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00:09There's no thrill like Discovery.
00:32The Discovery Channel.
00:37Explore your world.
00:42The Discovery Channel.
00:52Squeezed into the cramped hold of a slave ship, a young African captive named Singbe Pie would win a once
01:00-in-a-lifetime chance of returning to his homeland.
01:04What Singbe was about to attempt had never been accomplished in the brutal history of transatlantic slave ships.
01:11Yet the actions he set in motion would capture the attention of an entire nation.
01:37The transatlantic slave trade was one of the most profitable businesses in the world.
01:43For nearly 400 years, almost everyone involved made a fortune from the misery of people whose names remain forever lost
01:52in time.
01:54Slave ships made roughly 39,000 voyages from Africa to the Americas.
01:59They were instrumental to the birth of commerce and wealth in the New World.
02:04Few cared about the millions of African men, women, and children shipped across the Atlantic to fuel that commerce with
02:12their labor in the largest forced migration in human history.
02:16$10 billion.
02:43$100 billion.
02:54Singbei was kidnapped from his home only three months earlier.
03:02He could still see the death march.
03:07And he could never forget being swallowed by a huge ship that hauled him for weeks across so very much
03:14water.
03:17When the ship finally reached land, Singbei was purchased by a white man.
03:27Now he was on another ship, bound for the white man's plantation.
03:32And frantic rumors were being whispered in the hold that once they arrived, the white man would kill and eat
03:37the Africans.
03:46For Singbei, a desperate chain of events began with the discovery of a single broken nail.
03:58He used the nail to break free of his shackles.
04:14Singbei would attempt to win back his freedom by using the only option left open with.
04:20Violent Rebellion
04:48Violent Rebellion
04:52Many of them were recorded in Lloyd's List.
04:55The London Shipping Report.
04:57October the 3rd, 1769.
04:59The favorite, Captain Dawson, is safe from Africa after being cut off by the natives who took away 96 slaves
05:05and all remaining part of the cargo.
05:07The Nancy, Captain Williams, with 132 slaves on board.
05:11The slaves fell upon the crew and wounded several of them.
05:15The crew fired upon the slaves, killed six and wounded several more.
05:19The true blue, Captain Hatton, is cut off by the slaves rising in Africa.
05:23Being very mutinous, the slaves afterwards, it is thought, ran her on shore.
05:33But throughout the entire history of the slave trade, Africans successfully mutinied in America and returned to Africa in freedom,
05:42exactly once.
05:50June, 1839, aboard the Cuban merchant schooner called Amistad.
05:55The Spanish word for friendship.
05:59The leader of the revolt was Singbe Pie.
06:04Singbe was born in the country of Mendi, now part of present day Sierra Leone.
06:11He had been kidnapped from his home and sold to a Portuguese slave trader in West Africa.
06:16He was then sent to Cuba aboard an illegal Portuguese slave ship.
06:22Cuba was not supposed to have slaves at all.
06:26But because the governor of Cuba was avaricious, he allowed slaves in the city if he was given a little
06:36money for each slave that was brought in.
06:40Warren Marr is a writer and historian.
06:43He is also deeply involved in the construction of a full-size replica of the Amistad, being built at Mystic
06:49Seaport, Connecticut.
06:53Singbe's real name was Singbe Pie.
06:56But his captors couldn't say it, and so they changed it to Cinque.
07:03It was by the name Joseph Cinque that Singbe Pie would become known to history.
07:11Don Jose Ruiz, a young Spanish dandy, bought Cinque and 48 other Africans at the Havana slave market.
07:23Ruiz's older friend, Don Pedro Montes, purchased several children.
07:27Together they commissioned the schooner Amistad to ship the 53 Africans to their plantations near the Cuban town of Puerto
07:35Principe.
07:39Jeffrey Bolster is an assistant professor of history at the University of New Hampshire.
07:43He is also an author and a licensed tall ship master.
07:48The Amistad was a little coasting schooner working the north coast of Cuba.
