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| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Amistad Rebellion Marcus Rediker, 2013-11-26 Vividly drawn . . . this stunning book honors the achievement of the captive Africans who fought for—and won—their freedom.”—The Philadelphia Tribune A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion in American history, now updated with a new epilogue—from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence and featuring vividly drawn portraits of the rebels, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course for freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This edition includes a new epilogue about the author's trip to Sierra Leona to search for Lomboko, the slave-trading factory where the Amistad Africans were incarcerated, and other relics and connections to the Amistad rebellion, especially living local memory of the uprising and the people who made it. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad Helen Kromer, 1997 Echoing a cry for freedom that can still be heard today, Amistad portrays the dignity and agony of the charismatic leader Cinque and 52 other kidnapped Africans, who overthrew their captors and embarked on a long journey toward liberty in a world that aimed to deny them justice. Written for readers of all ages, the book includes period illustrations and maps. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: A History of the Amistad Captives John Warner Barber, 1840 |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Ardency Kevin Young, 2012-09-18 Now in paperback, a haunting chorus of voices that tells the story of the captivity, education, language, hopes, dreams, and fight for freedom, of the African Americans abducted in the Amistad rebellion. Based on the 1840 mutiny on board the slave ship Amistad, Ardency begins with Buzzard, a sequence of poems told in the voice of the interpreter for the captive rebels, who were jailed in New Haven. In Correspondence, we encounter the remarkable letters to John Quincy Adams and others that the captives wrote from jail. The book culminates in Witness, a libretto chanted by Cinque, the rebel leader, who yearns for his family and freedom while eloquently evoking the Amistads' conversion and life in America. As Young conjures this array of characters, interweaving the liberation cry of Negro spirituals and the indoctrinating wordplay of American primers, he delivers his signature songlike immediacy at the service of an epic built on the ironies, violence, and virtues of American history. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Rebellious Passage Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, 2019-02-07 In late October 1841, the Creole left Richmond with 137 slaves bound for New Orleans. It arrived five weeks later minus the Captain, one passenger, and most of the captives. Nineteen rebels had seized the US slave ship en route and steered it to the British Bahamas where the slaves gained their liberty. Drawing upon a sweeping array of previously unexamined state, federal, and British colonial sources, Rebellious Passage examines the neglected maritime dimensions of the extensive US slave trade and slave revolt. The focus on south-to-south self-emancipators at sea differs from the familiar narrative of south-to-north fugitive slaves over land. Moreover, a broader hemispheric framework of clashing slavery and antislavery empires replaces an emphasis on US antebellum sectional rivalry. Written with verve and commitment, Rebellious Passage chronicles the first comprehensive history of the ship revolt, its consequences, and its relevance to global modern slavery. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Story of the Amistad Emma Gelders Sterne, 2012-03-12 Gripping tale of the epic 1839 revolt, aboard the schooner Amistad, of Africans bound for slavery in the New World. Young readers will thrill to the book's you-are-there flavor. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad Eric Foner, 2015-01-19 The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by practical abolition, person by person, family by family. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Art of the Amistad and The Portrait of Cinqué Laura A. Macaluso, 2016-03-23 The Amistad incident, one of the few successful ship revolts in the history of enslavement, has been discussed by historians for decades, even becoming the subject of a Steven Spielberg film in 1997, which brought the story to wide audiences. But, while historians have examined the Amistad case for its role in the long history of the Atlantic, the United States and slavery, there is an oil on canvas painting of one man, Cinqué, at the center of this story, an image so crucial to the continual retelling and memorialization of the Amistad story, it is difficult to think about the Amistad and not think of this image. Visual and material culture about the Amistad in the form of paintings, prints, monuments, memorials, museum exhibits, quilts and banners, began production in the late summer of 1839 and has not yet ceased. Art of the Amistad and The Portrait of Cinqué is the first book to survey in total these Amistad inspired images and related objects, and to find in them shared ideals and cultural creations, but also divergent applications of the story based on intended audience and local context. Tracing the revolutionary creation of what art historian Stephen Eisenman calls “a highly individualized, noble portrait of an African man,” Art of the Amistad and The Portrait of Cinqué is built around visual and material culture, and thus does not use images merely as illustration, but tells its story through the wide range of images and materials presented. While the Portrait of Cinqué seems to sit quietly behind Plexiglass at a local history museum, the impact of this 175-year old painting is palpable; very few portraits from the 19th century—let alone a portrait of a black man—remain a relevant part of culture as the Portrait of Cinqué continues to be today. Art of the Amistad the Portrait of Cinqué is about the art and artifacts that continue to inform and inspire our understanding of transatlantic history—a journey 175 years in the making. