On this Day: Amistad Captured Off Long Island Coast

In 1839, 49 African slaves took control of the ship Amistad (“Friendship”) while off the coast of Cuba. Led by Sengbe Pieh, popularly known as “Cinque,” the slaves had resolved to take over the ship after suffering abuse.

The ship had set sail from Havana for another part of Cuba on June 27, 1839, with a crew consisting of the captain, two Spanish crewmen, a creole slave, a mulatto slave, and the slaves’ owners. There were 53 Africans aboard the ship, including 49 men and four children. Their journey was supposed to take only two or three days, but the ship was slowed by storms. The crewmen became abusive to the African slaves, and on the fourth day the cook told some of the slaves that they were to be killed and eaten once they reached their destination.

Cinque set the rebellion in motion by unlocking his own shackles using a loose nail and setting the other slaves free. The men discovered sugarcane knives and then killed the captain and cook. Cinque took command of the ship and ordered it back to Africa, but the ship’s owner steered the ship east by day and northwest at night. They ended up in Long Island Sound—the body of water between Connecticut and New York’s Long Island—were taken captive by sailors aboard the U.S. Washington on Aug. 26, 1839.

Soon after the Africans’ capture, the abolitionists took up their cause, and the Amistad case became a rallying point for the movement. A group called “The Amistad Committee,” made up of several prominent abolitionists, put together a legal team, sought out Mende interpreters, and provided for the care of the Africans while they awaited their verdict. During a second trial in 1840, a district court in Connecticut determined that the slaves had been illegally sold into slavery in violation of Spanish law. President Martin Van Buren ordered an appeal of the decision immediately afterward. The abolitionists persuaded former President John Quincy Adams to lead the defense team during the third and final trial before the U.S. Supreme Court. After two years of internment while they waited the court’s decision, the slaves were freed in 1841.

The event was to have long-lasting effects both in the United States and Africa. In the United States, it would contribute to the development of African-American culture, and is credited by some as one of the events leading to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860. The Amistad case, which was heard by the Supreme Court, galvanized the abolitionist movement and further polarized the antislavery North and the slave-holding south of the country. The freedom of the Africans also inspired missionary work that led to the founding of the American Missionary Association in 1846, which became the largest and most-organized abolitionist society in the U.S. before the war. And in Sierra Leone, American missionary activity there would eventually be a nationalist movement to achieve independence.

In 2000, Time magazine reported that a $3.1 million re-creation of the Amistad was under construction at the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, which maintains and exhibits recreations of hundreds of historic vessels.

Sengbe Pieh, or “Joseph Cinque,” was the son of a village chief in the village of Mani in West Africa. He was captured by African tribesmen because of an overdue debt, and taken to a slave factory and sold to a Spanish slave trader. He was then resold, sent to Havana, Cuba, and then sold to Pedro Ruiz and put on board the Amistad. He is widely recognized as the leader of the African slaves during the Amistad revolt and afterward during court proceedings. Cinque eventually returned to Africa, only to find found that his village had been destroyed and his entire family sold into slavery.

The Amistad case continues to capture widespread public interest as a symbol in the struggle for freedom, but writer Clifton Johnson argues that “too much should not be made of the court’s decision” in the case, as the verdict was not actually an attack on the institution of slavery: “On the one hand, Justice Story declared that the Africans had exercised the ‘ultimate right to all human beings in extreme cases to resist oppression, and to apply force against ruinous injustice.’ In other words, free men have a natural right to resist enslavement. On the other hand, he stated that the blacks, had they been legally recognized as slaves of Spanish citizens, would have been deemed property within the meaning of the treaty of 1795 and restored to the claimants.”