07:53She was not as well equipped, as well armed, or as heavily manned as a slave ship would have been
08:02in the deep sea trade.
08:03That's in part how the Mende captives there were able to seize the ship.
08:11In addition to Ruiz and Montes, there was a crew of five, consisting of the ship's captain, Ramon Farrar, two
08:19sailors, and the captain's two slaves, who worked as cook and cabin steward.
08:25The Cuban sailors let down their guard. They were a little complacent, a little cavalier.
08:33Cinque found a piece of metal with which he was able to undo his shackles.
08:40They were able to do it.
08:45They were able to do it.
08:53Someone had made a colossal mistake, which was to leave a bunch of cane knives or machetes in the hold
08:58of the ship, where they put the slaves themselves.
09:07The ship's cook had joked with the captives that the Cubans were planning to eat them, and they took the
09:15joke as a deadly threat.
09:21One by one, they followed Cinque out of the hold and onto the main deck.
09:30The ship's small crew had no idea that the Africans were armed and ready to attack, until it was too
09:39late.
09:42When the Africans confronted the Cubans, they hesitated, unsure what to do.
09:56The Amistad's captain, Ramon Farrar, boarded his cabin steward, Antonio, to throw bread at the Africans, hoping the food would
10:07appease them.
10:24Then Farrar made an arrogant, fatal decision.
10:30The shot killed one African and set off a battle.
10:49In the struggle, the Africans killed Captain Farrar and the mulatto cook.
10:58Ruiz and Montes were captured by the Africans.
11:03The cabin steward translated the Africans' ultimatum.
11:07Montes must take the ship back to Africa if he expected to live.
11:15The Amistad mutiny would have repercussions that would eventually extend as far as the United States Supreme Court
11:22and pit two American presidents against each other.
11:28Sinque must have been an amazing inspiration, a marvelous hero, to have escaped once from enslavement via a mutiny,
11:37using a boat that he didn't know anything about, on an ocean he didn't know very much about,
11:43and then that he could escape, essentially, from the American legal process that had enslaved African Americans.
11:51That's a miracle.
11:53There is no doubt that the outcome would have been different had Sinque and his people attempted a revolt aboard
11:59a fully manned transatlantic slave ship.
12:02Very few captives ever dared mutiny once a ship left Africa on the infamous voyage of violence and death,
12:09known in the trade as the Middle Passage.
12:20Sinque and his people were captives on an undermanned coastal merchant schooner.
12:25The odds that they could have overpowered the well-armed crew of a transatlantic slaver were virtually non-existent.
12:31On those ships, captives and crew never let their guard down.
12:45These ships were armed camps.
12:49These ships had massive security problems because Africans did not go willingly into their slavery.
12:56The Africans' desperation and hopelessness meant that security problems persisted throughout the Middle Passage,
13:02the major leg of the Great Triangular Slave Route.
13:09It was the route followed by the slave ships across the Atlantic to the Americas.
13:14Most of the ships transported Africans from the coast of West Africa to Brazil or the West Indies.
13:20Only about 5% of their human cargo came to the United States.
13:27A typical slave ship could make the Middle Passage in 5 to 12 weeks.
13:36For the traders, the formula was simple.
13:39Cramming as many Africans as possible into a ship and then delivering them to market alive equal the greatest possible
13:46profit.
13:50But that was also the traders' dilemma.
13:52How could they best bring the Africans across alive?
13:57The mortality was high.
13:5915-20% was not uncommon for people to die on these passages.
14:04Some entrepreneurs thought the more we cram aboard the ship, the more we're going to have to walk off on
14:10the other end.
14:10They were the tight packers.
14:13Others said, if you treat these people a little bit better, they're more likely to live.
14:17We're going to cram fewer into a ship.
14:19They were the loose packers.
14:23Slaves shackled together below decks often had no more than about 24 inches with very little room
14:29and often lying in their own filth because of the way that they were shackled together.
14:38The British slave ship Brooks broke all known records in tight packing by jamming 609 Africans in a ship meant
14:46to hold 300.
