9781422284124

The Amistad Rebellion The mutiny of slaves in 1839 on the slave ship La Amistad (Friendship) was a major event that changed the way the U.S. legal system looked at slavery. Their action also became a symbol for slaves’ long struggle for freedom. The story began when Portuguese slave hunters captured many people in the African country of Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba. Spanish planters bought 53 (including four children) and put them on the Cuban schooner La Amistad bound for a Caribbean plantation. On the third night out—July 1, 1839—a slave named Cinque led the other slaves in a revolt to take over the ship, killing the captain and cook. They ordered the remaining crew to sail back to Africa toward the rising sun, but each night the crew secretly turned the ship back west. After two months of this zigzag movement, the currents and winds took La Amistad off Long Island, New York, where a U.S. revenue ship seized it. The slaves were imprisoned in New Haven, Connecticut, as property. President Martin Van Buren wanted to send the Africans back to Cuba, but abolitionists raised money to defend the prisoners. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1841, and former president John Quincy Ad- ams helped attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin defend the slaves, who spoke no English. Adams and Baldwin said that international law meant that the Africans had been bought illegally. The Supreme Court justices agreed, and the Amistad mutineers were freed and allowed to sail back to their homeland. Steven Spielberg’s 1997 movie, Amistad , made the story known around the world. Slavery and Nationhood Forcing a race of people into slavery to serve another race is an extreme example of racism . For instance, white Europeans, including those who settled the United States, made captives of black Africans and even pretended it was for the slaves’ own good. Some blacks in Africa helped capture slaves for Western nations, and a few tribes owned slaves from other groups. More than 1,000 blacks in the United States even owned black slaves themselves. The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, said slaves had been “elevated” from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts, but also with careful religious instruction under the supervision of a superior “race.” Other races around the world also owned slaves. The Arabs, for instance, were traditional slave owners.

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RACE AND CRIME