By JERRY O'BRIEN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Related Story: Books and periodicals on the Amistad incident
Related Story: Amistad story inspires books, exhibits, opera


In the dark and narrow hold of the schooner Amistad, 53 captive Africans were shackled together, bound at the neck, wrist and ankle with iron chains and collars, destined for lifetimes of slavery in the canefields of Cuba.

The 49 men and 4 children had been stolen from their Mende homeland in Sierra Leone in West Africa, ripped from their families by the hired hands of slave traders, chased like animals down winding dirt roads and through the rice fields of their villages.

Among the captives was a 26-year-old man named Cinque. He was patient and self-possessed. Taller and more robust than the other captives, he had the presence and temperament of a leader.

Cinque was determined to be reunited with his wife, son and two daughters.

Locked man-to-man in the bowels of the black-hulled Amistad, the discouraged captives heaved with the stormy sea just off the Cuban coast, their heads bowed painfully in a hold barely four feet high.

On Cinque's signal, the captives gripped the iron links and pulled. The padlock that bound the long chain to the hold yawned and gave way.

Deftly handling a nail he had hidden in his armpit, Cinque picked the lock on his neck collar, then freed his fellow captives. They gingerly touched the painful cuts that scarred their wrists and ankles.

Cloaked in darkness before the dawn, in the early morning of July 2, 1839, Cinque and his band quietly came upon the open deck. Weapons were waiting: razor-sharp sugarcane knives, blades two feet long.

The Africans broke into a run and fell upon Capt. Ramon Ferrer. Cinque struck first. He raised his arm against the sky and buried the blade. A pair of sailors jumped overboard into the darkness. The cabin boy was captured.

Awakened by the screams were the two Spanish planters who had bought the Africans in the slave houses of Havana, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes. They tried to stop the attack, but failed to save the drowsy cook, whose body was repeatedly hacked. It was the cook who had grinned when he told the Africans they would be boiled and eaten when the ship reached land.

Ruiz and Montes soon surrendered. Their lives were spared. The Africans cleaned their captors' wounds, dressed them in fresh clothes and put them briefly in chains to taste enslavement.

By the light of the new day, Cinque and his friends controlled the Amistad, buoyed by the fresh hope of returning home. It was a hope that would be sorely tested.

Pointing to the sun in the east, Cinque ordered Montes to sail back to Africa. But at night, as the Africans slept, Montes turned the ship back toward the west. The Amistad zigzagged a path in the Atlantic for nearly two months, slowly creeping north off the eastern seaboard.

Meager supplies of food and water dwindled, and 10 Africans died.

Finally, on Aug. 26, torn sails hanging limply, the ghost ship and its exhausted crew dropped anchor at Culloden Point, near Long Island.

From the deck of the revenue cutter Washington, Lt. Commander Thomas R. Gedney spied the mysterious vessel and its black sailors. He read the name on the bow of the Spanish ship.

Amistad. Friendship .

Gedney claimed the schooner, its cargo and its African passengers as his salvaged property, and he brought a federal district judge to the Washington to start the hearing.

Judge Andrew T. Judson noticed that for a man who faced charges of mutiny and murder, this Cinque appeared strangely calm. Judson ordered the 39 adult male Africans held in the New Haven county jail until a grand jury could sort out the opposing claims.

The Africans were in chains again.

THE AMISTAD incident embroiled a presidential election and threatened international relations between the United States, Spain and England.

It fanned the fervor of slavery's supporters in Congress and fired the resolve of abolitionists in the north.

It marked the first civil-rights case in American history and inspired an aging former president, John Quincy Adams, to take the cause of the captives' freedom before the Supreme Court.

Over the next two years, as the case of the Amistad captives wound its way through the American legal system, the abolitionists who came to the Africans' defense learned lessons in legal strategy and publicity that would prove essential in their effort to rally public opinion against slavery over the next two decades.

The 1841 Supreme Court decision freed the Amistad captives, but the act was more symbolic than substantive. It would take a Civil War to dissolve with blood the shackles of slavery in the United States.

Despite the drama of this historical episode, it is only in recent years that the Amistad story has been seriously researched and popularized.

Scholars attribute this slowly rising tide to the effects of a generation of African-American history and literature courses in American colleges, a new interest in Diasporic studies -- the history and culture of people dispersed from their homelands -- and renewed vigor in the longstanding debate on racism in America.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Dubois professor of humanities and chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, believes that Americans have not grown up learning the Amistad story for a simple reason.

``I think that's because black men killed white men and the Supreme Court said it was okay,'' said Gates, the country's preeminent scholar in the growing field of African-American studies.

``It's an episode that reveals black people at their most noble and resistant. They stood up to their oppressors, they slew their oppressors, they went to court and they won.

