An ambiguous morality tale that is the subject of a recent feature film produced by Steven Spielberg, from the second volume of Samuel Eliot Morison's The Oxford History of the American People:

The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Africans who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding black named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they spared to sail the ship. He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare. Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Africans be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom. The court, with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other blacks set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader.

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