Joseph Cinqué and dozens of other Africans, kidnapped from Sierra Leone and illegally sold into the Spanish slave trade, had revolted aboard the Amistad weeks earlier before being captured off Long Island. Their subsequent trial tested whether they were property to be returned to Cuba or free people wrongly enslaved. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams argued for their freedom in 1841.
The Amistad's Africans had been abducted from Sierra Leone, transported across the Atlantic on the slave ship Tecora in violation of treaties banning the international slave trade, and sold in Havana. Loaded aboard the schooner Amistad for transport to another Cuban port, they rose up under Joseph Cinqué's leadership, killed the captain and cook, and ordered the two surviving Spaniards to sail them back to Africa.
The Spaniards secretly steered north instead, and the US Navy intercepted the drifting ship off Long Island in late August. By early September, the captives sat in a Connecticut jail facing piracy and murder charges, while abolitionists rallied to their cause, seeing in the case a chance to expose the horrors of the illegal slave trade in an American courtroom.
The case became a sensation, pitting Spain's demands for the ship's return against a growing abolitionist legal strategy. Lower courts ruled the Africans had been illegally enslaved and were entitled to their freedom, a decision the Van Buren administration appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams's argument in 1841 secured their liberation and eventual return to Africa.
Key people: Joseph Cinqué, John Quincy Adams