14:48Some scholars now believe that whether a ship was loosely or tightly packed made no appreciable difference in the Africans'
14:55mortality rates.
15:01The ship we're aboard was built in 1841.
15:04A lot of the construction details are similar to the slave ships.
15:08Clearly, the overhead is low.
15:11You have to crouch to get through here.
15:12But it was even worse than that.
15:14Oftentimes, the tween decks of a ship like this was partitioned so that two tiers of slaves could be packed
15:20aboard,
15:21chained to each other, not only suffering the indignity of not being able to sit up,
15:25but their flesh rubbing against the rough sawn planks of the ship itself.
15:31The hardships suffered by the Negroes during the passage are scarcely to be conceived.
15:37Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, ship's surgeon.
15:42Falconbridge practiced on board British slave ships.
15:45In 1788, he wrote about becoming physically ill after spending only 15 minutes in a slaver's hold.
15:56When I had to enter the slave deck, I was forced to crawl over the slaves.
16:06The Negroes are frequently packed so close together that they have not so much room as a man in his
16:11coffin.
16:12I was so overcome with the heats and dense and foul air that I nearly fainted.
16:24It was only with assistance I could get on deck.
16:31Hundreds of Africans were forced to use three or four large buckets as toilets.
16:37Our wretched situation was aggravated by the filth of the necessary tubs into which the children often fell and almost
16:46suffocated.
16:48O lauda equiano.
16:49The intense body heat created a thick, wet steam that hung in the air like fog.
16:57The stench often preceded them into port.
17:01Despite the despicable conditions, these floating bits of hell were called by the gentlest of names.
17:07The names that captains and merchants gave to their slave ships make us understand a little bit about their perception
17:16of slavery.
17:18Most of us would be agath at the thought of naming a slave ship for our mother or our wife,
17:23the Betsy, the Polly, the charming Sally.
17:26Most of us would think it was a cruel trick indeed to name a slave ship the Olive Branch, or
17:32the Dove, or the Liberty.
17:36The most ironic of all was an American slaver simply called Hope.
17:48When weather permitted, the Africans were brought onto the main deck where they were forced to dance.
17:55Dancing, it was thought, would help keep them alive.
17:59Those who didn't dance heartily enough were flawed.
18:09To escape the brutal condition, some Africans chose starvation.
18:14The slavers simply used a device called the speculum oris to change their minds.
18:29Former slave Alaudah Equiano described how Africans desperate to escape the ships took their own lives.
18:38Two of my weary countrymen, preferring death to a life of misery, jumped into the sea.
18:43There was such a noise and confusion among the people of the ship to get the boat out and go
18:48after the slaves.
18:50However, the wretches drowned.
18:52Olaudah Equiano.
18:57Others, including African women, quite simply wished for death.
19:04There were many captains that allowed their sailors free reign with girls and women aboard these ships.
19:10The ships were known in the trade as a bachelor's delight.
19:13They were known in the trade as lustful, wanton places.
19:18The sailors are allowed to have intercourse with the black women.
19:22And sometimes are guilty of such excesses as disgrace human nature.
19:28Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, ship surgeon.
19:31The great irony is that the Europeans accused the Africans of being savages.
19:37They accused them of being less than human.
19:39But of course the treatment that the Africans were subject to by lustful sailors, by sadistic masters, belied that.
19:48No one will ever know how many Africans died during the savagery that was the Middle Passage.
20:01But scholars now suggest that despite high mortality rates aboard the ships,
20:06many more captives were likely killed before ever leaving the continent of Africa.
20:21Aboard the Amistad, Singbepied freed himself and others by fighting the men who tried to enslave him.
20:30Another African, Olaudah Equiano, won his freedom by joining his enslavers.
20:37The slave Equiano became so successful as a slave trader,
20:41he was allowed to keep a small share of the profits for himself.
20:46Within a few years, he saved enough money to buy his own freedom.
20:52He later wrote a successful autobiography exposing the inhumanity of the slave trade.
20:58The story began with Equiano's own kidnapping at the age of 10,
21:02from his home in what is present-day Nigeria.
