Amistad

Amistad: Historical Review

Amistad: Historical Review
The movie Amistad is based on a true story about slavery around the 1840s directed by Steven Spielberg (1997). It was very well described and accurate at pointing out every fact that occurred during the trial of West Africans from beginning to end. The movie was enjoyable even though some of the scenes helped me realize how corrupted theworld was back then. At first, the scene where Cinque took out the nail from the rock seemed a little unrealistic, but later it was interesting to see how the story developed. The cast did an excellent job at bringing life to the story and making the viewer feel like the actors were real people who suffered in this battle.
The story took place on July 1839, near Havana Cuba, where the Spanishship named La Amistad with fifty-three West Africans, changed its course due to an unpredicted reaction from Joseph Cinque, a Mende native. He was the leader of all the slaves on board and led them during their mutiny against the Spanish crew members. They were thus victorious but decided to keep two slave traders alive, who were Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez. The West Africans made the decision notto kill these two men because no one else knew how to navigate the ship and they wanted to go back home. This accomplishment from the Blacks was just the beginning to their long journey. Africans ordered Ruiz and Montez to follow the sun back to Africa. However, things did not go as planned; the Spaniards did not follow the instructions and headed north which caused the ship to take sixty days tofinally reach land. The Amistad was short in supplies when it reached Long Island, New York, where it was taken into custody by Lieutenant Thomas Gedney of the U.S.S. Washington with no more than forty-three survivors as stated by Jones Howard in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Modern World (2008).
The slave ship was taken to admiralty court in New London, Connecticut, where the battle for freedombegan, as slavery was legal at that time in this particular state. There, the commotion started because abolitionists wanted to publicize and convince people that slavery was wrong along with the slave trade. They decided to take the case before the courts. Abolitionists believed that the slaves should had been set free without reimbursement to the owners. The abolitionists also organized acommittee, named the “Amistad Committee,” to defend the Black and help them expose the case. They requested help from Lewis Tappan to handle the case, who later hired attorney Roger S. Baldwin to assist him. In partnership, they worked on the case; Baldwin’s goal was to declare the Africans as captives and allow him to charge Ruiz and Montez with piracy (Macmillan, 1998) But Ruiz and Montez filed a suitfor slave property that, according to them, was legally obtained in Cuba expecting to get the slaves back.
On the other hand, the Spanish government ordered the United States to return the slaves and the ship to Cuba. This practice was not uncommon, since the two nations agreed to return any vessel from one country driven to into the port of the other for any uncontrollably reason, under Pinckney’sTreaty of 1795 (Macmillan, 1998). At this point, President Martin Van Buren headed a Democratic party that mainly consisted of northerners and southerners. He knew that a case of this magnitude under his administration could not be accommodating to his future presidential reelection in 1840; as a result, he chose to please Queen Elizabeth’s demand. In contrast, Baldwin with the hope of winningthe case sought a writ of habeas corpus (1839), with the purpose of removing the “slave” status from the accused people and forcing the Spaniards to recognize the Africans as “individuals with rights” who had murdered.
At this point, the real battle began between human and property rights, because there was the opposition of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Baldwin’s writ of...