In 1839, fifty-three enslaved Africans aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad, coasting eastward from Havana toward a village port in north-central Cuba, took advantage of a summer night and a small, sleepy crew to rise in revolt. One of the young men, named Cinqué, a Mende-speaker from a region near the Windward Coast of West Africa, led the uprising by killing the ship’s cook and captain. Several crewmen met the same fate, although José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, the Cuban middlemen who had purchased the Africans in Havana, were spared to navigate the rebels back to their homeland. Instead, the clever Cubans tacked indifferently to the east by day and earnestly to the northwest by night, ending up weeks later, with the increasingly desperate mutineers dehydrated and diminished in number, off the coast of Long Island. There the U.S. Coast Guard spotted the wounded vessel and seized it and the rebels, including Cinqué and a handful of others who had rowed ashore looking for water.

In tow, La Amistadarrived in New London, Connecticut, to await salvage proceedings. The authorities placed the Africans in custody, but their plight sparked a much more complicated legal wrangle as a network of Northern abolitionists rallied to their support. They hired lawyers knowing full well that challenging in court the competing claims of the Coast Guard officers, the Spanish Crown, Ruiz and Montes, and the administration of President Martin Van Buren would gain considerable publicity for their antislavery cause. The whole