by James Traub
In mid-November, on his way to Washington for the new term of Congress, Adams stopped in New Haven to meet with Baldwin. They spent two hours going over the arguments to be presented to the court. Then Baldwin took Adams to meet the prisoners. The thirty-six men—the women and children were separately housed—lived in a single room with two rows of cots. Adams felt they were poorly housed and clothed. Baldwin put his charges through their paces by asking three of the Africans to read to Adams from the New Testament. They did so, Adams grumbled, “very indifferently.” He was introduced to the group’s leaders, Cinqué and Grabow. Both men had, he thought, “very remarkable countenances.”
Once in Washington, Adams had something else to focus on besides the gag rule and the play of legislative debate. He immersed himself in documents and clippings he had received from Loring and from Baldwin, as well as in the diplomatic correspondence the Van Buren administration had released. He asked Attorney General Henry Gilpin to dismiss the case. Gilpin said that President Van Buren could not ignore the Spanish minister’s demands for restitution. He went to see Francis Scott Key, the US district attorney, who had played a not very helpful role when Adams had tried to rescue Dorcas Allen from slavery. Now Key told Adams that he had no chance of winning the argument, citing what Adams knew very well was a vulnerable point—the precedent of the Antelope, a celebrated Supreme Court case also concerning a Spanish slave ship captured at sea. In that case, adjudicated when Adams was secretary of state and decided in the first months of his presidency, Chief Justice John Marshall had concluded that the law of nations required the ship and its cargo of slaves to be returned to Spain despite American laws prohibiting the slave trade.
Antelope v. U.S. looked to be very much on point for the government, and Key’s rather offhand dismissal sent Adams scurrying to the Supreme Court library to read up yet again on a case to which he had already given a great deal of attention. He worried constantly, as even very confident lawyers do when they are scheduled to argue before the Court, that he had overlooked a fine point, that he had not prepared enough. He felt his own unworthiness. On a visit to the Court clerk, he found his name inscribed on the rolls from his first appearance, as a plaintiff’s lawyer in two commercial cases in February 1804. (He had appeared again in 1809.) He spent hours closeted with Baldwin. The Court was originally scheduled to hear the case on January 16, 1841, but it was put off until February 19. Adams sought additional documents from the docket of the circuit court, as well as diplomatic correspondence. England, the global champion of the abolitionist cause, was prepared to do anything it could to help the cause of the Amistad captives, and Adams hoped that he could introduce diplomatic correspondence with Great Britain into his argument before the Court. The clerk told Adams that he would have to bear the cost of document production. Adams, who had neither asked for a fee nor been offered one, immediately agreed.
Adams’ fear of failure could be counted on to drive him to heroic feats of exertion. In this case, he also knew that he held his clients’ very lives in his increasingly shaky hands. Lest he forget, in early January he received a letter from Kale, an eleven-year-old Amistad captive, though it had been composed by others, perhaps chiefly Cinqué and Kinna, another leader of the group. Kale began by saying what Adams already knew, that they were “Mendi people,” not Ladinos. “Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts because we not talk American language,” Kale wrote with some asperity. “American people no talk Mendi. American people crazy dolts?” American people also imagined that the Africans were content with their situation because they smiled all the time, but in fact they smiled because they feared that if they expressed their true feelings they would be mistaken for angry savages.
Nor, noted Kale/Cinqué, were they heathens: “we read all Matthew Mark Luke and plenty of little books.” They were thought not to have souls, but in fact they missed their home and longed to return. “Dear friend Mr. Adams,” the writer continued, “you have children and friends you love them you feel very sorry if Mendi people come and take all to Africa.” Adams received another such letter directly from Kinna. Adams was deeply struck by the dignity and depth of feeling of both missives. He wrote to Baldwin asking him to tell both correspondents that he received their letters “with great satisfaction,” and that “I think of them, hope for them, and pray for them, night and day.”