21:06One day when all our people were gone out to their work,
21:09only I and my dear sister were left to mine the house.
21:14Two men and a woman got over our walls and seized us both,
21:18without giving us time to cry out or make resistance.
21:30Kidnappings like Equiano's were common long before the Europeans arrived in Africa.
21:36People became slaves mostly through violence, through war, through kidnapping,
21:42through very specific raids that were designed to enslave people.
21:49These were very different groups of people in their own eyes who spoke different languages,
21:54who had different customs, and who didn't see each other as brothers,
21:57who saw each other as sometimes rivals for the same territory,
22:04rivals for hegemony, rivals for power.
22:09The people that were being enslaved were enemies.
22:13They were criminals.
22:15They were all the kinds of people that were being defined in one way or another as outsiders,
22:20as people that you could subject to the ultimate form of degradation and slavery.
22:28When in 1517 the Europeans first came trading for slaves,
22:32the Africans had a ready-made product.
22:36Europeans fitted themselves in to existing trading patterns along the African coast,
22:42and then gradually, as the slave trade became more important,
22:46came to dominate the slave trade as a whole.
22:53The men who were most wanted as slaves were, of course, men who were in the prime of life,
22:58teenagers, men in their 20s.
23:00They were strong and they were angry.
23:03Some African kings distrusted the Europeans.
23:06They refused to take part in the slave trade.
23:10African monarchs at times did expel European slavers.
23:14A few African states actually banned the slave trade,
23:18particularly the sale of slaves to Europeans.
23:22The Kingdom of Benin, for example, at one period,
23:25banned the export of any male slaves.
23:28And since male slaves were the principal slaves that were desired by Europeans
23:31for working on plantations, this effectively killed the trade from the Kingdom of Benin.
23:36It was intended to, and it did do that.
23:40Other African rulers and merchants fought vicious battles against the Europeans
23:44for control of the trade.
23:51But most monarchs echoed the opinion of one African ruler who declared to a European slaver.
23:57We want three things, powder, ball and brandy.
24:03And we have three things to sell, men, women and children.
24:10Traders exchanged a variety of goods for human merchandise.
24:15But cowries, small seashells indigenous to the Indian Ocean near the Maldive Islands,
24:21were the currency of choice.
24:24Muslim merchants brought the shells to West Africa to exchange for African goods and slaves.
24:34As currency, cowrie shells were traded by the bag.
24:38A trader could pay as much as 40,000 shells for a single African.
24:44Hauling shiploads of seemingly worthless shells in order to buy slaves
24:48was a large inconvenience for European traders.
24:51But they had little choice in the matter.
24:54European money meant absolutely nothing to African slavers.
25:00When you look at currency, even in today's society,
25:04it's only paper with print on it.
25:06It's green paper.
25:07Anyone coming into our society today would say,
25:11we are able to achieve and acquire huge amounts of materials with green paper.
25:18As profits increased for both Africans and Europeans,
25:22slavers increased their raids on villages.
25:27The west coast of Africa, from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south,
25:31was so thoroughly covered by slave traders that entire populations moved inland.
25:37But the slavers only followed them deeper into the African interior.
25:42The slaves came from all different parts of West Africa.
25:46Early on in the slave trade, they came from relatively near the coast.
25:50Later, they would be marched sometimes for two or three months from inland.
25:56No one was safe from the slave traders.
26:01Captured Africans were marched in long lines called kaffels.
26:06Bound and tied together, they were moved as quickly as possible to the sea.
26:12Many never made it to the coast.
26:15They died from exhaustion.
26:18Or were simply executed if they couldn't keep up.
26:26Those who survived were sold to African or European middlemen known as factors.
26:32A European factor would work on the coast.
26:36He would be the middleman, the exchange merchant,
26:40who would arrange to buy the slaves in exchange for other goods.
26:45Waiting for the ships, factors would accumulate hundreds in their compounds.
26:50The compounds where slaves were kept were called factories.
26:54But they weren't manufacturing anything.
