The touchiest subject that a person could bring up in the early 19th century was slavery. Many in the north were wholly against it while many in the south could not live properly without it. The Amistad case intensifies the already bitter feelings between these two parts of the country, and it shows how sectionalist our country had become. On one hand there were the northerners who couldn't believe that these people were being held for freeing themselves, and on the other hand there were the southerners who said that the Negro's were animals and should be sent back to Cuba to be hung. There were not only two different attitudes on what should happen to the Africans, but each group also had different opinions on how to handle the story. "The northern press made much of the story, while the southern press avoided it because they didn't want to give the slave populations any ideas." (8)
             When the Amistad landed in 1839, most people opposed slavery in the north, but many of them weren't abolitionists, and others didn't want to think about the subject at all. The wanted to just save the union, because if that had dispersed, all of the founding fathers work would have gone for none. "The Abolitionists seized upon the Amistad case as heavensent to abet their cause." This was what they needed to get more support behind their cause, and to get the people who didn't want to talk about the subject out and gossiping. On the Spaniards side there was William S. Holabird the District Attorney at that time who thought that it was an "open and shut case of murder and mutiny, and that Gedney saved the Spaniards from the blacks, and not the blacks from the Spaniards." (19) The Africans do have many intelligent abolitionists on their side, and Lewis Tappan was one of them. The Africans attorney Roger Baldwin accompanied him, along with an abolitionist named Robert Madden. Madden ...