The Battle for Individual Freedom and Autonomy in Amistad

On August 26, 1839, US Navy brig Washington discovered a schooner at Long Island, New York. Unlike conventional merchant ships that carried cargos, this Spanish vessel named La Amistad was severely damaged and came ashore with two Spaniards under the control of forty-four Africans. The investigation revealed La Amistad came from Cuba and the Africans were mutineers that killed the captain and chef en route and took over the vessel. Imprisoned in Connecticut, these mysterious Africans became the catalyst that intensified the national debate over the legitimacy of chattel slavery. Although the US had abolished the importation of slaves through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, it hesitated to grant the complete emancipation to people of African descent. Slavery’s economic contribution to the agricultural South and the embedded eugenic theory brought the “property-ness” to the Amistad prisoners, who had trouble providing their status as freemen from West Africa (Lecture 10, 5). However, despite the social hostility towards the Negro race and the blurred line between freedom and slavery in the antebellum US, the Africans on Amistad were able to win from the District Court of Connecticut to the US Supreme Court, which eventually recognized their freedom and sent them back to Sierra Leone. A close examination of film Amistad indicates that it is the combined influence of the political environment, the autonomy of law, and the individuals’ agency that shapes the trajectory for Africans on Amistad to regain freedom. While US-Spain diplomatic relations and Southerner’s leverage on President Van Buren’s reelection compelled the judicial branch to evaluate the Amistad case for multiple times, individual choices of Cinque and John Adams coincided with legal autonomy and transformed the law into a discourse that rallied popular support for eradicating the American chattel slavery institution.

Political Calculations Behind the Individual Freedom

To begin with, both international relations between the US and Spain and domestic politics under President Van Buren’s administration pressured the executive branch to stick its arm into the judicial procedure and keep pushing the Amistad case from court to court. The US and Spain established diplomatic relations in 1783 and had since become the long-term allies. As the pillar of the metropole’s economy, Spanish colonies in Latin America benefited from the labor-intensive sugar plantations that depended on slavery. Although Spain outlawed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the tentacle of slavery penetrated Cuba, one of its most significant colonies where the slave population increased “from 286,942 to 370,553” between 1830 and 1860 (Lecture 8, 10). Consequently, any attempt to deny the property-ness of Spanish slaves constituted as the violation of Spain’s sovereignty. Unsatisfied with the US involvement in the Amistad case, Queen Elizabeth II applied the coercive diplomacy to delineated the harmful consequences for US noncompliance. Her letter argued that the emancipation of Africans on Amistad would not only “deny Spain’s glory of aiding the [US] and its virtuous rebellion against the British” but also reduce the US power to protect citizens’ private wealth. (Amistad, 1997) The concern of losing the strategic partner and facing challenges to the legitimacy and efficiency of US leadership motivated the US decision makers to reconsider the adjudication of the Amistad case. This power politics at between two great countries, therefore, compelled President Van Buren to “bend to the will of the [11-year-old] pubescent Queen” and politicized the Judiciary by dismissing the juries and replacing the judge to prevent the freedom of Africans on Amistad (Amistad, 1997).

In addition to conflicts of interest with Spain, the political momentum behind US vs. the Amistad was further enhanced by both the unreconciled division between the North and South and the electoral calculation at the end of the Van Buren’s administration. The political environment in the 1940s US was characterized by the polarization between the industrialized North and the agricultural South. While the North considered chattel slavery as the necessary evil that would die out naturally, the innovation of cotton gins at the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade resulted in the soaring demands of slaves in the South, which became the firm support and defender of American chattel slavery. As the Three-Fifth Clause recognized a slave as three-fifths of a person, Southern states with substantial slave population had robust political leverage in the presidential election. To reinforce the legitimacy of slavery, Senator Calhoun representing the Southerners demonstrated the outspoken support of President Van Buren’s reelection, a quid pro quo for the president to intervene in the United States vs. the Amistad, the cause célèbre for both pro-slavery and abolitionist movements. If the president failed to execute the Africans, he would not only lose the reelection under the political adversary initiated by the South but also “take the US one long step closer to the civil war.” (Amistad, 1997) Southerner's use of carrot and stick strategy and their wealth coerced the administration to advocate the legitimacy and legality of slavery. Consequently, to assure the Southern constituencies that the Amistad case would not release the lion of slavery to tear the country into two pieces, the executive branch stepped in to push the case from the district court to the Supreme Court, where seven out of nine Justices were slave owners and would predictably deny the freedom of Africans on Amistad. The turmoil amid Spain’s threat at the international level and antebellum political calculations at the domestic level justified the blunt executive interference into judicial functions and shed lights upon the political elements behind the Amistad Africans’ struggle for freedom.

