Amistad Rebellion - July 2, 1839

A rebellion took place aboard the slave ship Amistad on this day in 1839.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July two today.
In eighteen thirty nine, the enslaved people aboard the Amistad
staged a rebellion. When this happened, even though these were
enslaved people aboard the Amistade, the Transatlantic slave trade was
largely abolished. It had been outlawed in the United States

(00:24):
and in Great Britain in eighteen oh seven, and then
several other European nations had also banned it in the
eighteen teens, but slavery itself was still legal in a
lot of the places that had been importing enslaved labor
from Africa and then the slave traders. A lot of
them were still working even though this was illegal, and
as one example, the port of Lumboco, which was controlled

(00:47):
by Pedro Blanco of Spain, was still an active slave port.
This was on the coast of what's now Sierra Leone,
and in early eighteen thirty nine, more than five hundred Africans,
maybe even closer to six hundred, were transported from the
interior of Sierra Leone and were sent to Cuba aboard
a slave ship called the Taka from the port of Lombo.

(01:10):
Coot After this ship arrived in Cuba, Jose Ruiz and
Pedro Montes purchased fifty three of the people who were aboard,
including four children, and their intent was for these people
was to send them by ship aboard the Amistade to
other plantations that they had. The treatment of these people
aboard the Amistade was just appalling. There was often not

(01:31):
enough food or water. Beatings were common. The cook tormented
them constantly, basically threatening them with the horrors that were
awaiting them once they got off the ship. Eventually, an
enslaved man named singby p A who is sometimes called
by the Spanish name Sink a letter rebellion. Before dawn
on July two, while they were still at sea, he

(01:54):
got the other people who were enslaved with him to
figure out how to release themselves from their shackles and
the ship's hold. This was kind of a feat. They
were in the ship's hold. There wasn't a below decks. Really,
there was just the upper deck and the cargo hold.
They were shackled down there. They represented at least nine
different ethnic groups from parts of what's now Sierra Leone.

(02:17):
They didn't necessarily all even speak the same language. Very well.
But they all worked together in spite of all this
to free themselves from their shackles, then to kill the
cook that had been tormenting them in his sleep, and
also to take on the captain of the ship. The
crew were not able to grab their firearms because things

(02:37):
happened so quickly. The enslaved people armed themselves with cane
knives that they had found in the hold with them,
and they were basically able to take over the whole ship.
A couple of the crew abandoned ship and and made
their way away in a lifeboat, and they captured Ruiz
and Montez, the two men that had, at least in theory,

(02:59):
purchased them. And then they ran into a problem. They
had taken over the ship. They had succeeded in their rebellion.
But these are people who were mostly from the interior
of the country. They didn't live on the coast, they
didn't have experience with boats and ships. They didn't really
know how to navigate in this part of the world.
They were on the opposite side of the planet from

(03:21):
where they had been living, so they had to still
rely on the two men who had purchased them. What
they told them to do was to take them back
to Africa, so Ruiz and Montez at first acted like
they were doing this, but then they turned the ship
to the north too instead, hopefully in their minds, find

(03:44):
somebody who would help them. What wound up happening instead
was that they made their way all the way up
the coast of North America, all the way to New
York to the southern tip of Long Island, and that
is where a US Navy vessel spotted them on August.
Weeks after that mutiny happened. At this point, some of
the Africans aboard had died of exposure or thirst. The

(04:05):
conditions were still not good. They did not have a
lot of resources, but Ruiz and Montes were allowed to go,
and the surviving Africans were imprisoned and charged with murder
in the deaths of the captain and the cook. Those
murder charges were later dropped, but they still had to
face trial in Hartford, Connecticut, because there were multiple different

(04:25):
entities all claiming to own these people. Eventually, a court
in Hartford found in favor of the Africans, saying that
they number one had the right to defend themselves and
number two that they had been brought to Cuba illegally
so that they were free, but the administration of President
Martin van Buren appealed that decision. It wound up being

(04:46):
former President John Quincy Adams who defended the Africans before
the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld that lower courts
ruling This legal process had gone on for more than
a year and a half, and that was on top
of the weeks and weeks they had spent at sea
both before and after the mutiny. But this legal victory
didn't have any provisions for them to get home. There

(05:09):
was no repatriation built into it, and the Navy was
given salvage rights for the Honestade, so they couldn't even
just sell the ship to pay for their way back.
Abolitionists wound up raising money for them to get back home,
and the thirty five surviving Africans boarded a ship bound
back for Africa on November forty one. They had several

(05:31):
missionaries along with them. These missionaries, once they all arrived
in Africa, began doing their missionary work, and their letters
back to the United States for years included little updates
about people who had been aboard the Honestade. They were
referred to as one of the Amistads in these letters.
According to the descendants of sing Bay p A, he
returned home to find that his wife and two of

(05:53):
his daughters were missing. It's possible that they were victims
of the same slave trade that he had been. After
a fruitless search for them, according to his family records,
he returned home to live near a surviving son and
later on his other descendants. Thanks to Eve's Jeff Cote
for her research work on today's episode, and Tari Harrison,

(06:14):
who edits and produces all of these episodes, you can
learn more about the Anestad rebellion in the Stuff You
Missed in History Class episode from April sleven, and you
can subscribe to This Day in History Class on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, and whatever else you get your podcasts. Tune
in tomorrow for an ancient discovery, at least one that
we think is ancient.