The Amistad Captives Won Their Freedom at the Supreme Court in 1841

Imagine a case where the plaintiff is a foreign government, the defendant is a group of men who do not speak the language of the court, the sitting President wants the foreign government to win, and the only lawyer willing to give them the argument of their lives is a seventy-three-year-old former President who is currently serving in the House of Representatives. A studio script editor would send it back with a note that it was implausible, and then watch the real thing happen.

It happened. It was decided in the Supreme Court of the United States on March 9, 1841, and the men won. United States v. The Amistad is a case that every American who cares about the courts should know, because it shows what the judicial power looks like when it does what it is for: it looked at the claims of a powerful executive and an allied foreign crown, applied the law, and found for the weak.

The facts: a revolt at sea

In the summer of 1839, off the coast of Cuba, a Spanish schooner named La Amistad, "friendship," carried fifty-three Africans on a short coastal voyage. They had been taken from their homes in West Africa, in the region of what is now Sierra Leone, and shipped across the Atlantic in a slave ship to Havana. The Atlantic slave trade was by then illegal under Spanish treaty obligations. It was a crime, and it continued anyway, with local officials paid to look the other way. The captives had been sold to two Spaniards, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, who loaded them on the Amistad to take them to plantations elsewhere in Cuba. Ruiz had gotten Spanish papers describing them as ladinos, Africans long resident in Cuba and so legally enslaved, a fiction that the facts would soon undo.

In early July 1839, a captive named Sengbe Pieh, known to history as Cinqué, freed himself from his irons, freed others, and took the ship. The captain and the cook were killed. Ruiz and Montes were spared to navigate. The Africans wanted to return to Africa and ordered the Spaniards to sail east. By day the Spaniards did so. By night they turned the ship north and west, hoping to be intercepted. For two months the Amistad zigzagged up the Atlantic coast.

Long Island and the courthouse

On August 26, 1839, the schooner was found anchored off Long Island by the United States Navy brig Washington, commanded by Lieutenant Thomas Gedney. The Africans, short of food and water, were taken into custody and brought to New London, Connecticut. A question of law immediately arose. What were these people? Were they property, to be restored to their owners, or were they free persons who had committed what the law called a revolt, a killing, or no crime at all?

Several parties made claims. Ruiz and Montes claimed the Africans as their slaves. Gedney and his officers claimed salvage on the ship and the cargo, which they argued included the Africans. And the Spanish government, through its minister in Washington, demanded the return of the ship and everything on it under the terms of a 1795 treaty with the United States, Pinckney's Treaty, which provided for the restoration of property rescued from pirates or robbers.

The Van Buren administration took the Spanish side. Martin Van Buren was seeking re-election in 1840, and the administration sided with Spain's claim. A treaty about recovering stolen cargo was being stretched to cover human beings, which is the sort of reading that only works if nobody asks what the cargo was.

The trials below

Abolitionists in New York, led by the merchant Lewis Tappan, formed a committee to defend the Africans. They hired lawyers, among them Roger Sherman Baldwin of Connecticut, a man of reputation, and raised money. They also found interpreters, because without a way to speak to the captives, the court could not hear their account.

In January 1840, in the federal district court in Connecticut, Judge Andrew Judson heard the case. The evidence of the Africans' status was decisive. They were not born in Cuba. They had been brought from Africa recently, in a ship that had violated the ban on the trade, and they did not speak Spanish. Judson held that they were not slaves under Spanish law but free men who had been kidnapped, and that they should be sent back to Africa under the federal law against the slave trade. The Africans' revolt, he held, was not a crime of piracy or murder, because they had been unlawfully taken. The circuit court affirmed.

The administration appealed to the Supreme Court. It is worth pausing on something the administration did in the meantime. It reportedly had a naval vessel standing ready at New Haven to carry the Africans back to Cuba if the district court's decision had gone the other way, an effort to move quickly past the courts. The plan, in other words, was to keep the verdict out of the judges' hands by having the ship already warmed up, a strategy that treats a courtroom as a formality to be hurried through. Whatever the exact orders, the episode raised a question of the separation of powers: whether the executive may arrange the outcome of a case that is before the judiciary.

The argument: Adams and Baldwin

The case was argued in the Supreme Court in February and March of 1841. The United States was represented by Attorney General Henry Gilpin, who argued the government's position that the Africans should be returned under the treaty.

Roger Sherman Baldwin made the opening argument for the Africans, a careful presentation of the facts and the law. Then John Quincy Adams rose.

Adams was seventy-three years old. He had been President from 1825 to 1829, and he had returned to public life as a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, where he fought the House's "gag rule" against antislavery petitions. He had not argued before the Supreme Court in many years. He argued the Amistad case over two sessions, on February 24 and March 1, and his argument had two parts.

First, he attacked the administration's conduct. He quoted the correspondence between the State Department and the Spanish minister and accused the President of having improperly interfered with the judiciary. A man who has been President criticizing a sitting President's overreach before the Court has a particular authority. The constitutional point was strong: the courts, under Article III, decide cases and controversies, and the executive's job under Article II, in the language of the Take Care Clause, is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," which does not include leaning on the scales.

Second, he made the argument that the Africans were free men, and that no treaty or statute could make them property. He stressed that the men were not claiming a favor, but a right, and he drew on the Declaration of Independence. Pointing to a copy of the Declaration hanging on a pillar of the courtroom, he said he knew of no law that reached the case of his clients but "the law of Nature and of Nature's God on which our fathers placed our own national existence." His closing is remembered for its personal note: he spoke of the many years since he had first appeared before the Court, and named the justices he had known who were gone, Marshall among them.

