Adams and Baldwin were eloquent in their pleas for justice based on higher principles. As Justice Joseph Story wrote to his wife, Adams’s argument was “extraordinary … for its power, for its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the records and points of discussion.”

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

On March 9, Story read a decision that could not have surprised those who knew anything about the man. An eminent scholar and jurist, Story was rigidly conservative and strongly nationalistic, but he was as sensitive to an individual’s rights as he was a strict adherent to the law. Although he found slavery repugnant and contrary to Christian morality, he supported the laws protecting its existence and opposed the abolitionists as threats to ordered society. Property rights, he believed, were the basis of civilization.

Even so, Story handed down a decision that freed the mutineers on the grounds argued by the defense. The ownership papers were fraudulent, making the captives “kidnapped Africans” who had the inherent right of self-defense in accordance with the “eternal principles of justice.” Furthermore, Story reversed Judson’s decision ordering the captives’ return to Africa because there was no American legislation authorizing such an act. The outcome drew Leavitt’s caustic remark that Van Buren’s executive order attempting to return the Africans to Cuba as slaves should be “engraved on his tomb, to rot only with his memory.”

The abolitionists pronounced the decision a milestone in their long and bitter fight against the “peculiar institution.” To them, and to the interested public, Story’s “eternal principles of justice” were the same as those advocated by Adams. Although Story had focused on self-defense, the victorious abolitionists broadened the meaning of his words to condemn the immorality of slavery. They reprinted thousands of copies of the defense argument in pamphlet form, hoping to awaken a larger segment of the public to the sordid and inhumane character of slavery and the slave trade. In the highest public forum in the land, the abolitionists had brought national attention to a great social injustice. For the first and only time in history, African blacks seized by slave dealers and brought to the New World won their freedom in American courts.

The final chapter in the saga was the captives’ return to Africa. The abolitionists first sought damage compensation for them, but even Adams had to agree with Baldwin that, despite months of captivity because bail had been denied, the “regular” judicial process had detained the Africans, and liability for false imprisonment hinged only on whether the officials’ acts were “malicious and without probable cause.” To achieve equity, Adams suggested that the federal government finance the captives’ return to Africa. But President John Tyler, himself a Virginia slaveholder, refused on the grounds that, as Judge Story had ruled, no law authorized such action.

To charter a vessel for the long trip to Sierra Leone, the abolitionists raised money from private donations, public exhibitions of the Africans, and contributions from the Union Missionary Society, which black Americans had formed in Hartford to found a Christian mission in Africa. On November 25, 1841, the remaining 35 Amistad captives, accompanied by James Covey and five missionaries, departed from New York for Africa on a small sailing vessel named the Gentleman. The British governor of Sierra Leone welcomed them the following January–almost three years after their initial incarceration by slave traders.

The aftermath of the Amistad affair is hazy. One of the girls, Margru, returned to the United States and entered Oberlin College, in Ohio, to prepare for mission work among her people. She was educated at the expense of the American Missionary Association (AMA), established in 1846 as an outgrowth of the Amistad Committee and the first of its kind in Africa. Cinqué returned to his home, where tribal wars had scattered or perhaps killed his family. Some scholars insist that he remained in Africa, working for some time as an interpreter at the AMA mission in Kaw-Mende before his death around 1879. No conclusive evidence has surfaced to determine whether Cinqué was reunited with his wife and three children, and for that same reason there is no justification for the oft-made assertion that he himself engaged in the slave trade.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to