Adams grew ever more nervous as the great date approached. By late January his perpetually inflamed eye was acting up, and he could barely see. His mind was in a whirl. He went to two church services and through both found himself thinking of the case. He turned for distraction to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. He tried to attend to the business of Congress. He lit into Henry Wise of Virginia and then regretted it. Joshua Giddings, his protégé, came under furious attack after an anti-slavery speech, and Adams for once held back.
The Amistad argument began on February 22—George Washington’s birthday, a coincidence that could only have heightened Adams’ sense of the supreme importance of the event. Attorney General Gilpin made the opening argument for the government, asserting that as the Amistad was a properly flagged Spanish vessel carrying cargo approved by Spanish authorities, the United States was obliged to return the ship and its property to its owners under Article 9 of the Treaty of 1795, which stipulated that “ships rescued out of the hands of pirates or robbers” should be brought into port and restored to their owners. The pirates or robbers—that is, the slaves—must be turned over to Spanish authorities for criminal prosecution. It was not for federal authorities to judge whether or not the Africans had been legitimately described as slaves. At the end of the day, Adams returned home and drew up a list of all the documents he planned to refer to as an aide-mémoire while he extemporized, a method he often used in speeches before the House.
The following day, Baldwin appeared for the Africans. Discarding fine legalisms, he began by stating that the core of the case was whether the American government “can become a party to the enslavement of human beings cast upon our shores.” The district court had concluded that the defendants were men, not property, and Ruiz and Montes, who had sought the restitution of the Africans as property, had not appealed the decision. Legally, therefore, that question had been decided. Further, Baldwin argued that the United States had no standing to appeal on behalf of the government of Spain, which had not made itself a party to the court process. Nor had it been necessary to do so in order to secure the slaves, since the district court was already considering the claim by Ruiz and Montes that the slaves were property and should be turned over to Spanish authorities. Why, now, was the United States interceding? Where did the Constitution specify that the federal government has the right to appeal on behalf of a foreign property claim?
If the defendants were not property, to be returned in a commercial dispute, neither were they pirates to be surrendered for prosecution. Did they seek gain, as pirates do? Of course not. “Cinqué, the master spirit who guided them, had a single object in view. That object was—not piracy or robbery—but the deliverance of himself and his companions in suffering from unlawful bondage.” Gilpin now responded, noting that the United States had the same responsibility to return slaves to foreign nationals that it claimed when American slaves were shipwrecked on foreign shores, including in nations like England that prohibited slavery. Baldwin was widely considered to have gotten the better of the exchange. One newspaperman called Baldwin’s statement “one of the most complete, finished, conclusive legal arguments ever made before that court.” Adams noted in his journal that his colleague had been “sound and eloquent but exceedingly mild and moderate.” Adams knew that he had to restrain his temper, but he would not, and could not, be mild.
Adams rose to speak on the morning of February 24. At the time, the Court’s chambers occupied a cozy apartment underneath the Senate chambers. Light streamed in from windows behind the raised bench where the robed justices sat; visitors occupied a gallery behind and above them. The wedge-shaped room he
ld barely enough space for the desks where Adams, Baldwin, and Gilpin sat. Of the nine men upon whom Adams fixed his unsettling gaze, only one, Smith Thompson, was as old as he. The senior-most justice, Joseph Story, a Madison appointee, was a good friend whom Adams regarded as every inch an intellectual equal. The other seven had been appointed by Andrew Jackson; the chief justice, Roger Taney, was the infamously supple character who had done Jackson’s bidding in the struggle over the defunding of the national bank. Five were Southern slaveholders. Adams had a dim regard for them.
Adams always overprepared. He had gone over his argument again and again, committing to memory the vast flow of logic and of rhetoric. He was consumed with anxiety, as he always was before public performances of great consequence; perhaps his hands shook. Adams began his address, as he often did when speaking before the public, with an exposition of first principles; he thought ill of orators like Giddings who sought to erect great structures on weak foundations. What, he asked, is justice? According to the Institutes of Justinian, the great codification of Roman law, it was “the constant and perpetual will to secure to everyone HIS OWN right.” He was seeking to summon these nine men to the realm of timeless truth and transcendent morality. That was what Adams could do as no other advocate could.
