"AMISTAD"
AMISTAD is a true story of the Spanish slave ship, La Amistad, whose "cargo" broke their chains in 1839 traveling towards the northwest coast of America. Much of the story involves the courtroom drama about the slave who led the revolt, Joseph Cinque (Djimon Hounsou). On July 2, 1839, La Amistad was sailing from Havana to Puerto Pricipe, Cuba, when the ship's unwilling passengers, 53 slaves recently captured from Africa, revolted. Led by Cinque, they killed the captain and the cook but spared the life of a Spanish navigator so that he could sail them home to Sierra Leone. The film, however, portrayed that the slaves only killed the captain and left the cook and navigator alive. The navigator instead managed to sail to Amistad, generally northward. Two months later, the U.S. Navy captured the ship off Long Island, New York, and towed it into New London, Connecticut. The mutineers were held in a jail in New Haven, Connecticut, a state in which slavery was legal. The Spanish government demanded for the return of the Africans to Cuba as did Martin Van Buren, our then President of the United States. President Van Buren, along with many newspaper editors, favored extraditing the Africans to Cuba in the hopes of
One of the white crewman on the ship initiated the violence by shooting a slave indiscriminately before the shipped even weighed anchor. The federal district court judge agreed and ruled that the Africans were not liable for their actions because they had been enslaved illegally. The portrayals of a ten-year-old Queen Isabella II and several of the Spanish officials look as though they were modeled after today's society standards as interpreted by the director, Steven Spielberg. He further ordered that they be sent back to their home, Sierra Leone. After some research on the actual event, several of the movie's key characters never existed in real history, and the people who did exist were only a faint ring of authenticity. Despite his prejudices against blacks and abolitionists, Judge Judson ruled on the evidence at the level of a federal district court that the rebels were free Africans kidnapped and illegally sold as slaves in Cuba. Chained and naked, the slaves embarked on the "notorious" slave ship in a frenzy of fear, panic and horror. The survivors of this ferociousness, once in Havana, were rudely rubbed down with palm oil in preparation for their sale. Many Abolitionists, including Lewis Tappan and James Pennington, hired Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) to argue the case before the court for the mutineers. According to the movie, President Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne), realizing that the lower court case was turning against the interests of his southern supporters whom he needed to win re-election, replaced Judge T. Madden was a former British official in Cuba and offered crucial information about the operation of Cuba's massive slave trade which was in violation of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1817. Others suffered disease and malnutrition, and some of the slaves even committed suicide. The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court where John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) defended the Africans.
Common topics in this essay:
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Supreme Court,
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Judge Judson,
La Amistad,
Steven Spielberg,
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Acceptance Essays