``It also shows interracial cooperation at the highest level, and displays the wonders of the American legal system.

``The story is irresistible. But if you don't like black men fighting back, then you keep that out of the history books, and that's what happened. This story is lots easier to digest at this moment in time.''

Now, with an Amistad opera and an Amistad novel before the public, the most successful and influential moviemaker of his generation is bringing the Amistad story to the screen. With his extraordinary feel for the pulse of an audience, Spielberg has sensed this story on the wind and will scatter it around the world.

``This was the first time in history that African slaves entered the American courts and won freedom,'' said Howard Jones, professor of history at the University of Alabama, whose 1987 Mutiny on the Amistad was the first scholarly work on the incident.

``Spielberg will force historians to put this story in the history books where it belongs.''

CONNECTICUT NEWSPAPERS knew a good story when they saw it.

``The case of the Africans who were captured on board the Amistad . . . is exciting a very strong sensation throughout the country, and has given rise to many interesting and important legal questions,'' the Norwalk Gazette wrote on Sept. 11, 1839.

Among the readers of such stories was former president and now Massachusetts Congressman John Quincy Adams, who at 72 remained pugnacious and irascible, a prodigiously gifted lawyer and orator.

He was also an opponent of slavery, which he regarded as a sin against God and natural law, a violation of the spirit and letter of the Declaration of Independence.

``That which now absorbs a great part of my time and all of my good feelings is the case of the 53 African negroes taken at sea off Montauk,'' Adams wrote in his diary that fall.

Other sympathetic and influential minds turned to the captives' plight.

Among them were Lewis Tappan, 51, a wealthy New York lawyer who helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society; the Rev. Joshua Leavitt, 45, a New York lawyer and editor of the abolitionist newspaper Emancipator; and Roger Baldwin, 46, a New Haven lawyer and the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Baldwin had a heart for justice and a weakness for impossible odds. He accepted the invitation to defend the captives. The Committee for the Defense of the Africans of the Amistad was born.

These abolitionists seized upon the Amistad incident as a way to publicize the evils of slavery. But they also chose to use the law to their advantage, to win the captives' freedom in the public mind and in the courts, an approach that would prove invaluable in the years before the Civil War.

``They appealed to the Declaration of Independence. That was their strategy,'' said historian Howard Jones. ``They would take the most revered document and show the wide gulf that existed between it and the Constitution, which protected slaveowners and their property.

``They hoped to shock Americans into seeing this contrast.''

THE FIRST BREAK for the captives came in September 1839, when the Circuit Court in Hartford dismissed charges of murder and piracy on the grounds that the alleged offenses took place in Spanish territory.

But the court refused to release the prisoners and turned the matter back to U.S. District Court where claims of salvage rights would be heard in January.

This did not bode well for the defense team. Presiding Judge Andrew T. Judson had led the effort in 1833 to destroy Prudence Crandall's school for black girls in Canterbury, Conn. Now he would weigh the competing claims.

Under the Constitution, the importation of slaves to the United States was banned after 1808, but federal law did not deal with slavery in individual states. Slaves were legally recognized as property in Connecticut, for example, until 1848.

If the Africans were slaves on the Amistad, then they were slaves in Connecticut.

Furthermore, maritime law provided that property found at sea was subject to the salvage rights of those, such as Lt. Gedney, who recovered it. But a treaty between the Uniied States and Spain required each to return to the other any property found on the high seas.

The legal snags didn't stop there.

In a treaty with Great Britain, Spain had outlawed the importation of slaves into her colonies, including Cuba. But a loophole made it legal to keep slaves born before 1820.

So, slave traders routinely bribed Cuban officials and purchased fake papers identifying kidnapped Africans as legally enslaved ``Ladinos,'' slaves who had been in Spanish possession long enough to speak the language.

Papers found on the Amistad showed that the captives were Ladinos, therefore the legal possession of Ruiz and Montes, who had purchased them for $450 a man. Therefore, the Africans must be returned to the planters.

The Spanish Embassy in Boston agreed. So did President Martin Van Buren, who held a trump card: he had appointed Andrew Judson to the federal bench.

Baldwin fiercely argued that the issue was ``whether men and women who were born free, and who have never been held as slaves for a moment, except as the victims of piracy and fraud, shall when they have escaped from bondage and sought an asylum in our country, be reduced to slavery by the active interference of the Executive, or of the Judicial tribunals of our country.''

In an unprecedented moment in an American court, a black man was allowed to testify. Cinque took the stand to describe, with an interpreter, the hideous treatment his fellow captives had received on the ship.

