Mutiny on the Amistad
by Howard Jones
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Publisher description: This book is the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history in which African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. In 1839, Joseph Cinque led other blacks in a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, in the Caribbean. They steered the ship northward to Montauk, Long Island, where it was seized by an American naval vessel. With the Africans jailed in Connecticut and the Spaniards claiming violation of their property show more rights, an international controversy erupted. The Amistad affair united abolitionists in the U.S. and England, drove the White House into almost any means to quiet the issue, and placed the U.S. and Spain in a confrontation that threatened to involve England and Cuba. The abolitionists, led by Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and others, argued that equal justice was the central issue in the case. Appealing to natural law, evangelical arguments, and "moral suasion" in proclaiming slavery a sin, they sought to establish that all persons, black and white, have an inherent right of liberty and thereby hoped to erase the color line that formed the racial foundation of slavery. In their eyes, the mutiny on the Amistad offered an ideal opportunity to awaken Americans to the injustice of slavery. In this book, Howard Jones shows how the abolitionists' argument put the "laws of nature" on trial in the U.S., as Tappan and the others refused to accept a legal system claiming to dispense justice while permitting artificial distinctions based on race or color. Jones vividly captures the compelling drama that climaxed in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that freed the captives and allowed them to return to Africa. He notes that many of the abolitionists were nonetheless dissatisfied with the decision because it had not rested on the law of nature; yet, he observes, even they failed to grasp the central importance of the affair: that America's legal system had fulfilled its function of securing justice. show lessTags
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Well written and very detailed legal history of the Amistad mutiny and subsequent legal issues surrounding the case. I should emphasize here that this is mainly a legal history, with all legal arguments and issues from both sides fleshed out ad infinitum. There was less discussion of what was going on and about the lives of the blacks who were held for over two years while the case worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and virtually nothing of what happened to them when they returned to Africa.
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Author Information
14 Works 830 Members
Howard Jones is Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama. A recipient of both the John F. Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award for teaching and research and the Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor Award, he teaches courses in American foreign relations and the U.S. Vietnam War.
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Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 326.0973 — Society, Government, and Culture Political science Slavery and emancipation Trans-Atlantic Slavery Biography And History North America United States
- LCC
- E447 .J66 — History of the United States United States Revolution to the Civil War, 1775/1783-1861 Slavery in the United States. Antislavery
- BISAC
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- Members
- 256
- Popularity
- 126,106
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.23)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 3