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Wake Rebecca Hall, 2025-09-04 'A must-read graphic history. . . an inspired and inspiring defence of heroic women whose struggles could be fuel for a more just future' Guardian 'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' Angela Y. Davis Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery, tells their story. With in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, she constructs the likely pasts of women rebels who fought for freedom on slave ships bound to America, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. Beneath both is Hall's own tale: of a life lived in the shadow of slavery and its consequences. Strikingly illustrated in black and white, Wake explores both a personal and a global legacy. Part graphic novel, part memoir, it is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Mutiny on the Amistad Howard Jones, 1997-11-20 This volume presents the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history where African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. Jones describes how, in 1839, Joseph Cinqué led a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, in the Caribbean. The seizure of the ship by an American naval vessel near Montauk, Long Island, the arrest of the Africans in Connecticut, and the Spanish protest against the violation of their property rights created an international controversy. The Amistad affair united Lewis Tappan and other abolitionists who put the law of nature on trial in the United States by their refusal to accept a legal system that claimed to dispense justice while permitting artificial distinctions based on race or color. The mutiny resulted in a trial before the U.S. Supreme Court that pitted former President John Quincy Adams against the federal government. Jones vividly recaptures this compelling drama--the most famous slavery case before Dred Scott--that climaxed in the court's ruling to free the captives and allow them to return to Africa. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Dreams of Africa in Alabama Sylviane A. Diouf, 2009-02-18 In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses. He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007) |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Empire of Necessity Greg Grandin, 2014-01-14 Documents an early nineteenth-century event that inspired Herman Melville's Beneto Cereno, tracing the cultural, economic, and religious clash that occurred aboard a distressed Spanish ship of West African pirates. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Black Odyssey Mary Cable, 1977 In 1839, thirty black slaves being transported from Havana to Puerto Príncipe aboard the Amistad took control of the ship and attempted to return to Africa. Instead, the whites sailed north, until the ship was spotted and taken to Connecticut. When President Van Buren attempted to return the slaves to Cuba, the abolitionists, led by John Quincy Adams, took the slaves' case to the U.S. Supreme Court. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad Pat McKissack, 2005 This book describes the historical account of the Amistad and the freeing of Africans who had been kidnapped in the 1830s. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: A History of the Amistad Captives John Warner Barber, 2017-12-18 Excerpt from A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York Collectors at various sea ports. The following, giving an account of the capture of this'vessel, and other particulars is taken from the New London Gazette. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad Rising Veronica Chambers, 1998 In 1839, a young man is brutally kidnapped from his homeland and imprisoned on the slave ship Amistad with 52 other Africans. But this man is brave beyond his years, and for him destiny has another plan. His name is Joseph Cinque, and, with former president John Quincy Adams as his ally, he will change the course of history. Full color. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Creole Mutiny George Hendrick, Willene Hendrick, 2003 A tale of revolt aboard a nineteenth-century slave ship and the story of the slaves' heroic leader, Madison Washington. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Barracoon Zora Neale Hurston, 2018-05-08 One of the New York Times' Most Memorable Literary Moments of the Last 25 Years! • New York Times Bestseller • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 • “A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”—New York Times “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison “Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”—Alice Walker A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last Black Cargo ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad Steven Spielberg, Maya Angelou, 1999-06-15 This elegant volume commemorates the creation of an extraordinary movie, featuring: specially commissioned watercolors which served as storyboards; production and historical photos and documents; essays by director Spielberg, producer Allen (who pursued the project for 13 years), and poet Angelou; and a lengthy text on the making of the film about the fight for freedom by 53 Africans, who, in 1839, were captured as slaves and who rebelled on the Spanish slave ship Amistad. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Fearless Benjamin Lay Marcus Rediker, 2017-09-05 The little-known story of an eighteenth-century Quaker dwarf who fiercely attacked slavery and imagined a new, more humane way of life In The Fearless Benjamin Lay, renowned historian Marcus Rediker chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular man—a Quaker dwarf who demanded the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. Mocked and scorned by his contemporaries, Lay was unflinching in his opposition to slavery, often performing colorful guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He drew on his ideals to create a revolutionary way of life, one that embodied the proclamation “no justice, no peace.” Lay was born in 1682 in Essex, England. His philosophies, employments, and places of residence—spanning England, Barbados, Philadelphia, and the open seas—were markedly diverse over the course of his life. He worked as a shepherd, glove maker, sailor, and bookseller. His worldview was an astonishing combination of Quakerism, vegetarianism, animal rights, opposition to the death penalty, and abolitionism. While in Abington, Philadelphia, Lay lived in a cave-like dwelling surrounded by a library of two hundred books, and it was in this unconventional abode where he penned a fiery and controversial book against bondage, which Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. Always in motion and ever confrontational, Lay maintained throughout his life a steadfast opposition to slavery and a fierce determination to make his fellow Quakers denounce it, which they finally began to do toward the end of his life. With passion and historical rigor, Rediker situates Lay as a man who fervently embodied the ideals of democracy and equality as he practiced a unique concoction of radicalism nearly three hundred years ago. Rediker resurrects this forceful and prescient visionary, who speaks to us across the ages and whose innovative approach to activism is a gift, transforming how we consider the past and how we might imagine the future. