On a dark night on July 2, 1839, off the coast of the Spanish colony of Cuba, a black man named Sengbe used a loose nail to open the lock on his chains aboard the Spanish ship, La Amistad.
He and 52 other illegally captured Africans then took over the ship, killing the captain and cook, but not telling two key crew members who they believed might be heading home to Sierra Leone.
The two Spanish crew members cleverly turned the ship north. For two months, the ship roamed the American coast until it was finally discovered off Long Island, New York, where the Africans were taken into custody and charged with murder and piracy, sparking a legal battle that captivated the American nation. The Southern states of the United States saw the rebellion of these slaves as a dangerous threat, while the Northern states rallied to the defense of the captives.
Their defense argued that the Africans were not slaves but free people who had been kidnapped and had the right to defend themselves and fight for their freedom.
The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in March 1841. Stating that they had been illegally trafficked, the justices ruled that the 35 surviving Africans were freedmen. They were eventually returned to their homeland in Sierra Leone in 1842, marking the Amistad (Spanish ship) case as a historic victory in the long war against slavery.
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