 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. In the summer of 1839, a foreign schooner accidentally sailed along the shores of the United States and transformed the federal courts into a forum for an explosive national debate. The drama that began when the enslaved Africans on the Amistad revolted and took control of the vessel off the coast of Cuba would culminate in the Supreme Court of the United States with a former president arguing on behalf of the Africans appeal for freedom. The Amistad case forced the federal courts and the nation to consider the legal foundations of slavery. For several weeks in the summer of 1839, newspapers along the Atlantic coast reported sightings of a mysterious schooner supposedly commanded by African pirates. Late in August, the crew of the Navy Brig, Washington spotted a badly damaged vessel in Long Island Sound and a shore party trading with local residents along the New York coast. When the naval officers boarded the Amistad, they were embraced by two Spanish men pleading for protection from a group of African men whom they had purchased as slaves in Cuba but who had taken control of the ship. The crew of the Washington took custody of the Amistad and the 42 Africans on board. They towed the schooner to New London in Connecticut, a state where slavery was legal rather than to a port in New York where slavery had been abolished. Under the law of salvage, anyone who rescued a ship from danger was entitled to a portion of the value of the ship and its cargo. Once in port, the commanding officer of the Washington contacted the federal marshal and requested a hearing in the U.S. District Court for Connecticut in order to file a claim of salvage. He and the crew intended to submit a claim for rescuing the Amistad and its cargo, including the enslaved Africans. On August 29, the Amistad case entered the federal judicial system when U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Judson convened a court of inquiry on board the Navy ship Washington in New London Harbor. Judson, along with the U.S. Marshal, the Clerk of Court and a group of observers heard testimony from the two Spanish planters about the Amistad's voyage from Cuba to New England. The planters, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, testified that each had purchased a group of slaves in Havana, then chartered space on the Amistad to carry the slaves to plantations along the coast of Cuba. Several nights out of Havana, the enslaved men freed themselves and in their struggle to take command of the ship, the captain and his crew. The leaders of the revolt forced Ruiz and Montes to sail the ship in the direction of the rising sun in West Africa. But each night, the Spaniards shifted course to the north and west in hopes of encountering another ship. Nearly two months later, the Amistad reached Long Island Sound, desperately short of food and water. One of the enslaved Africans on board the Washington during the inquest was a young man, Singh Bey Pye, who would become better known as Singh K. He spoke neither English nor Spanish and could not testify at this court session. But Singh K. was recognized by the court officers as the leader of the Africans on the Amistad. Reporters at the hearing commented on his composure characteristic of true courage. Singh K.'s presence dramatized the unique character of this case, a case that resulted from the actions of enslaved Africans and in which these African captives would appear in courtrooms to assert their right to freedom. Judson moved the court to the Amistad itself in order to hear testimony from Antonio, a slave who served as cabin boy to the slain captain. Antonio recounted what he had witnessed the night of the revolt and in the Amistad's hold crowded with the Africans in custody, he identified those who had led the revolt along with Singh K. After hearing the testimony, Judge Judson ordered the U.S. Marshal to hold the adult Africans in custody in a New Haven jail. He also ordered that Antonio and three young girls purchased as slaves in Cuba be held in custody to serve as witnesses. The testimony revealed both criminal and civil questions. Judson referred the criminal questions to the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Connecticut and set a date for the U.S. District Court to hear the sailor's salvage claim. The Judiciary Act of 1789 established both district and circuit courts for the federal judicial system. Among the powers granted to district courts was the authority to hear cases involving maritime commerce and the trade laws of the new nation. In the Amistad case, the Connecticut District Court would be responsible for hearing all property claims related to the ship and its cargo. Circuit courts, which operated from 1789 to 1911, were also trial courts that exercised jurisdiction over most federal crimes, over disputes between citizens of different states, and over all but the smallest cases in which the federal government was a party. They also heard some appeals from the district courts. The Circuit Court in Connecticut would consider the attorney's charges of murder and piracy on the Amistad. Circuit courts had no authorized judgeships of their own, so the district judge and the justice of the Supreme Court presided over them. Each of the nine Supreme Court justices was