by James Traub
It would be months before the full story of the Amistad emerged, but once it did, many Americans would come to see the black captives as Adams did: martyrs to the monstrous evils of the slave trade. The men, women, and children aboard the slave ship had been kidnapped from West Africa by Spanish slave traders. Spain had agreed to end the slave trade in an 1817 treaty with Great Britain as well as a series of subsequent royal decrees. Nevertheless, a clandestine trade continued, often terminating in Havana’s slave market. The forty-two Africans who had survived the harrowing Middle Passage had been purchased in Havana by two Cubans, Jose Montes and Pedro Ruiz, who planned to sell them in the plantation district of Camaguey. The slaves were jammed belowdecks of the Amistad, a coastal schooner only sixty-four feet long and nineteen feet wide. They could barely raise their heads in the dark, fetid cargo hold, which was otherwise filled with farm equipment, clothing, textiles, plate ware, pots, toys, and the like. These men, women, and children—there were four little girls—were merchandise, nothing more or less.
The Africans knew nothing of their destination or their fate. When some of them tried, with hand signals, to ask the cook, Celestino, what would become of them, he indicated, in what he must have considered a fine bit of comedy, that they would be chopped to bits and eaten. The captives, terrified and enraged, determined to take their lives in hand. On the second night, with the crew exhausted from having battled a storm, the Africans’ leader, known as Cinqué, either broke or picked the central padlock that bound them all together. The men emerged onto the ship’s deck. Cinqué grabbed a handspike and drove it into Celestino, killing him in a moment. The rebellion now burst forth. The captives found machetes and began going after the crew members. They killed the captain; after some debate, they agreed to spare Ruiz and Montes, whom they instructed to set a course for Africa.
Montes sailed slowly eastward by day and then, with no one watching, tacked backward much more quickly at night, so that they sailed northward along the Eastern seaboard. After seven weeks the mutineers spotted land. The Amistad’s stores were almost exhausted. On August 24, some of the men went ashore to seek fresh provisions. The following day, the ship was spotted by the Washington, a Coast Guard cutter, which dispatched a boarding party. The ship’s captain, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, bewildered by the Amistad’s tattered sails and foul stench, the crew of black men dressed in outlandish outfits that had in fact been pilfered from the ship’s stores, and by the two Spanish men apparently being held captive, seized the vessel, which he assumed must be a pirate ship or privateer. Gedney brought the Amistad to New London to be examined by a federal magistrate, Judge Andrew Judson. Gedney was seeking salvage rights for the ship and its cargo of slaves. After listening to Ruiz and Montes recount a blood-chilling tale of insurrection and slaughter, Judge Judson ruled that the slaves be tried for “murder and piracy.”
The seizure of the Amistad proved to be a racial cause célèbre the likes of which America would hardly see again until the Scottsboro Boys went on trial at the dawn of the civil rights era. When one considers the pacifism of many abolitionists, and the horror slave rebellions provoked even in the North, it is remarkable that a case of murder on the high seas could have roused such widespread passions. But the Amistad captives were deeply sympathetic figures, women and children as well as men, all of them illegally stolen from their native land and treated as slaves. They were available to be visited in jail, where they could be seen sitting quietly and talking among themselves. In newspaper accounts of the time, they appeared to combine elements of early Christian martyrdom and noble Roman patriotism. Journalists offered stirring accounts, possibly apocryphal, of Cinqué’s speech urging his confederates to die together rather than to accept a life of servitude. A popular illustration showed the rebel leader with an implacable gaze and a white cloth thrown, toga-like, over his shoulder. Strong and handsome and no more than twenty-one years old, Cinqué was one of America’s first black heroes.
In Havana, Ruiz and Montes had signed a bill of lading stipulating that they were transporting Ladinos, slaves who had lived in Spanish territories since long before the slave trade had been outlawed. The ship’s manifest, otherwise known as a passport, described them so and gave each captive a fictitious Spanish name. The fact that the Amistad captives spoke no Spanish made this imposture obvious, but only when Lewis Tappan, who had taken up their cause, located a speaker of Vai, a second language for many of the Mende-speaking slaves, were they able to tell their story and thus demonstrate the truth that they were free men who had been illicitly abducted from their home.
On September 20 the captives appeared before Smith Thompson, a Supreme Court justice sitting as a federal circuit court judge. They were represented by Roger Sherman Baldwin, grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Baldwin observed that the defendants were being held as merchandise in order to satisfy property claims filed, variously, by Ruiz and Montes, Lieutenant Gedney, and the government of Spain. Had they been slaves, such a holding would have been morally repugnant but legally sound. Yet they were not slaves, Baldwin asserted, for they had been born free persons in Africa. Even were they judged to be chattels rather than humans, were they to be sold, like any other object of merchandise, in order to satisfy Lieutenant Gedney’s salvage claims against the ship and cargo? A federal magistrate, Andrew Judson, had already ruled that he would not authorize the sale of the slaves in the free state of Connecticut.