26:56They were more like holding pens.
26:58One African monarch controlled a compound with factories for four separate nationalities.
27:05France, England, the Netherlands, and Portugal.
27:12In 1481, in a fishing village off the coast of Guinea, the Portuguese built Elmina, a massive fort.
27:21Intended to guard gold and ivory shipments from West Africa to Lisbon.
27:26But then in 1517, Spain commissioned Portugal to deliver the first African slaves to the Spanish New World in the
27:35Americas.
27:42In 1519, Spain became more valuable than gold.
27:48In 1519, Spain was a good carton of slaves in the US.
27:59And the slaves of the Spanish The American
28:00In 1519, Spain remained highly reliable than the slaves.
28:05and its massive bullion cells were converted into pens and dungeons for holding captured Africans.
28:18Yet in spite of possessing a fort as imposing as Elmina,
28:22Portugal had very little influence over the African elites,
28:26the powerful kings and rich merchants who controlled the slave trade.
28:31Europeans operated in Africa at the sufferance of African elites.
28:35European power really didn't reach any farther than a European gunshot.
28:40So that had African elites not been interested in selling slaves,
28:45had African elites not been interested in allowing Europeans to set up slaving operations on the coast,
28:51they never could have done it.
28:53When the ships finally did anchor, the captured Africans were quickly loaded aboard.
29:01At times, Europeans would risk their lives and livelihood to kidnap Africans without permission.
29:08When a ship didn't fill its hold with enough bodies and it really had to sail quickly,
29:15it was common for the ship captain to send a small boat upriver somewhere
29:21and just try to kidnap a few people to make up the hold, if they could get away with it.
29:26This was the constant battle that went back and forth between local authorities and European ship merchants.
29:32Because the ship merchants wanted to come back to the same place year after year and do business.
29:38And if you did that, you obviously couldn't be involved in kidnapping and illegal actions.
29:42But I have to emphasize that the overwhelming majority of slaves were still supplied through African middlemen
29:49from wars that had nothing to do directly with European involvement at all.
29:55In the beginning, the transatlantic slave trade was the exclusive monopoly of Portuguese slavers
30:01who dominated the west coast of Africa.
30:04But during the 1600s, the Portuguese monopoly came crashing down.
30:09The ubiquitous wars that raged through Europe during most of the 17th century were fought not only for territory and
30:17power.
30:17The battles determined who would dominate the new world and control the African trade.
30:24Those wars overwhelmingly resulted in British domination
30:28because it was England's mastery of the sea, which was particularly clear in the 18th century,
30:34that enabled Britain really to dominate the slave trade as a whole.
30:39Britain turned the slave trade into an industry.
30:43Its ships alone carried an estimated 3 million Africans to the Americas.
30:51But there was still plenty of opportunity for France, the Netherlands,
30:56and virtually every other major country in Europe to take part in the trade.
31:04By the 1700s, money from the trade helped build the cities of Liverpool and Bristol and England,
31:11and the French city of Nantes, all of them participating in a great triangle of profit.
31:16The triangular trade is a phrase that's used to emphasize the link between Africa, the tropical Americas, and Europe, hence
31:26the triangle.
31:28Goods, commodities are shipped from Europe to West Africa to buy slaves.
31:34Slaves are taken to the Americas to grow sugar.
31:38Those crops are then shipped to Europe, where they're manufactured for re-export to Africa to buy slaves.
31:47That's the idea of a triangular trade.
31:50Rivals for power in the slave trade gave way to rivalries in business.
31:55The demand for ever-increasing profits unleashed a new cruelty.
32:01Men who possessed the unquestioned authority over the life and death of every person aboard a slave ship.
32:15The responsibility of transporting hundreds of Africans to slavery in the Americas rested solely on the shoulders of the slave
32:23ship captains.
32:25They held the ultimate power to do whatever was required to bring their human cargo to market at a profit.
32:33A successful slaver captain was highly respected by his employers and greatly feared by his crew and his slaves.