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The New-York Conspiracy Daniel Horsmanden, 1810 |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Blake; or, The Huts of America Martin R. Delany, 2017-02-13 Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene. This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Fire on the Water Lenora Warren, 2019-06-07 Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Argument of Roger S. Baldwin, of New Haven, Before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of the United States, Appellants, Vs. Cinque, and Others, Africans of the Amistad Roger S. Baldwin, 2017-10-04 Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic book titles. Our aim is to provide readers with the highest quality reproductions of fiction and non-fiction literature that has stood the test of time. The many thousands of books in our collection have been sourced from libraries and private collections around the world.The titles that Trieste Publishing has chosen to be part of the collection have been scanned to simulate the original. Our readers see the books the same way that their first readers did decades or a hundred or more years ago. Books from that period are often spoiled by imperfections that did not exist in the original. Imperfections could be in the form of blurred text, photographs, or missing pages. It is highly unlikely that this would occur with one of our books. Our extensive quality control ensures that the readers of Trieste Publishing's books will be delighted with their purchase. Our staff has thoroughly reviewed every page of all the books in the collection, repairing, or if necessary, rejecting titles that are not of the highest quality. This process ensures that the reader of one of Trieste Publishing's titles receives a volume that faithfully reproduces the original, and to the maximum degree possible, gives them the experience of owning the original work.We pride ourselves on not only creating a pathway to an extensive reservoir of books of the finest quality, but also providing value to every one of our readers. Generally, Trieste books are purchased singly - on demand, however they may also be purchased in bulk. Readers interested in bulk purchases are invited to contact us directly to enquire about our tailored bulk rates. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Heir to the Fathers Gary V. Wood, 2004-01-01 In Heir to the Fathers, author Gary V. Wood examines the ideas that guided John Quincy Adams throughout his political career. For Wood, it is Adams' understanding of The Constitution of the United States that foregrounds a crucial link between the principles laid-forth in The Declaration of Independence and the original intent of the Framers of The Constitution. Heir to the Fathers traces this link through an examination of Adams' celebrated essay, Jubilee of the Constitution and, most significantly, through his defense of a group of Africans who mutinied aboard the slave ship Amistad. The contradictory relationship between what is stated The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution and the treatment of African slaves has been a persistent problem in any attempt to understand the legacy of freedom in the United States. Adams' argument before the Supreme Court, based on his interpretation of constitutional law, is an example of how this unique political mind comes to terms with this contradiction without abandoning the spirit of America's founding principles. Wood's discussion of Adams' political and intellectual life invites readers to reexamination the principles upon which the United States of America was founded. Heir to the Fathers is a salient addition to the study of constitutional law and history and American political thought. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: United States V. Amistad Susan Dudley Gold, 2007 Describes the historical context of the 1841 U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Amistad that ruled that illegally enslaved blacks had the right to be free. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Teaching with Documents , 1989 |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites Kristin L. Gallas, James DeWolf Perry, 2014-12-23 Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites aims to move the field forward in its collective conversation about the interpretation of slavery—acknowledging the criticism of the past and acting in the present to develop an inclusive interpretation of slavery. Presenting the history of slavery in a comprehensive and conscientious manner is difficult and requires diligence and compassion—for the history itself, for those telling the story, and for those hearing the stories—but it’s a necessary part of our collective narrative about our past, present, and future. This book features best practices for: Interpreting slavery across the country and for many people. The history of slavery, while traditionally interpreted primarily on southern plantations, is increasingly recognized as relevant at historic sites across the nation. It is also more than just an African-American/European-American story—it is relevant to the history of citizens of Latino, Caribbean, African and indigenous descent, as well. It is also pertinent to those descended from immigrants who arrived after slavery, whose stories are deeply intertwined with the legacy of slavery and its aftermath. Developing support within an institution for the interpretation of slavery. Many institutions are reticent to approach such a potentially volatile subject, so this book examines how proponents at several sites, including Monticello and Mount Vernon, were able to make a strong case to their constituents. Training interpreters in not only a depth of knowledge of the subject but also the confidence to speak on this controversial issue in public and the compassion to handle such a sensitive historical issue. The book will be accessible and of interest for professionals at all levels in the public history field, as well as students at the undergraduate and graduate levels in museum studies and public history programs. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Middle Passage Tom Feelings, 2018-01-02 Alex Haley's Roots awakened many Americans to the cruelty of slavery. The Middle Passage focuses attention on the torturous journey which brought slaves from Africa to the Americas, allowing readers to bear witness to the sufferings of an entire people. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Villains of All Nations Marcus Rediker, 2020-05-05 Pirates have long been stock figures in popular culture, from Treasure Island to the more recent antics of Jack Sparrow. Villains of all Nations unearths the thrilling historical truth behind such fictional characters and rediscovers their radical democratic challenge to the established powers of the day. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope Jonathan M. Bryant, 2015-07-13 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History A dramatic work of historical detection illuminating one of the most significant—and long forgotten—Supreme Court cases in American history. In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida, the Spanish slave ship Antelope. Since the United States had outlawed its own participation in the international slave trade more than a decade before, the ship's almost 300 African captives were considered illegal cargo under American laws. But with slavery still a critical part of the American economy, it would eventually fall to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they were slaves at all, and if so, what should be done with them. Bryant describes the captives' harrowing voyage through waters rife with pirates and governed by an array of international treaties. By the time the Antelope arrived in Savannah, Georgia, the puzzle of how to determine the captives' fates was inextricably knotted. Set against the backdrop of a city in the grip of both the financial panic of 1819 and the lingering effects of an outbreak of yellow fever, Dark Places of the Earth vividly recounts the eight-year legal conflict that followed, during which time the Antelope's human cargo were mercilessly put to work on the plantations of Georgia, even as their freedom remained in limbo. When at long last the Supreme Court heard the case, Francis Scott Key, the legendary Georgetown lawyer and author of The Star Spangled Banner, represented the Antelope captives in an epic courtroom battle that identified the moral and legal implications of slavery for a generation. Four of the six justices who heard the case, including Chief Justice John Marshall, owned slaves. Despite this, Key insisted that by the law of nature all men are free, and that the captives should by natural law be given their freedom. This argument was rejected. The court failed Key, the captives, and decades of American history, siding with the rights of property over liberty and setting the course of American jurisprudence on these issues for the next thirty-five years. The institution of slavery was given new legal cover, and another brick was laid on the road to the Civil War. The stakes of the Antelope case hinged on nothing less than the central American conflict of the nineteenth century. Both disquieting and enlightening, Dark Places of the Earth restores the Antelope to its rightful place as one of the most tragic, influential, and unjustly forgotten episodes in American legal history. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Many Middle Passages Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker, 2007-09-03 This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the cruelty of the captivity, torture, terror, and death involved in the shipping of human cargo over the waterways of the world, which continues unabated to this day. At the same time, these essays highlight the forms of resistance and cultural creativity that have emerged from this violent history. Together, the essays accomplish what no single author could provide: a truly global context for understanding the experience of men, women, and children forced into the violent and alienating experience of bonded labor in a strange new world. This pioneering volume also begins to chart a new role of the sea as a key site where history is made. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad's Orphans Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance, 2015-01-28 The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and illegally sold as slaves. In this fascinating revisionist history, Benjamin N. Lawrance reconstructs six entwined stories and brings them to the forefront of the Amistad conflict. Through eyewitness testimonies, court records, and the children’s own letters, Lawrance recounts how their lives were inextricably interwoven by the historic drama, and casts new light on illegal nineteenth-century transatlantic slave smuggling. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Stono Mark Michael Smith, 2005 Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt introduces readers to the documents needed to understand both the revolt and the ongoing discussion among scholars about the legacy of the insurrection. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Anti-slavery Record , 1836 |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Black Mutiny William A. Owens, 1997 Black Mutiny is the historical retelling of one of our nation's most dramatic national crises. It is one among many historical sources used in the development of the new motion picture Amistad. Written as a novel in 1953 by William A. Owens, this is one historian's view of the Amistad mutiny. Based on U.S. government documents, court records, official and personal correspondence, diaries, and newspaper accounts, it tells the true story of 53 illegally enslaved Africans who revolted against their captors. After the Amistad was intercepted and seized by the United States Navy, the imprisoned Africans were forced to stand trial for mutiny and murder in a case that reached the Supreme Court. With its impassioned plea for freedom for all people, Black Mutiny brilliantly recreates a critical moment in America's racial history more than twenty years before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. It is a rousing and unforgettable story of oppression, justice, and the precious cost of human dignity. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: The Amistad Revolt and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Richard Worth, 2015-12-15 Through court documents, supporting details, and narrative language, students will discover how Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinqué, staged a mutiny on a slave ship that not only gave him and his fellow captives freedom, but also spurred a court case that began an international debate over the morality and legality of slavery. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the politics involved in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as a part of history that has shaped our society. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad Walter Dean Myers, 2001 In 1839, a young man named Sengbe Pieh led a group of illegally enslaved Africans to revolt against their captors aboard the slave ship Amistad. All they wanted was to return home to their families. Instead, the Africans landed in the United States, where they were imprisoned and charged with murder. In the historic case that followed, abolitionists came to the Amistad captives' defense. Sengbe Pieh continued as the group's leader, learning enough English to speak out in court for the freedom they so desperately needed. Award-winning author Walter Dean Myers's look at the Amistad rebellion shows how this complicated struggle against bigotry and injustice was an important victory in our nation's fight for equality for all. Book jacket. |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Mutiny on the Amistad Howard Jones, Alan M. Dershowitz, 2014 |
| slave mutiny on the amistad: Amistad Joyce Annette Barnes, David Franzoni, 1997 When a group of illegally enslaved Africans seizes their captors' ship, the Amistad, in 1839, they find themselves in a courtroom, with not only their freedom at stake but also the entire institution of slavery on trial. Original. Movie tie-in. |
Slavery - Wikipedia
According to those proposing a change in terminology, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun instead of "carry[ing] them forward as …
SLAVE Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of SLAVE is someone captured, sold, or born into chattel slavery. How to use slave in a sentence.
Slavery | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica
May 28, 2025 · slavery, condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily …
U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition | HISTORY
Apr 25, 2024 · Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next …
A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn't Learn in School
Aug 19, 2019 · Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don’t know the full story of slavery. Sometime in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship, …
Slavery and Freedom | National Museum of African American …
Slavery and Freedom explores the complex story of slavery and freedom, which rests at the core of our nation’s shared history. The exhibition begins in 15th-century Africa and Europe, …
SLAVE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
SLAVE definition: 1. a person who is legally owned by someone else and has to work for that person: 2. to work very…. Learn more.
Slave Voyages
This database contains information on more than 11,000 maritime voyages trafficking enslaved people within the Americas. These slave trades operated within colonial empires, across …
slavery | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
In the United States, individuals were forced into slavery, born into slavery, and were slaves for life based on their race. Slaves were recognized as property or objects of the slave owners.
SLAVE definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
A slave is a person who is owned by another person and has to work for that person without pay.
Slavery - Wikipedia
According to those proposing a change in terminology, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun instead of "carry[ing] them forward as …
SLAVE Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of SLAVE is someone captured, sold, or born into chattel slavery. How to use slave in a sentence.
Slavery | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica
May 28, 2025 · slavery, condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held …
U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition | HISTORY
Apr 25, 2024 · Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next …
A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn't Learn in School
Aug 19, 2019 · Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don’t know the full story of slavery. Sometime in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship, …
Slavery and Freedom | National Museum of African American …
Slavery and Freedom explores the complex story of slavery and freedom, which rests at the core of our nation’s shared history. The exhibition begins in 15th-century Africa and Europe, extends …
SLAVE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
SLAVE definition: 1. a person who is legally owned by someone else and has to work for that person: 2. to work very…. Learn more.
Slave Voyages
This database contains information on more than 11,000 maritime voyages trafficking enslaved people within the Americas. These slave trades operated within colonial empires, across …
slavery | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
In the United States, individuals were forced into slavery, born into slavery, and were slaves for life based on their race. Slaves were recognized as property or objects of the slave owners.
SLAVE definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
A slave is a person who is owned by another person and has to work for that person without pay.
