The Amistad Case and Black History in the US
Black history in the United States began in 1619, when a Dutch trading ship brought twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia. These people arrived as slaves or as indentured servants. Soon thereafter being of African decent became synonymous with being a slave. The southern colonies plantation system was built on slavery. Slaves were present in all of the 15 southern states. There were 700,000 slaves in the United States by 1790, and 4 million before the civil war. Although some worked in cities at a variety of trades, most slaves labored in the fields, often from daybreak until sunset and even longer during the harvest. The law allowed owners to impose whatever disciplinary measures they deemed necessary to ensure that slaves labored continuously. The law even allowed an owner to kill his slaves, in most circumstances, without consequence. Owners divided slave families at public auctions where human beings were bought and sold as pieces of property. Unschooled and dependent on their owners for all their basic needs, slaves had little control over their destinies (Franklin, 1967; Sowell, 1981). Some whites prospered as slave traders. Traders forcibly transported more than ten million Africans to various countries in the Ame
One such case of slave smuggling lead to the supreme court ruling in 1841 establishing that the United States would treat slaves escaping from illegal bondage as free men. The following is a summary of that case as it was presented in class. Amistad Case (1841): In February 1839, a group of Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of tribesmen from Sierra Leona, Africa. Against all treaties then in existence, the slave hunters shipped them to Havana, Cuba, which was the center of the illegal slave trade. In Havana, 53 of the Africans were purchased by two Spanish planters and placed aboard the Cuban schooner called Amistad (ironically, amistad means friendship in Spanish) for shipment to a Caribbean plantation. Passports for the group were obtained by perjured testimony. On July 1, 1839, the African tribesmen seized the ship, killing 2 crewmen and ordered the ship be sailed back to Africa. On August 24, 1834, the schooner was seized off the coast of Long Island by a United States ship. The planters were freed and the Africans were imprisoned in Hartford, Connecticut on charges of the 2 crewmen who were murdered. Most of the press advocated extraditing the Africans to Cuba to be placed on trial for murder. President Martin Van Buren who sympathized with the abolitionists in the North opposed extradition and raised money for the defense counsel. Despite claims to the slaves made by planters by the government of Spain and by the
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Approximate Word count = 980
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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