32:41The captain's orders were taken as long and his methods of punishment were almost always brutal.
32:51Slavery was an accepted fact at the time.
32:54There was a numbness in the heart of many people involved in the trade.
32:58There was not the assumption that slavery was either a sin, or that it was morally wrong, or that it
33:06was somehow reprehensible.
33:08This came later.
33:11Luke Collingwood may have been the worst slave ship captain of them all.
33:16Collingwood was master of the British slaver Zong.
33:20In 1781, the Zong was nearing the island of Jamaica, but was almost out of drinking water.
33:27Fearing most of his cargo would die before the Zong reached Kingston,
33:31Collingwood decided to collect the insurance money on his captives.
33:35He gave the order to jettison 132 sick or weak Africans.
34:01News of the Zong atrocity reached England through the efforts of Olaudah Equiano.
34:07Equiano was living in England and had heard of the Zong.
34:09He had heard of the massacre from old contacts in the trade.
34:13He exposed the incident to British abolitionists in hopes of finding justice.
34:18And his actions helped jumpstart England's anti-slavery movement.
34:25The owners of the Zong were brought to trial for insurance fraud.
34:28No objection!
34:31There was no evidence that Negroes were thrown overboard after the rains.
34:35That evidence is here, in the transcript of proceedings.
34:39For the first time, the British people learned about the real horrors of slave ships.
34:44They were shocked and outraged.
34:48One of the men who spoke out loudest in condemning the Zong atrocity was British clergyman John Newton.
34:55Newton had first-hand knowledge about the brutality on slave ships.
34:59Because he had once been a slave ship captain himself.
35:03John Newton has come down to us as a man who, late in life, found his conscience,
35:09and began to look back on his former life as a slave ship captain with a degree of contrition,
35:15a degree of regret, a degree of self-loathing.
35:21Newton became a prominent church minister whose fiery sermons lashed out against his former trade.
35:30Custom, example, and interest had blinded my eyes.
35:34I should have been overwhelmed with distress and terror if I had known, or even suspected, that I was acting
35:42wrongly.
35:45In 1779, Newton authored the hymn, Amazing Grace.
35:50Perhaps he wrote it as his plea for forgiveness from the people who suffered and died aboard his slave ships.
35:56I was blind, but now I see.
36:06With pressure building from John Newton and other abolitionists,
36:10both Great Britain and the United States banned the slave trade on January 1st, 1808.
36:18Passage of the ban brought a standing ovation in the British Parliament for William Wilberforce,
36:24who had labored for over 20 years to abolish the slave trade.
36:30Although importing slaves had been declared illegal in the United States,
36:34the institution of slavery was alive and well.
36:38In 1820, Spain also banned the African slave trade in Cuba and her other American possessions.
36:56But by the time Cinque took control of the Amistad,
37:01nearly 20 years later,
37:04Renegade captains were still bringing illegal shipments of Africans to the Americas as slaves.
37:09Yet Cinque had accomplished the impossible.
37:12He commandeered the slaver's own captain.
37:14He was ordered to steer the ship into the sun in order to get back to Africa.
37:30By day, Montes did steer into the sun.
37:35But at night, there was no light to guide the Africans.
37:40Cinque could not know that at night,
37:42Don Pedro Montes was secretly changing the course of the Amistad away from Africa
37:48and north toward the United States.
38:08For two months, the Amistad wandered on the waters just off the coast of the United States.
38:14For two months, the Amistad wandered on the waters just off the coast of the United States.
38:21Several Africans had died from illness or dehydration.
38:34Instead of sailing for Africa, the Amistad was slowly being pulled northward by the powerful currents of the Gulf Stream.
38:47In the summer of 1839, newspapers along the eastern seaboard of the United States reported wild stories of a mystery
38:56schooner prowling the coast manned by roving black pirates.
39:04But the Africans aboard the Amistad, who unknowingly caused the panic, were having worries of their own.
39:11Cinque desperately needed to find food and water.
39:17He anchored the Amistad off Culloden Point at the northeast tip of Long Island, New York.