Adams now proceed to frame an indictment of the Van Buren administration. He was, he explained to the justices, under the “painful” obligation to expose both the proceedings and the motives of the executive to “the censure of the Court.” This he now proceeded to do, reading from the administration’s diplomatic correspondence to show the lengths to which Secretary Forsyth and others had gone to protect Spanish subjects and Spanish sovereignty against the “oppressors” who had seized the Amistad. By what right, Adams now asked, did the government violate its duty of impartiality by extending its sympathy to the slave traders rather than to “the men who had restored themselves to freedom”? Was that justice? Certainly not. It was, Adams conceded, a strange case. Yet to find where justice lay, one need look no further than “that law”—and here he pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence affixed to a pillar in the Court—which embodied “the law of Nature and of Nature’s God on which our fathers placed our own national existence.” This was the view of the Declaration he had begun to develop. Others might not agree, but you could hardly go wrong citing that document on the wall.
Adams dwelt on the history of the case in order to show that “the proceedings of the United States are all wrongful from the beginning,” and thus that its appeal should be dismissed. When Lieutenant Gedney encountered the Amistad, the Africans were in possession of the ship, seeking to return to their home. They were not pirates, as the circuit court had concluded. (This was not quite accurate: the court had concluded that the captives had not violated American statutes against piracy.) Gedney thus had no right to seize the ship. When the captives were brought before the court, Secretary Forsyth had instructed the district attorney to keep them in custody as “Spanish property.” This assertion was, Adams said, with mock circumlocution, “the thing that is not”—that is, a lie. Forsyth, in turn, had been moved to act by a letter from the Spanish minister, Calderon de la Barca, demanding that the Africans be returned to Spain in accord with the stipulation in the Treaty of 1795 that shipwrecked or disabled vessels and cargo be restored to either nation. “Is that language applicable to human beings?,” Adams asked scornfully. “Will this Court so affirm?”
Adams now surfaced the contradiction Baldwin had so ably identified—that the defendants were alternately criminals and property—but imparted a rhetorical twist that seemed to render the Spanish government’s claims preposterous. “My clients,” he observed, “are claimed under the treaty as merchandise, rescued from pirates and robbers. Who were the merchandise, and who were the robbers? According to the construction of the Spanish minister, the merchandise were the robbers, and the robbers were the merchandise. The merchandise was rescued out of its own hands, and the robbers were rescued out of the hands of the robbers.” Here was the absurdity, both legal and existential, which came of treating men as things.
Adams continued his assault on the Van Buren administration. He read Calderon’s letter, concentrating on the minister’s assumption that an American president could intervene in the judicial system as he wished, just as the Spanish king did. The letter, in short, was an insult to American republicanism. Did the secretary explain America’s constitutional principles to this envoy of an autocratic state? No—he sought to comply with his demands. “He has,” Adams declared, “degraded the country, in the face of the whole civilized world.” Calderon’s successor, the Count d’Argaiz, perplexed by the procedural safeguards of the American system, wrote that surely the executive could break the impasse “gubernativamente”—a word Adams translated as “by absolute fiat” and repeated as often as possible. The Spanish ministers had called on the president to seize the captives, jail them, and hand them over to Spanish authorities for the purpose of judicial murder. To defer to this autocratic demand was to surrender America’s identity as a republican nation.
Here Adams concluded—though only for the day. He resumed his argument March 1. The government had urged the court not to look behind the manifest describing those on board the Amistad as Ladinos, but Adams dilated on the thriving illegal slave trade of Cuba, actively abetted by the governor general. Fraudulent documents were the common currency of the trade. What, then, could the Court make of the government’s assertion that the passport should be taken as proof positive of the Africans’ identity? Here, too, Adams was pointing to the Van Buren administration’s deference to an autocratic ally and its eagerness to prejudge the facts. So eager, in fact, had the administration been to satisfy Spanish demands that it had sent the ship the Grampus to New Haven to transport the defendants to Cuba before they could file an appeal—a point Adam cinched by reading the previously secret correspondence with the ship’s captain.