assigned to a regional circuit and spent much of the year traveling to the circuit court sessions in that circuit. This practice was known as circuit riding. The Circuit Justice for Connecticut was Smith Thompson, and New Yorker appointed to the Supreme Court in 1823 by President James Monroe. During the three weeks between the initial inquest and the sessions of the district and circuit courts, the Amistad case became the subject of a growing national debate on slavery. Led by wealthy merchant Louis Tappin, a group of anti-slavery advocates in New York recognized the opportunity to build national support for the abolition of slavery in the United States. These abolitionists had found the case they were looking for to challenge the laws of slavery in federal court. Tappin and his associates formed a committee to represent the jailed Africans. In a newspaper appeal to Friends of Liberty, they asked for donations in order to employ interpreters, lawyers, and whatever else it took to secure the rights of the Africans. The abolitionist committee called upon Yale College Linguistics Professor Josiah Gibbs to give the captives a voice in the upcoming court proceedings. Gibbs learned some basic phrases from the captives and then searched the docks of New York, hoping that an African sailor could serve as a translator. Within a week, Gibbs met two sailors from West Africa's Mendee region, which the abolitionists soon learned was the home of the African captives on the Amistad. While the abolitionists organized their legal strategy, the Spanish ambassador to the United States, citing a treaty between the two countries, requested that the ship and cargo, including the alleged slaves, be returned without any payment for salvage. The administration of President Martin Van Buren decided to enter the case on the side of the Spanish planters and ship owners. Van Buren, a Democrat, faced a difficult bid for reelection in 1840 and was determined not to anger southern slaveholders who supported the Democratic Party. The president preferred to deal with the Amistad as a diplomatic problem and let the Secretary of State, John Forsythe, manage the administration's response to the case. Forsythe instructed the U.S. attorney in Connecticut to take whatever steps were necessary to keep the Africans in federal custody and ready for transfer to Spanish authorities. Preparations for the court proceedings took place against a backdrop of intense public curiosity about the case and especially about the Mendee captives, newspapers throughout the country debated questions of federal jurisdiction and the law of piracy. Even popular entertainment capitalized on the interest. Within a few days of the original inquest, a New York theater presented a play called The Long Low Black Schooner. In New Haven, nearly 4,000 visitors paid the jailer for a chance to view the men in custody. The greatest public attention focused on Sinké. The nation's leading African American newspaper compared Sinké to Senator Daniel Webster, who they hoped would represent him in court. Other papers portrayed Sinké as a classical hero. At the same time, racist newspapers presented vicious accounts of his supposedly savage nature. After the translators arrived in New Haven, newspapers printed articles about the Mendee's families, their occupations, and accounts of their enslavement. A broad public soon recognized the men held in custody as distinct individuals devastated by the cruelties of the slave trade. The circuit court convened in the State House in Hartford, Connecticut on September 17th, 1839. Sitting in the Senate chamber, the court first impaneled a grand jury to hear testimony regarding the U.S. Attorney's indictment of the Mendee on charges of murder and piracy. When the grand jury asked for instructions from the bench, Circuit Justice Smith Thompson ruled that no federal court had jurisdiction over an act that occurred on a foreign vessel at sea. This ruling eliminated all threat of criminal prosecution of the Africans. Thompson referred the Admiralty case concerning trade and property questions to the U.S. District Court for Connecticut. The Mendee's fate now depended upon a court proceeding that revolved around the question of their status as property rather than any accusation of wrongdoing. In the District Court, the crew of the Navy Ship Washington and the people who traded with the Mendee on the New York shore submitted rival claims for salvage rewards. Both parties asserted that the Mendee were slaves and should be considered part of the Amistad's cargo. Claims for recovery of slave property were submitted by the planters who had purchased the Mendee and by the heirs of the cabin boy Antonio's owner. The U.S. Attorney, William Halliburd, submitted two different claims in anticipation of two possible decisions of the court. If the court determined that the Mendee were slaves and the property of Spanish planters, the federal government's attorney asserted that they should be delivered to agents of the Spanish government. If the court decided that the Mendee had been illegally enslaved and transported to the United States, the government wanted them delivered to the president for return to their native country under provisions of an anti-slave trade act. In an admiralty proceeding with no jury, determination of