United States v. The Amistad: Supreme Court's Opinion

The Amistad was a Spanish slaver that carried slaves and cargo across Cuba during the early nineteenth-century. In July 1839, while transporting roughly fifty West African slaves to a small Cuban port for auctioning, a mutiny led by the slave Joseph Cinqué resulted in a takeover of the Amistad. The slaves attempted to force the ship's navigator to sail "for the coast of Africa", but the navigator tricked them and sailed to Long Island instead, where the ship was taken into custody by the USS Washington (FindLaw). Because the international slave trade had been outlawed by the time of the events, the ensuing Supreme Court case, United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad (1841), ruled that the slaves were acting as free men during the mutiny, and ordered their freedom. The legal victory became an important symbol for the abolitionist movement. 

The court case, held in New Haven, Connecticut (an ironic placement for such a trial - 'New Haven'), throughout early 1841, heard arguments from multiple parties, including former President John Quincy Adams, who represented the slaves. Adams argued that the Spanish seamen violated an 1817 treaty between Great Britain and Spain outlawing the slave trade across the Atlantic - he subsequently charged them with assault and piracy (FindLaw). In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court agreed with the former President; because the Amistad was captured in New York waters, they found, it was subjected to United States law, under which the slaves were judged to be free. Writing the majority opinion for the court, Justice Joseph Story wrote, "the said negroes be declared to be free, and be dismissed from the custody of the court, and go without delay" (FindLaw). Justice Story's handwritten opinion is pictured here:

The writing is small and difficult to read, but more information can be found at these links:

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/amistad/supreme-court-opinion.html

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=40&page=518

Though it's difficult to navigate through the tricky and outdated legal language, the opinions are very interesting to read with Melville's Benito Cereno in mind. It rarely feels like Adams, Story, or other abolitionists, are motivated to abolish slavery for moral reasons - instead, judging from the language, they were mostly concerned with protecting the integrity of the law. Regardless, the outcome provided momentum for abolitionists across the country. 

Melville's readers would have been familiar with the United States v. The Amistad, and may have interpreted the Spanish Cereno with these events in mind. Pinpointing Cereno as a Spanish pirate not dissimilar from the pirates of the Amistad would have dramatically altered an interpretation of Benito Cereno. 

-Marcus Dovigi

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1. "Find Law | Cases and Codes." FindLaw | U.S. Supreme Court. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.

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