Thread: The Amistad Case

In November, 1841, the ship Gentleman was chartered for $1840 to carry the Africans back to Freetown, where the Governor of Sierra Leone said the group would be met and guided on a four day journey to Mendeland. After a moving and tearful round of goodbyes, the thirty-five surviving Africans of the Amistad and four American missionaries boarded the Gentleman, bound for West Africa. (Only one African, Sarah, would ever return to America. She attended Oberlin College.)

After fifty days at sea, the Gentleman put down anchor in Freetown harbor. It didn't take long for the missionaries to realize they had their work cut out for them. After disembarking, some of the Africans began to strip and engage in "heathenish dancing." British missionaries in Freetown told the Americans that their plan to establish a mission in Mendeland was folly. Soon the missionaries wrote letters complaining of their Amistad students: some fell back to their "licentious habits," some disappeared, some were just trouble. Others, such as Kin-na, were clearly torn by the pull of two different worlds, becoming an ordained minister but practicing polygamy. The missionaries also contended with rats (Brother Raymond killed 164 in a single day), the 175 annual inches of rain, malaria and yellow fever ("black vomit.") One by one, the missionaries died and were replaced by others. With the new arrivals, the character of the mission might also change. Tolerance might turn to hell-fire and ex-communication.

The last of the Amistad Africans to have contact with the mission was Cinque. In 1879, old and emaciated, he stumbled into the mission to die and was buried among the graves of the American missionaries.
Although every American President from the time of the Amistad decision of the Supreme Court until 1860 urged that Spain be compensated, efforts to appropriate funds for such a purpose were consistently stymied in the House. John Quincy Adams led the opposition to compensation efforts until his death in 1847, calling the proposal "a robbery of the people of the United States." With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Spain's efforts came to an end.