The holding

On March 9, 1841, Justice Joseph Story delivered the opinion of the Court. The vote was seven to one. Only Justice Henry Baldwin dissented.

Story's reasoning followed the facts. The Court held that the case turned on whether the Africans were lawfully slaves, and that, on the record, they were not. The Spanish papers describing them as ladinos, long resident in Cuba, were contradicted by the evidence that they had recently been brought from Africa in violation of Spanish law and treaty. A document obtained by fraud or by violation of law could not make a free man into property. In short, the Africans were kidnapped Africans, persons who were entitled to their freedom, and the treaty with Spain, which dealt with the restoration of property, did not apply to them.

The Court also took a position on the claims of Ruiz and Montes. Their claim rested on the papers, and the papers were not credited. On the question of what should be done with the Africans, the Court held that they were free and that the lower court had gone too far in ordering the government to return them to Africa, since the President had no statutory authority to do so in this case. The Court affirmed the ruling that the Africans were free, reversed the part of the decree that had them delivered to the President for transport, and ordered them discharged. The Africans were released.

I want to be exact about what the decision did not say. It did not hold slavery unlawful in the United States. It did not hold that the Constitution forbade it. Justice Story took care to say that if the Africans had been lawfully enslaved under Spanish law, the treaty would have required their return. The decision was narrow: these particular men were not slaves, because they had been kidnapped in violation of the law. That narrowness is the kind of reasoning that can be criticized as timid, and I think it can be defended as exactly the kind of reasoning that wins a case in a Court that includes slaveholding justices. One of the justices who joined the majority was Chief Justice Roger Taney, who sixteen years later wrote the Dred Scott decision. The same Court that decided the Amistad case would, in a different age and under a different mood, decide the opposite on a different question. The lesson of that irony is told in Dred Scott Is the Warning Every Fan of Judicial Supremacy Should Read.

What followed

The Africans' liberty was won in court, but their journey was not over. The Court had ordered them freed, not provided for their return. Abolitionist and church groups raised money for their passage home. The thirty-five survivors of the group, along with a party of missionaries, sailed for Sierra Leone and arrived in January 1842. Some others had died in captivity before the case was done. Cinqué himself returned to Sierra Leone, a country troubled by civil unrest, and accounts of what he found there vary.

The case has other legacies. It was among the cases that moved Northern opinion. It showed that the courts could be a forum for justice for people with no standing in the political system. And it provided the antislavery movement with a story in which the law, for once, was on the side of the weak.

The strongest objection

Here is the objection a careful skeptic raises. The case is celebrated, but it was a narrow decision on a unique set of facts. The Court did not strike a blow against slavery, and the same Court would soon reaffirm the power of slaveholders in other cases. Holding up Amistad as a monument to the judiciary overlooks the many decisions of that era that went the other way, including Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, which held that the federal government had exclusive power over fugitive slave law, and which went far in favor of slaveholders. Is the Amistad case really a triumph, or is it the exception that proves the rule?

The skeptic is right about the record, and a fair account should say so. The antebellum Court was no antislavery tribunal. But there are three answers.

One. A narrow decision can still be a correct one. The Court's job in a case is to decide the case, and in this one the law and the facts required freedom. The decision did not pretend to be more than it was.

Two. It proves what judicial independence means. The pressure on the Court came from the President, from the Spanish government and from powerful Southern interests. The Court resisted it. That is Hamilton's argument in the Federalist for a judiciary that has "neither force nor will, but merely judgment," a point read line by line in Neither Force Nor Will, Hamilton's Federalist 78 Read Line by Line, and the Amistad case is an example of judgment holding against force and will.

Three. The result depended on the rule of law, and a rule of law that cannot protect the least powerful is not worth the name. The Africans had no vote, no money and no language in common with the court. They had a right, and the courts honored it.

The Constitution and the case

For a constitutional conservative, the Amistad case is useful because it shows the separation of powers at work. The executive attempted to influence a judicial outcome, and a former President brought the matter to the Court's attention. The judiciary decided on the law and the facts. Congress had made the slave trade a federal crime in 1820, and the treaties and Spanish decrees against the trade stood behind the Court's view of the facts. And the Constitution's structure, which Madison set out in the Federalist, worked as designed: no one branch got to decide the matter alone. We discuss the principle in Federalist 47 Defines Tyranny as All Powers Gathered Into the Same Hands.

The case also shows the limit of what courts can do. A court can free these thirty-five. It cannot end the institution. That took a war and three amendments, one of which, the Thirteenth, is examined in The 13th Amendment's Second Section Gave Congress a New Kind of Power.

The case in brief

1. In July 1839 Africans, illegally brought to Cuba, took control of La Amistad, and in August the Navy seized the schooner off Long Island.
2. Spain, citing a 1795 treaty, and the Van Buren administration sought their return; abolitionists organized a defense, and lower courts held them to be kidnapped Africans and not slaves.
3. John Quincy Adams, then seventy-three, argued for the Africans on February 24 and March 1, 1841, attacking the executive's interference and appealing to the Declaration.
4. On March 9, 1841, Justice Story, for a seven-to-one Court, held that they were free; the thirty-five survivors returned to Africa in 1842.
5. The decision was narrow, and the Court's later record was mixed, but it showed an independent judiciary protecting people with no political power.

What you can do: read the opinion in United States v. The Amistad (1841) on a free case-law site, then read Article III, Section 2 and ask what kind of cases the Founders meant the courts to decide.