The district attorney, William S. Holabird, now made the remarkable concession that, despite the claims made on the ship’s manifest, the defendants really were freemen who had been illegally captured in Africa. Nevertheless, he said, the president had the right to hold them until a definitive decision was rendered, in order to be able to return them safely to Africa. This was bewildering; as Baldwin pointed out, whites seized as slaves by Barbary pirates would not have been held in prison on such a pretense. Nevertheless, on September 23 Judge Thompson denied the motion to free the defendants. His own feelings, he said, were “abhorrent to the system of slavery,” but “we must look at things as they are.” The defense had not yet proved to his satisfaction that the captives had been illegally seized in Africa. They might be slaves in the eyes of the law. Since the Constitution sanctioned slavery, the court could not simply release them as self-evidently free men. At the same time, he had dismissed the criminal charges against the accused not because he thought lightly of murder on the high seas, but because he had determined that the United States had no jurisdiction over a crime allegedly perpetrated against Spanish citizens on the high seas. He ordered the district court to convene in November to adjudicate the property claims.
That very day, Ellis Gray Loring, a leading Boston abolitionist, wrote to Adams saying that, despite the ruling, he worried that the Van Buren administration would surrender the captives to Spain, which had claimed jurisdiction over them as Spanish property. Adams was an authority on international law with unrivaled experience in the interpretation of international accords. What, Loring asked, should the Africans’ legal advisors do? Adams did not feel ready to respond. Nevertheless, he paid a visit to Loring at the latter’s office in Boston. Loring, he wrote in his journal, was “extremely anxious to know my opinion upon the right of the President to deliver the Negroes upon the demand of the Spanish minister.” Adams understood that Loring wanted more than his opinion; he wanted the ex-president, the nation’s conscience, to publicly take the side of the abolitionists. “The time has not yet come,” he reflected, “when it would be proper for me to give an opinion for publication. . . . If I ever do, it must be with great consideration and self-controul.” Of course, the moment Adams posed a problem to himself as a choice between “prudence” and truthfulness, he predetermined the outcome.
When Adams wrote back to Loring, aware that anything he said could be grist for the abolitionist mill, he posed a battery of questions without supplying answers. By what authority, he asked, did Lieutenant Gedney seize these men, and the
district judge order them to prison, if they had committed a crime on the high seas, beyond American jurisdiction? If the defendants were pirates rather than slaves, what property claim could possibly be lodged against them? Most fundamentally, what were these defendants—men or chattel? These were, of course, precisely the questions Baldwin had raised. Adams had not yet seen the trial transcript. Even at this early stage, it’s clear that, prudence notwithstanding, he yearned to play a role in the Amistad defense. He was, he said, prepared to help in any way possible—“could I indulge for a moment the hope that any service of mine would save the lives of these most distressed and most injured fellow men.” That would turn out to be a fateful offer.
Adams now devoted himself full time to the case, poring over his law books, examining precedents, mastering the facts as far as he could learn them. In early November Loring responded to Adams’ letter, and in his own answer Adams crept closer to open advocacy. The defendants, he said, “were not slaves but masters when Gedney found them.” They were no longer subject to property claims. Masters, of course, could be guilty of piracy, and so in theory the captives could have been found guilty at trial; but Judge Thompson had refused to release the defendants while declining to give them the trial to which the accused have a right. These were legal judgments, but Adams’ growing fury over the injustice of the case shone through his carefully crafted argument. Adams conceded the worst but still insisted on the innocence of the defendants. The men and women of the Amistad, he wrote, “had vindicated their natural right to liberty by conspiracy, insurrection, homicide and the capture of the ship in which they were embarked and of her cargo.”
Adams could not fully appreciate how much this meant to the abolitionists who had taken up the cause of the Amistad. Long afterward, when the issue was finally settled, the organizers of the Amistad Committee wrote to Adams about his firm conviction from the outset of the innocence of the captives. “The value of this confidence,” they recalled, “amid the alarm of friends, the taunt of enemies, the failings of counsel, and the occasional misgivings of our own minds as to the result, the Committee can better appreciate than express.” Excerpts from both of Adams’ letters to Loring were widely reprinted in the press, as Adams had assumed they would be.
ADAMS LEFT QUINCY IN LATE NOVEMBER, REACHING WASHINGTON a few days before the beginning of the new session. On the first day the clerk traditionally read the roll to introduce the new Congress. This time, he stopped when he reached New Jersey. There were two rival slates of New Jersey members, one Whig and one Democrat. Whichever side was seated would tip the balance of power in the House, allowing the winning party to choose a Speaker from their own ranks. The clerk refused to call either slate, and the House descended into bedlam. After four days of disorder, old John Quincy Adams, having sat quietly in his seat, rose to ask contemptuously whether the clerk, “whom we create, whom we employ, and whose existence depends on our will” was to hold the Congress in thrall, and thus “control the destinies of 16 million freemen?” When a member pointed out that the House could not compel the clerk to act, Adams said, “Well, sir, then let him resign, and we may possibly discover some way by which we can get along, without the aid of his all-powerful talent, learning and genius.” Adams then introduced a resolution demanding that the clerk call the roll.
