John Quincy Adams and the Amistad Case

On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kipnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on the schooner Amistad. They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards who had purchased them to sail them back to Africa. Instead, the ship was seized off Long Island by a U.S. revenue cutter on August 24, 1839. The Amistad then landed in New London, Connecticut, where the American captain filed for salvage rights to the Amistad's cargo of Africans. The two Spaniards claimed ownership themselves, while Spanish authorities demanded the Africans be extradited to Cuba and tried for murder.

Connecticut officials, for their part, jailed the Africans and charged them with murder. The slave trade had been outlawed in the U.S. since 1808, but the institution of slavery itself still thrived in the South when the Amistad case entered the federal courts and caught the nation's attention. The murder charges against the Amistad captives were quickly dropped, but they remained in custody as the legal focus turned to the property rights claimed by various parties. Abolitionists raised money for the Amistad captives' defense, arguing that the Africans had always been and remained free, and had acted in self-defense. U.S. President Martin Van Buren, loath to anger U.S. slaveholders as he faced the prospect of campaigning for reelection, issued an order of extradition, per Spain's wishes. To President Van Buren's surprise, however, the New Haven federal court's decision preempted the return of the captives to Cuba. The court ruled that no one owned the Africans because they had been illegally enslaved and transported to the New World. The Van Buren administration appealed the decision, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1841.

Abolitionists enlisted former U.S. President John Quincy Adams to represent the Amistad captives' petition for freedom before the Supreme Court. Adams, then a 73-year-old U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts, had in recent years fought tirelessly against Congress's "gag rule" banning anti-slavery petitions. Here, with characteristic humility, Adams accepts the job of representing the Amistad captives, hoping he will "do justice to their cause." Adams spoke before the Court for nine hours and succeeded in moving the majority to decide in favor of freeing the captives once and for all. The Court ordered the thirty surviving captives (the others had died at sea or in jail) returned to their home in Sierra Leone.

Roger S. Baldwin, Esqr. New Haven Conn[ecticu]t.

Boston 11. Novr. 1840

Dear Sir

I have received your obliging Letters of the 2d. and 4th: inst[an]t together with the narrative of the case to be tried before the Supreme Court of the United States, at their next January session, of the Captives of the Amistad.

I consented with extreme reluctance at the urgent request of Mr. Lewis Tappan and Mr. Ellis Gray Loring, to appear before the Court as one of the Counsel for these unfortunate men. My reluctance was founded entirely and exclusively upon the consciousness of my own incompetency to do justice to their cause. In every other point of view there is in my estimation no higher object upon earth of ambition than to occupy that position.

I expect to leave this city next Monday the 16th inst[an]t. for Hartford; and hope to be the next Morning Tuesday the 17th at New Haven. I shall then desire to see and converse with you concerning the case and will if necessary devote the day to that object. I have engaged to be at New York on the 18th.

I am with great respect Dear Sir,

Your obed[ien]t Serv[an]t

J. Q. Adams

GLC 582. John Quincy Adams to Roger Sherman Baldwin, 11 November 1840.

Editors: Kathleen Barry, Coordinator of Special Projects and Publications, Gilder Lehrman Institute; James G. Basker, President, Gilder Lehrman Institute; Sandra M. Trenholm, Curator, Gilder Lehrman Collection.

David Brion Davis, introduction to Amistad: Martin Van Buren & John Quincy Adams (Gilder Lehrman Institute, 1998).

Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad (reissue ed., Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).

William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress (Vintage Books, 1998).

James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (rev. ed., Hill & Wang, 1997).

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (reprint, Louisiana State University Press, 1997).