime? Lucas: That's exactly the question the case turned on. Under US law at the time, the international slave trade had been banned since 1808, but the domestic slave trade was still legal. The Spanish government claimed the Africans were property — slaves under Spanish law — and demanded they be returned to Cuba. The US government, under President Martin Van Buren, initially sided with Spain. But abolitionists in New England saw an opportunity. Luna: And that's where Lewis Tappan and the others got involved. Lucas: Yes. Lewis Tappan, a wealthy New York abolitionist, formed a committee to defend the Amistad captives. They hired lawyers — including Roger Sherman Baldwin, a prominent Connecticut attorney — and they worked to establish that these people were not slaves but free individuals who had been illegally captured in Africa after the international slave trade was outlawed. The key was proving they were born free in Africa, not enslaved in Cuba. Luna: How could they prove that? The captives didn't speak English. Lucas: That's the remarkable part. Among the captives was a young man who spoke some English — he'd been taught by slave traders in Cuba. But more importantly, the abolitionists found a Mende speaker named James Covey, a sailor on a British ship anchored in New York Harbor. Covey was a former slave from Sierra Leone himself. He spoke Mende, and he could translate for Cinqué. When Cinqué told his story in court — through Covey — it became clear that he was a rice farmer, kidnapped by slave raiders months earlier, and had never been a legal slave. Luna: That testimony must have changed everything. Lucas: It did. The case went through several lower courts, and at each level the abolitionist argument gained ground. The key legal question was whether the Africans were property or persons. The Supreme Court finally heard the case in early 1841. By then, former president John Quincy Adams had joined the defense team — he was 73 years old, but he gave an eight-and-a-half-hour oral argument that became legendary. Luna: What did Adams argue? Lucas: He argued that the Africans had been seized in violation of treaties banning the slave trade, and that they had exercised a natural right to self-defense. He also hammered on the point that the US government was improperly interfering with the judicial process — Van Buren had tried to send the captives back to Cuba before the trial even finished, and Adams called that out. The Court ruled 7–1 in favor of the Africans, ordering their release. Justice Joseph Story wrote the opinion, saying that the captives were 'free negroes' who had never been lawfully held as slaves. Luna: So they were free. What happened to them? Lucas: The 35 survivors — several had died in jail — were finally freed in 1842. With money raised by abolitionists, they sailed back to Sierra Leone. But it's not a completely happy ending. When they arrived, Sierra Leone was a British colony, not their homeland. Cinqué returned to his people, the Mende, but later found that his family had been killed or scattered during the slave raids. He reportedly became a trader, but died in relative obscurity around 1879. Still, their case had a huge impact — it galvanized the abolitionist movement and set a legal precedent that the Atlantic slave trade was piracy, not legitimate commerce. Luna: It's amazing that the story of a nail and a mutiny ended up changing US law. Lucas: It really is. And if today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That kind of direct support keeps us independent and focused on the stories that matter. Luna: Yeah, it's a good reminder that these conversations only happen because people chip in. I'm glad we get to do this. Lucas: So back to the Amistad — one detail that often gets overlooked is the role of the Mende language itself. Without James Covey, the captives' story might never have been heard. And the abolitionists understood that language was evidence. They actually published a Mende vocabulary list to prove the captives' African origin. It's a small thing, but it shows how carefully they built their case. Luna: Did the Supreme Court decision actually free any other captives, or was it just for this one group? Lucas: It was technically limited to the Amistad captives — it didn't strike down slavery in the US or free anyone else. But it did have ripple effects. For one thing, it embarrassed the Van Buren administration and helped the abolitionist cause politically. And it reinforced the idea that the international slave trade was a crime, which later influenced the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, where the US agreed to maintain a naval squadron off the African coast. So it wasn't a revolution, but it was a major symbolic victory. Luna: And it showed that Africans could speak for themselves in a US court. Lucas: Exactly. That was powerful. Cinqué was seen by many Americans as a hero — there were posters, plays, even a portrait painted of him in a pose of defiance. But of course, that same country still held millions in bondage. The Amistad case didn't end slavery, but it forced a conversation about who could claim freedom under the law. And that conversation continued right through the Civil War. Luna: I'd love to know more about what happened to the other survivors after they got back to Sierra Leone. Lucas: There's not a ton of record, but we know some of them became Christian missionaries — a few even returned to the US with American Missionary Association projects. Others integrated into the Krio community in Freetown. One young boy named Kali, who was only about nine when he was captured, grew up and became a Christian teacher. They carried the memory of that rebellion and that trial with them for the rest of their lives. Luna: It's a story that keeps unfolding, even now. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's what we're doing here — pulling out one thread at a time, following it where it leads.