Enslaved Sailors on the Amistad Seize Their Ship
Sengbe Pieh leads a revolt that reaches the US Supreme Court and ends with the captives ruled free, illegally enslaved people
Quick facts
- Seizure date
- July 2, 1839
- Ship
- Amistad
- Leader
- Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinque)
- Supreme Court ruling
- March 9, 1841, Africans ordered freed
What happened
In February 1839, Portuguese slave traders abducted a group of Africans from Sierra Leone in violation of existing treaties banning the trade and shipped them to Havana, Cuba. Two Spanish planters, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, purchased 53 of the captives and put them aboard the schooner Amistad to be transported to a Cuban plantation. On July 2, 1839, the captives, led by a man named Sengbe Pieh, known in American accounts as Joseph Cinque, seized the ship, killing the captain and the ship's cook. They spared Montes and Ruiz on condition the men sail them back to Africa, but Montes secretly steered the ship north instead, and on August 26, 1839, the US brig Washington intercepted the Amistad off Long Island. The Africans were jailed on murder charges, which were later dismissed, while a separate legal battle over their status as property or as free, illegally kidnapped people proceeded through US courts. On March 9, 1841, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Africans had been illegally enslaved to begin with and had exercised a legitimate right to fight for their freedom, ordering their release.
Why it matters
The Amistad case forced US courts to directly confront the legal difference between people enslaved under a domestic system the country's laws still protected and people who had been kidnapped in defiance of international treaties banning the trade, and the Supreme Court sided with the captives on that distinction. Abolitionists used the case's national publicity, including former president John Quincy Adams' personal argument before the Court, to expand American antislavery sentiment in the North.
How we know
The National Archives holds the original case records, including the warrant for habeas corpus and John Quincy Adams' handwritten requests for trial documents, from the Department of Justice, the Treasury Solicitor's office, and the federal district and Supreme Court records generated by the case.
Sources
- National Archives. The Amistad Case · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- National Park Service. Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinque) · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineThe Atlantic Slave Trade29 events · Four centuries in which European traders forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and the enslaved people, revolts, and abolitionists who fought it from the first crossing to the lastView all →