“Who will put the question?,” one legislator asked. “I intend to put the question,” Adams cried. Adams’ fearlessness had a galvanic effect on the House. One member proposed that Adams fill the chair until a Speaker could be chosen, and the hall rang with cheers—this for the man who had been threatened with censure and criminal indictment. Even men who considered Adams a menace and a fanatic acknowledged that he stood above them as a figure of nonpartisan integrity. Adams presided over stormy debates between the two parties from December 6 to 16. One evening, when the session stretched past eight o’clock, his colleague Levi Lincoln urged him to rest; Adams asked Lincoln to take the chair, sent for a cup of coffee and two slices of buttered toast, and returned to the chair after an interval of ten minutes. The House agreed to choose a Speaker before settling the question of the rival delegations and, on the eleventh ballot, chose Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, a Whig widely considered independent. Adams wrote that at last he stepped down “with an ejaculation of gratitude to God for my deliverance.”
The Amistad trials in New London resumed in the first days of the new year. On January 11, 1840, after five days of hearings on the property claims, including testimony from Cinqué and other captives demonstrating beyond question that they were not Ladinos, District Court Judge Andrew Judson, who had shown little sympathy for the Amistad captives, delivered a bombshell: the defendants, he ruled, were “natives of Africa and were born free and ever since have been and still of right are free and not slaves.” Lewis Tappan later speculated that the judge had buckled before mounting public pressure.
After almost unimaginable tribulations, the Amistad captives had regained their freedom. Judge Judson ordered the government to repatriate them. The Van Buren administration, however, had no intention of doing so. Secretary of State Forsyth was a slaveholder and a former minister to Spain, and he had argued that the United States must honor its treaty obligations with Madrid. President Van Buren had no wish to open a breach with Spain. More important, he could not afford to jeopardize his Southern support on the eve of the 1840 election by countenancing the right of people taken in slavery to commit conspiracy, insurrection, and homicide against their white captors. The government immediately appealed the judge’s decision. The Amistad captives, briefly jubilant, were reduced once again to despair. Since they had not been released, they did not have to be recommitted to their prison.
In April, the circuit court in Connecticut affirmed the judgment of the district court. The government then appealed to the Supreme Court. At that time the Court’s term began in January, soon after Congress reconvened. The defendants, whom the courts had found to be the victims of a gross crime rather than the perpetrators of one, would nevertheless spend another nine months in confinement. The captives used their time to learn to read and write in English, enduring with good will the abolitionists’ evangelizing efforts.
In the House, Adams proposed a resolution calling on the president to provide the diplomatic and official papers touching on the Amistad. The resolution passed, perhaps because legislators cared less about the issue of the captives than about their right to solicit information from the executive. The documents, above all the correspondence with Spanish officials, would later allow Adams to put the Van Buren administration on trial. He also introduced a resolution denouncing the ongoing detention as unlawful; this the Speaker refused to consider. In May, Adams received a letter from Baldwin, who in going through documents had found that the government had translated the word “Ladinos” in the ship’s manifest as “sound Negroes.” This looked like a transparent attempt by the government to obscure the fraud Ruiz and Montes had committed by characterizing Africans as naturalized black Spaniards. Perhaps it was. When Congress reconvened the following December, Adams called for Congress to investigate the crucial change in nomenclature, which appeared not to have been made by the translator himself. The Speaker agreed, but the committee, which Adams chaired, was unable to find evidence of wrongdoing.
The Amistad’s team of lawyers had begun preparing for the Supreme Court hearing. On October 27, Adams received a visit in Quincy from Loring and Tappan, who implored him to join the attorneys working on the case. Adams had not appeared before the Supreme Court—or for that matter practiced law—in thirty years. Loring and Tappan had previously approached Rufus Choate, one of the great orators and legal minds of the day, but Choate was no abolitionist, and he turned them down. Indeed, most Whigs wanted absolutely nothing to do with the case. In November, they finally elected a president, William Henry Harrison, who stood at the head of a coalition of North and West, slave and free. The slave case looked like a wedge to drive that shaky alliance apart. Danie
l Webster, always conscious of his political standing (Harrison would soon make him secretary of state), refused to meet with the abolitionist firebrands who had taken up the cause of the Amistad.
The Amistad defendants did not need a gifted lawyer; they had one in Roger Sherman Baldwin, who continued to represent them despite fearing that he would bankrupt himself in doing so. They needed a man of national stature who could present to the justices a vision of American national interests more morally compelling than the one the government would deploy in arguing to honor the terms of the treaty with Spain. They needed an attorney who could speak to the justices as an equal. And of course they needed someone prepared to risk his reputation for a noble cause. There followed the kind of pantomime Adams was wont to perform. He insisted that he was too old, too busy, and too inexperienced for the job. He was prepared to continue serving as an unofficial advisor to Baldwin, nothing more. Loring and Tappan persisted. “It is a case of life and death for these unfortunate men,” they wrote. They begged the old man to take the case. They may have known him well enough to realize that he could not say no to a case of life and death. He relented.