Footprint of the Autonomy of Law

Although material interests and power competitions in US international relations and domestic policies were constitutive elements of United States vs. the Amistad, political pressure alone was not sufficient to explain the trajectory that granted freedom to the forty-four Africans. In fact, it is the legal autonomy that opened an avenue for these Africans to fight back in the society that perpetuated the presumption of slavery for the Negro race. Before the trail, Africans on the Amistad had few means to prove their status as freemen from Sierra Leone. Had the politics been the only significant factor that overshadowed the law and constitution, these Africans would have been categorized as fugitive slaves from Cuba who maliciously murder their master and been executed even without a trail. However, as abolitionist Tappin pointed out, the US law was not the political vessel that used “vagaries of legal minutia” and sophisticated technicalities to advance the partisan narrative (Amistad, 1997). Rather, the law was the defender of and the “battlefield of righteousness” of morality (Amistad, 1997).

An example to illustrate the power of legal autonomy that prioritized the internal anti-oppression logic over the outside forces was the second trail of Amistad in the US Circuit Court. The executive office replaced the previous judge with Judge Coglin, a young Catholic concerned about his religious identity and longed for a proper career path, with the hope that his political identity led the court to strike down freedom for Africans. After hearing Cinque’s testimony his call for freedom, Judge Coglin went to the Church, where he contemplated his consciousness as a human and his legal duty as a judge. The persistent struggle against the tyranny and hope for justice in the Bible encouraged him to “deny the power of the government’s position” and recognize the true identity of Africans as freemen (Amistad, 1997). Judge Coglin’s psychological procedures proved that politics was not the only determinative factor. Instead, the autonomy of law enabled the dissatisfied groups to challenge the contentious institution of slavery. Law became a tool for the abolitionists, slaves, and free people of color to challenge the original constitutional settlement and to modify the racist narrative. Rallying the popular support against American chattel, the US law and constitution contributed the geopolitical conflict between the North and South and eventually brought the Civil War, which changed the life of numerous African Americans and shaped their collective memories of freedom.

Individual Agency to Resist the Structural Exploitation of Slavery

It would be unfair to attribute all credits of Amistad Africans’ freedom to the political power-play and legal acumen without mentioning the great hearts and minds behind them. Specifically, decisions and efforts of both Cinque and John Adams not only contributed to the release of Africans on Amistad but also turned this case into a landmark that empowered African American to resist the structural exploitations of chattel slavery. Unlike other movies that usually failed to provide a detail portray of victims, the film Amistad tried to emphasize the identity of the enslaved Africans and to deliver their voices. More than a name in the historical record, the key character Cinque was an intelligent leader who had the courage and individual autonomy to strive for his freedom. Reenacting Cinque’s life in Sierra Leone as a free farmer, the film contrasted his heroic story of killing a lion with his suffering in the middle passage, thereby enhance the humanity of him and his fellow Africans. Cinque’s decision to rise against the Spaniards started off the journey for both Africans on Amistad and the African Americans to explore the meaning of freedom in antebellum America. Despite language barriers and limited knowledge of the western civilization, he soon had a good grasp of English and Bible stories and even pointed out the US constitutional contradiction, which defended the rights and liberties of citizens while condoning the abhorrent oppression and exploitation of the others. Cinque’s decision to not succumb to the structural violence against the negro race enabled him and the abolitionists to seize and adapted the constitutional ideas to distill the concept of personal liberty for Africans. Had Cinque given up the pursuit of freedom that motivated him to shout out “give us free,” he would not have swayed the courts in his favor and galvanized the public to challenge the status quo that condoned the brutality of chattel slavery (Amistad, 1997).

While Cinque’s determination to break the shackle weighted significantly on the fate of Africans on Amistad, John Adams’ devotion to the abolitionist movement brought them one step closer to freedom. Former US president and a prestigious lawyer, John Adams decided to represent the forty-four Africans after the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. He excavated the rights of liberty for Africans from The Declaration of Independence, which granted “inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to “all men” that were created equal regardless of their race (Amistad, 1997). The court’s attempt to executive these Africans would be a breach to the fundamental principles of the US, thereby compelling citizens to lose faith in the judiciary and even question their allegiance to the young country. Adding on to his textualist approach to interpret the scope and meaning of the law, John Adams highlighted the Queen of Spain’s criticism of the incompetence of US courts. He rejected this accusation by arguing that unlike the Spanish courts whose only function was to comply with the monarchs, the US courts upheld the principle of separation and would not become the politicians’ magic wands. This strategic deployment of the check and balance argument explicated emphasized the superiority of American government setup, thereby compelling the court to be immune to the political calculation and use the rational thinking to answer the question of law. Afraid of “be[ing] toyed like a doll” by the young Spanish Queen, the Supreme Court had no alternative but to grant the freedom to Africans on Amistad (Amistad, 1997). Without the participation of John Adams, the court might have surrendered to the executive branches and ruled against Amistad prisoners. The deliberate choice of the textualist interpretation and the principle of separation of power by the political and legal savvy John Adams, together with Cinque’s decision to break loose his chains, exercised the power of agency and ignited the domestic and international firestorm against chattel slavery.