Adams devoted the last several hours of his speech to a minute analysis of the Antelope case. His central argument was that the precedent did not apply because Spain had not yet prohibited the slave trade when the Antelope set out; Chief Justice Marshall had explicitly stated that he would not have restored the slaves to their owners had the ship belonged to a nation that prohibited slavery and the slave trade. This, of course, was precisely the case with the Amistad.
Adams had now spoken for more than eight hours over two days. He had not stumbled, as he had feared he would. The inflammation in his eyes, and all his other afflictions, had dropped away. He had argued the law, the facts, the politics, and the great moral principles that lay behind them all. He had reminded the justices, not once but twice, of the two copies of the Declaration of Independence hanging on their walls. In the first draft of his argument, Adams had planned to begin by addressing the Court directly, as one who had not appeared before it in thirty years. Perhaps he had seen the egoism in that design; he saved it instead for the end. Now this celebrated speaker, the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, commenced his peroration. He recalled Justices Marshall, and Cushing, and Chase, and the lawyers he had fenced with so long ago, and even the court administrators. “Where are they all? Gone! Gone! All gone!—Gone from the services which, in their day and generation, they faithfully rendered to their country.”
Now Adams had tears streaming down his deeply lined pink cheeks. The crowd in the galleries was rapt. He spoke his final words before the Court:
From the excellent characters which they sustained in life, so far as I have had the means of knowing, I humbly hope, and fondly trust, that they have gone to receive the rewards of blessedness on high. In taking, then, my final leave of this Bar, and of this Honorable Court, I can only ejaculate a fervent petition to Heaven, that every member of it may go to his final account with as little of earthly frailty to answer for as those illustrious dead, and that you may, every one, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, be received at
the portals of the next with the approving sentence—“Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
Now Adams—and everyone else—had to wait. On March 4, William Henry Harrison was sworn in as the new president. Adams was deeply moved by the simplicity of the event, the absence of pomp, the quiet dignity of the vast crowds. The procession passed before his home on F Street, and he was struck that Harrison rode a plain white horse and wore a simple overcoat that made him indistinguishable from the men around him.
The Court announced that it would render a decision March 9. Adams’ colleagues were optimistic. He, of course, was not. “My anxiety for it is intense, and deeply distrustful,” he wrote. He went to the Court and waited. It was Justice Story who had been assigned to deliver the opinion. “There does not seem to us to be any ground for doubt,” he said, “that these Negroes ought to be deemed free; and that the Spanish treaty interposes no obstacle to the just assertion of their rights.” The Court had voted 7–1 to dismiss the government’s appeal. (One justice, Philip Barbour, had died in the middle of the argument.) At the same time, the Court rejected Adams’ claim that the Africans should be deemed the owners of the ship and the cargo, awarding Lieutenant Gedney his salvage rights to the ship and cargo, though not to the captives themselves.
From the courtroom, Adams dashed off a note to Tappan: “The captives are free!” The verdict loosed an explosion of relief and joy among the multitudes who had come to feel that the cause of abolitionism itself was summed up in the plight of the Amistad captives. Adams’ speech was published in the abolitionist as well as the mainstream press. Adams received a stream of letters exalting him as the moral hero of the age. One came from “the people of colour of Columbus, Ohio,” saying that at a gathering at a local Baptist Church a resolution of profound thanks had been voted. The great victory restored Adams’ tattered reputation in the anti-slavery movement. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote to acknowledge that “some of us may have at times done thee injustice in our regret and disappointment at thy expressed sentiments in regard to the District of Columbia,” but now “we feel that thou art entitled to our warmest gratitude as abolitionists.”