the District Court case rested solely with Judge Andrew Judson. The abolitionist feared he would not be sympathetic to appeals from Africans. Judson was appointed by President Andrew Jackson in 1836. Prior to that, he was well known for his efforts to shut down a Connecticut school established by abolitionists for the education of African American girls. Nor were the Mendee's lawyers encouraged by the activities of the Van Buren administration. The president ordered the positioning of a navy ship off the coast of New Haven so that the captives could be removed immediately if the judge ordered their return to Cuba. In New Haven, when Judson convened the District Court session in January of 1840, he faced one of the largest crowds ever assembled to view a federal court proceeding. Most of the spectators supported the abolitionists and followed the case so intently that they refused to leave their seats during the midday recesses. The team of experienced lawyers recruited by the abolitionist committee was led by Roger Sherman Baldwin, son of a famous political family. Baldwin and his colleagues followed a legal strategy based on personal liberties and the laws of property. Their priority was to win the court's acknowledgment that slavery violated natural rights, those rights to which every human was entitled regardless of any nation's laws. Baldwin argued that the enslaved mendee had a natural right to return to their homeland or seek asylum in a free country. But Baldwin also needed to respond to the president from an earlier Supreme Court case involving slaves transported by citizens of other nations. In that case, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the opinion, ruling that even though slavery violated natural law, the federal courts must support the right to hold slave property whenever any government had approved laws in support of slavery or the slave trade. And in the circuit court hearing, Justice Thompson had reminded Baldwin that the United States Constitution protected slavery. Baldwin argued that under Spanish law, the mendee could not be considered lawfully held slaves. The captives had only recently been transported to Cuba, which was in violation of a Spanish treaty prohibiting the African slave trade, and that under the terms of that Spanish treaty, the mendee were free in Cuba or any other Spanish territory. In a trial filled with testimony about salvage laws and treaty obligations, the dramatic high point came when Sincay presented the court with a chilling narrative of enslavement. Speaking through a translator, Sincay described his capture by slave traders in West Africa and the horrors of what was called the Middle Passage, the voyage across the Atlantic with several hundred people confined in the suffocating hold of a slave ship. He demonstrated the painful position the enslaved were forced to maintain day and night. Sincay also reenacted the brutal physical scrutiny of the Africans by the planters in the Havana slave market to other mendee captives. Grebo and Fulihua gave similar testimony about being kidnapped and enslaved within the past year. After five days of testimony, Judge Judson read his lengthy decision to a crowded courtroom. In response to the conflicting claims of salvage, Judson determined that the naval officers and crew had taken custody of a ship in almost certain danger of sinking and thus were entitled to an award of one-third the value of the ship and its cargo. But Judson denied the salvage award for rescuing the Africans because slave sales were illegal in Connecticut and so the court had no way to determine a monetary value of slaves. The judge then considered Spain's demand for the return of the mendee as the rightful property of Spanish citizens. According to Judson, the Spaniard's right to this property and with it the fate of the mendee depended on proof of ownership and proof that the Africans were in fact property under Spanish law. On both points, Judson surprised nearly everyone by ruling against the Spanish claims. Judson determined that the Spanish planters possessed no legal evidence of ownership, only passes for transporting slaves, and that these documents incorrectly stated that the Africans on the Amistad were longtime inhabitants of Spanish territory. The Spanish treaty prohibiting the slave trade from Africa declared that any Africans transported after 1820 were to be free in Spanish territory, including Cuba. Since the testimony of several witnesses proved that the mendee had arrived recently in Cuba, Judson declared that they were not lawfully held property and could not be delivered to Spanish officials. Instead, Judson granted the U.S. attorney's alternate request that the mendee be delivered to the president for transport to their native land. The mendee were elated at the possibility of returning home, but disappointed that Judson had not declared them free individuals. Judge Judson next turned to the question of Antonio, the slave who had been cabin boy for the Amistad slain captain. The abolitionists wanted the court to affirm natural rights and establish a precedent for challenging slavery in the United States. But their hopes collapsed when Judson ruled that because Antonio was born in Spanish territory as a slave, he was the legal property of the captain and must be delivered to the