39:27The United States surveying brig, Washington, came upon the Amistad and seized it as a pirate ship.
39:35The Africans and the Amistad were taken into custody, towed across Long Island Sound to New London first and then
39:46to New Haven,
39:47where formal charges were launched against them in the courts of Connecticut.
39:53Spain demanded that President Martin Van Buren return the Africans to Cuba.
39:58Van Buren agreed to the Spanish demand secretly.
40:03But then the media of the day got hold of the story.
40:07The mutiny was sensationally depicted as a huge battle royal between Africans and Spaniards.
40:17The Africans became celebrities.
40:20Cinque himself was the subject of a heroic painting that portrayed him as a godlike African prince.
40:28Northern abolitionists came together to champion the Africans.
40:31It was an opportunity to draw public attention to their radical views against slavery.
40:38The Amistad affair did mobilize people.
40:42It did provide a cause which could bring the abolitionists in the United States in particular together.
40:49So therefore it was a focal point at a very crucial time in the development of the abolitionist movement.
40:57Noted abolitionist Lewis Tappan put out a call for public support to provide a defense fund for Cinque and his
41:04people.
41:05One response was typical of the sympathy the public had for the Africans.
41:12September 11th, 1839.
41:15Sirs, a friend of human rights but no abolitionist desires your acceptance of the enclosed five dollars for the benefit
41:23of Joseph Cinque and his African comrades who nobly liberated themselves from illegal and involuntary bondage.
41:31Roger Sherman Baldwin, a respected Connecticut attorney agreed to represent the Africans in court.
41:38But to President Martin Van Buren, the Amistad Africans were becoming a political thorn that had to be removed.
41:46He just simply wanted to get rid of them, send them back to Cuba, turn them over to the Spanish,
41:52anything in order to get them out of the United States.
41:56The Africans came to trial in January 1840 at the U.S. District Court in Hartford, Connecticut.
42:09There was no question that there had been a mutiny aboard the Amistad.
42:15But were the Africans now property to be returned to their owners?
42:19Or were they human beings with the right to be free?
42:24Baldwin argued that since Spain had outlawed the slave trade to Cuba 19 years earlier, the Amistad Africans were never
42:32legally slaves at all.
42:35During the trial, President Van Buren secretly ordered a U.S. ship, the Grampus, to Connecticut.
42:40If the court ruled against the Africans, the Grampus was to return them immediately to Cuba before an appeal could
42:48be filed.
42:49When the Grampus' mission was discovered, reports surfaced of a second vessel that followed the Grampus.
42:55This shadow ship, supposedly leased by the abolitionists, would spirit the Africans to Canada if the verdict went against them.
43:02The verdict came on January 13, 1840.
43:06Judge Andrew Judson's decision shocked everyone.
43:11Judson ruled that Sinque and his people were free Negroes of Africa, who had been falsely sold as slaves.
43:18He ordered the government to transport them back to their original homelands.
43:23But President Van Buren appealed the verdict.
43:32The Amistad Affair was headed for the Supreme Court of the United States.
43:42The Supreme Court of 1841 met here, in this tiny courtroom located in the basement of the U.S. Capitol
43:49Building.
43:50The court was composed mostly of justices who were slaveholders or Southern sympathizers.
44:01With the Van Buren administration determined to return the Amistad Africans to Cuba, Sinque and his people didn't need an
44:08attorney.
44:09They needed a miracle worker.
44:13They found him in the person of former President John Quincy Adams.
44:18John Quincy Adams was 73 years old.
44:22He was ailing and he had not tried a case in the Supreme Court in over 30 years.
44:28He was reluctant to go to Washington and attempt to handle a case in the court.
44:37One of the children from the Amistad, a 10-year-old boy named Kay Lee, learned enough English to write
44:43a letter to Adams and plead for help.
44:46Kay Lee's letter was leaked to the press.
44:51Dear friend, Mr. Adams, I want to write a letter to you because you love many people and you talk
44:58to the Grand Court.
44:59Many people no want to go back to Havana. All we want is make us free. Kay Lee.