When Cinque crouched on the floor to show their captivity, the New Haven Herald reported, ``his action induced an instantaneous silence and solemnity in the assemblage, which the highest eloquence of language might well covet as its richest reward.''

On Jan. 13, 1840, after five days of testimony, Judson astounded the courtroom. He ordered the federal government to return the captives to their homeland.

Cinque and his fellow Africans ``shall not sigh for Africa in vain,'' Judson wrote. ``Bloody as may be their hands, they shall yet embrace their kindred.''

The abolitionists' joy was short-lived. An angry Van Buren, needing Southern votes for his 1840 bid for reelection, ordered the attorney general to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

The Africans went back to jail.

BY THE FALL of 1840, the Africans -- now popularly known as the Amistads -- had been given more hospitable lodgings in Westville, Conn., taught daily by the Yale Divinity School. Public opinion toward the captives had become so warm that their jailor was raising the three girls in his own home.

Despite Baldwin's record, the abolitionists knew he would need help before the Supreme Court. They begged John Quincy Adams to take up the fight. Slowed by age and fading eyesight, Adams had not argued before the court in 30 years.

He accepted the challenge in October and turned, as he always did, to his diary.

``I implore the mercy of God so to control my temper, to enlighten my soul, and to give me utterance, that I may prove myself in every respect equal to the task,'' Adams wrote.

On Feb. 24, 1841, Adams rose before the eight Supreme Court justices. As was his custom, he consulted few notes. He spoke for four and a half hours the first day and three hours at the next session.

``These men were found free, and they cannot now be decreed to be slaves, but by making them slaves,'' Adams said, in a voice that cracked, broke, wheezed and piped, as Emerson wrote.

``Has the fourth of July, '76, become a day of ignominy and reproach?'' he asked, pointing to a copy of the Declaration of Independence framed on the wall of the chamber.

``The moment you come to the Declaration of Independence, that every man has a right to life and liberty, an inalienable right, this case is decided.''

On March 9, 1841, Justice Joseph Story issued the majority opinion. The planters' documents were fraudulent. The Africans were free.

``They are natives of Africa, and were kidnapped there, and were unlawfully transported to Cuba,'' Story wrote. ``The negroes . . . are declared to be free.''

THANKS TO STEVEN SPIELBERG, said Gates, of Harvard, more people will learn about the Amistad in the weeks ahead than in the previous 150 years.

``And that's great,'' Gates said. ``But a movie is always just a movie. I don't think it's fair to place too much weight on an artistic form, to make it do more work than it can bear.''

Gates believes that not much was left in the wake of the Amistad.

``The immediate impact was negative. What came next was the Dred Scott decision'' of 1857, Gates said, which held that blacks were not citizens of the United States and thus had no right to petition federal court.

``This was not a story to be passed on,'' Gates said of Amistad. ``The apologists for slavery didn't want it. Even the abolitionists did not want the slaves to fight back. It was against the tide. That's what makes it so curious.''

The Supreme Court freed the Amistad captives not because slavery was morally or legally wrong but because no one could prove who owned them.

``The truth is that the papers were fraudulent. The image is that it was a blow against slavery,'' said historian Howard Jones. ``This story speaks to us today because that struggle is not over yet. This movie will carry a great message.''

The Amistad defense committee raised money to pay for the Africans' return home. On Nov. 27, 1841, a ship bearing Cinque and his friends left New York harbor for Africa. It arrived safely.

Devoted to abolition, the committee merged with three other groups in 1846 to become the American Missionary Association, which helped educate millions of former slaves after the Civil War and founded hundreds of schools in the South.

Over the next century, the association was instrumental in creating, among others, Atlanta University, the Tuskegee Institute and Howard University, where in 1982, Amistad coproducer Debbie Allen read of the Amistad incident and determined to get the story filmed.

Allen made her pitch to Spielberg at a parent-teacher breakfast at their children's elementary school. No one but Spielberg could have gotten the movie made, she has said. With the story's compelling themes, engaging characters and vivid confrontations, Spielberg found the elements for his next serious film.

Cinque returned to his Mende country. Some researchers hold that there is no evidence of the rest of his life. Others believe that he walked into a mission compound in Sierra Leone in 1879 and died a short time later. Tappan, Leavitt and Baldwin continued their work against slavery.

John Quincy Adams died in 1848, at the age of 80, after suffering a stroke in the Capital. He has the last word.

In 1836, Adams was embroiled in opposing the annexation of Texas and the expansion of slavery into the territories. He opened the pages of his diary and looked into his heart.

"This is a cause upon which I am entering at the last stage of life, and with the certainty that I cannot advance in it far,'' he wrote. ``My career must close, leaving the cause at the threshold. To open the way for others is all that I can do. The cause is good and great."

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