Spanish government along with other Spanish property. Any possible homecoming for the mendee was postponed when the U.S. attorney William Halliburd appealed to Judson's decision to the U.S. Circuit Court. That court convened in Hartford in April of 1840 with Circuit Justice Smith Thompson presiding. In order to hasten the certain appeal to the Supreme Court, he affirmed the district court's decision. Pending the convenion of the Supreme Court's term in January 1841, the mendee remained in federal custody, although in less restrictive confines in the town of Westville outside New Haven. In the coming months, several of them took odd jobs and all received religious and language instruction provided by the abolitionists. No one could predict how the Supreme Court justices would respond to the Amistad case. The majority of the nine justices were slaveholders, among them Chief Justice Roger Tawney. In the few previous cases dealing with slavery, the Supreme Court had protected the institution as it existed in the United States, but the court had strictly enforced the prohibition on the foreign slave trade. Anticipation about the deliberations were further heightened when former President John Quincy Adams joined the group of lawyers representing the mendee. The abolitionists' committee wanted a prominent statesman on the legal team, and when Daniel Webster declined, they turned to the 73-year-old former president. Adams was then serving as a member of the House of Representatives, where he had earned the nickname Old Man Elegant for his tireless condemnation of slavery. In February 1841, the case came before the Supreme Court in its chamber on the ground floor of the Capitol building. Large crowds gathered in expectation of dramatic oral arguments. U.S. Attorney General Henry Gilpin presented the government's arguments in support of the Spanish claims to the alleged slaves, and Roger Sherman Baldwin repeated the argument he had used in the lower courts. Then, former President Adams offered the court and its audience a seven-hour performance over the course of two days. His emotional arguments included a blistering critique of the Van Buren administration. Adams accused the administration of concealing the Spanish demand for return of the captives for trial, which would surely lead to their execution in Cuba. Adams repeatedly invoked the principles of natural rights as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, two copies of which hung before the justices in the Supreme Court chamber. On March 9, 1841, nearly 18 months after the federal court first ordered the detention of the Mendy, Justice Joseph Story delivered his opinion for the majority of the Supreme Court. Story, from Massachusetts, was the court's senior justice and the nation's most respected constitutional scholar. After a lengthy review of the federal court proceedings and the arguments presented to the Supreme Court, Story issued the decision that finally gave the captives their unconditional freedom. The Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling that the Mendy were recently arrived in Cuba and should not be delivered to Spanish officials as legally held property. The justices, however, overturned Judson's decision to deliver the captives to the president for return to Africa. The Supreme Court decision immediately freed the Mendy and released them from federal custody. The victory of freedom was bittersweet. It left the Mendy with no means by which to return to their homeland. To raise money for transportation, the abolitionist staged public appearances at which the Mendy sang, recited from the Bible, and demonstrated their English-language skills. One event at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York attracted more than 2,500 people. Finally, in November 1841, the 35 surviving Mendy departed for Sierra Leone, accompanied by several missionaries from the United States. The decision that freed these particular captives offered no legal relief for the nearly 3 million residents of the United States held in slavery. The Supreme Court let stand the district court's ruling that the cabin boy Antonio was a slave under Spanish law, and like all lawfully held slaves, must be returned to his owners. Soon after the decision, Antonio escaped to Canada and freedom, realizing the dream shared by many slaves in the United States. Yet nothing in the Amistad case would serve as a precedent for legal challenges to slavery within the United States. Until the Civil War, the federal courts continued to protect slave property at the same time that they enforced laws prohibiting the slave trade from Africa, and abolitionists largely abandoned efforts to challenge slavery through the federal judiciary. Like many other important cases in the history of the federal courts, Amistad had its greatest impact in the world beyond courtrooms and casebooks. The legend of Sincay inspired other enslaved people and remains a powerful tale of the quest for freedom. The widely reported court proceedings exposed the fragile legal principles and political compromises supporting slavery. And the personal stories of enslavement won the anti-slavery cause many new supporters. The lasting impact of Amistad's passage through the federal courts was to encourage the growing opposition to slavery in the United States.