45:06Adams could not refuse and agree to represent the Africans, but privately he was deeply worried, as he wrote in
45:13his journal.
45:15Oh, how shall I do justice to this case and to these men?
45:21The Supreme Court in 1841 convened in the small basement chamber that was so cramped,
45:27the justices changed into their robes outside in the hall.
45:32Before a packed courtroom, Attorney General Henry Gilpin presented the federal government's position,
45:38that the Africans were legal property that should be returned to Cuba.
45:45Adams countered with arguments for the unconditional release of Cinque and his people.
45:51This court is a court of justice.
45:55Justice is the constant and perpetual will to secure to everyone his own rights.
46:02These Negroes were free and had a right to assert their liberty.
46:06By a vote of seven to one, the Supreme Court upheld Judson's lower court decision.
46:13Justice Joseph Story spoke for the majority.
46:16It is the ultimate right of all human beings in extreme cases to resist oppression
46:22and to apply force against ruinous injustice.
46:26John Quincy Adams scribbled a quick triumphant letter to fellow defense counsel, Roger Baldwin.
46:349 March 1841, noon.
46:39Dear sir, the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of the Amistad has this moment been delivered by
46:45Judge Story.
46:47The captives are free.
46:50Perhaps for the first time in history, U.S. courts recognized Africans not as property, but as free human beings.
46:58The fact that an African had managed to escape from being enslaved by mutinying on a slave ship, by managing
47:07to arrive in a relatively hostile environment,
47:11and to be vindicated by the United States legal system, that was a miracle.
47:20Although the Supreme Court had freed the Africans, it awarded no money to send them home.
47:26What shall be done with the late captives of the Amistad now that by the Supreme Tribunal of the land
47:32they have been declared free?
47:35John Quincy Adams.
47:39The abolitionists moved Cinque and his people to Farmington, Connecticut, a strong abolitionist town and a major station in the
47:47Underground Railroad.
47:49They would live there until money could be raised for the return to Africa.
47:59It was very evident the Africans themselves were impatient to return.
48:04But the Friends of the Amistad had no money.
48:12Abolitionists took the Africans on fundraising tours.
48:15They sang Sunday hymns in New England churches.
48:21Cinque astonished one congregation when he ascended to this pulpit in a Connecticut church and read verses from the Bible
48:29in English.
48:30And the Lord spoke unto Moses,
48:33Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him,
48:38This saith the Lord,
48:40Let my people go.
48:44But months of fundraising and delays had a tragic consequence.
48:49One of the Africans, Fune, had reached the end of his patience.
48:54In August 1841, Fune walked into a canal lake in Farmington and disappeared into the waters.
49:12Fune may have drowned himself because he believed that walking into a body of water was a way of transiting
49:19to the next phase of life.
49:22It was perhaps looked at as suicide, but that depends upon your perspective.
49:26From his perspective, he wasn't ending it. He was beginning a new phase.
49:30And the theory was that the issue is to have your soul go back to Africa.
49:40Like many Africans who were displaced by the slave ships, Fune may have drowned himself because he had decided that
49:47it was time to go home.
49:53Friends of the Amistad were moved immensely by Fune's death.
49:59That incident pressed them to raise money to get the other Africans home.
50:09Eventually, they did raise enough money to charter the British ship to gentlemen and take the Africans back to Sierra
50:17Leone.
50:22In January 1842, almost two years after the mutiny, Sinque finally brought 34 survivors of the original 53 Amistad Africans
50:34home to what is now Sierra Leone in Western Africa.
50:39Despite the Africans' victory, Renegade ships continued to illegally import African slaves for more than 40 years.
50:48It wasn't until 1888, when Brazil outlawed the trade, that the last major slave market in the New World collapsed.
50:58The reign of the slave ships ended, leaving the ghosts of 350 years of kidnappings, of packed and hellish slave
51:07holes, of disease, death and violent struggles for freedom, twisting slowly in its wake.
51:35The reign of the slave ships ended, leaving the
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