Sengbe Pieh, (also known as Joseph Cinqué, was a West African man of the Mende people. He was one of many, when Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of African people in Sierra Leone, a West Indes British colony. Sengbe was born around 1813 in the town of Mani in Mende country, a distance of ten days’ march from the Gallinas coast. His exact birthday is unknown. He was a rice farmer and had a wife and three children. Sadly, he was sold into slavery to pay off a debt. In the spring of 1839 he was captured by four men as he was going to his farm. Sengbe knew of others who were taken from West Africa, and of the horrors of the Middle Pasage. He also knew that none of those kidnapped ever returned home.
They were taken to a nearby village, and then sent to Lomboko, a notorious slaving island off the Gallinas coast. It was here where he was sold to the wealthiest slaver there. He eventually came to be known as Joseph Cinque, a name given him by Spanish slavers in Cuba. They were to be sold as slaves at ports along the coast in Cuba. They transported them aboard the slave ship "Tecora" to Havana, Cuba, then a Spanish colony for auction. Cinqué was sold with 110 others to Spaniards José Ruiz and Pedro Montez. When the "Tecora" arrive, the captain anchored offshore and waited for nightfall before unloading his human "cargo", because they were in violation of a 1820 British-Spainsh slave trade ban.
The Spaniards arranged to transport the captives on the coastal schooner La Amistad, which is "Friendship" in Spanish, ready for Puerto Principe (now Camagüey), where the two Spaniards owned plantations. On board with them would be the Amistad owner and captain, Ramon Ferrer, a mulaato cook called Celestino, a 16-year old cabin boy named Antonio, and two Spanish crewmen. The slaves would stay in the hold, chained together in crude iron collars. They wanted to sell them as slaves at different ports in Cuba. These people would then be forced to work on sugar plantations. The captain allowed the Africans, "breathers" on deck for their meager daily rations of one banana, two potatoes and a cup of water. Cinque was worried, that none of the Africans spoke Spanish, and not knowing where they were going.
The captives experienced harsh treatment by their captors. The cook, Celestino, would flog anyone for taking an extra sip of water. Because of the harsh treatment by their captors, four days into the voyage on July 2, 1839, one of them, Joseph Cinqué managed to free himself and his comrades by using a loose spike which he found on the floor of the ship. The freed Blacks then scrounged some sugarcane knives with two foot blades and planned their next move. Cinqué led them to the upper deck where they killed the lone Spaniard at the wheel. Ruiz and Montez rushed up from their bunks to find their two crewmen trying to stop Cinqué and other Blacks from beating Captain Ferrer. Ferrer got to his feet and killed on of his attacker, before Cinqué struck killed him.
The Africans took Ruiz and Montez, as prisoners and demanded that they direct the ship back to Sierra Leone. But the Spaniards secretly changed course and sailed up the eastern coast towards the United States. The ship had an uneven course between the coasts of the United States and Africa. When supplies and water dwindled, eight men died from drinking medicines they mistook for extra water. Several vessels spotted the Amistad and a few came alongside. But the Black crew, looking like sinister pirates, scarred everyone off. After zig-zagging westward and northwards for about two months, the Amistad reached United States waters near Long Island, New York. While Cinqué and others went ashore to gather supplies, members of the USS Washington boarded the vessel.
When they discovered what had happened (according to the Spaniards), Ruiz and Montez were released, while Sengbe and the other slaves were arrested and charged with murder and piracy. The two Spaniards claimed that the Africans had been born in Cuba and were already slaves at the time of their purchase, and were therefore legal property. Cinque was identified as the leader by Ruiz and Montes. A preliminary investigation by a federal district judge held an inquiry aboard the USS Washington. He examined the Amistad's papers, and they seemed to support Ruiz and Montez's story that the Amistad was a Spanish slaver transporting legal Spanish subject to their new owners. The district judge then ordered that the case be heard before the circuit court at Hartford, Connecticut.
The Spanish consul in Boston claimed the ship, slaves and cargo in the name of the king of Spain, as Ruiz and Montez were Spanish subjects. The Africans were taken to New Haven where they were held in jail with Cinqué being separated from them to prevent him from stirring them to rebel. Two men who knew the Mende language were brought in to help translate and allow the captives to tell their side of the story story to attorneys and the court. Joseph Cinqué continued to be recognized as the group's leader throughout the court proceedings associated with the Amistad Africans. He learned a great deal of English while in the U.S. as well as learning about Christianity. Cinqué served as the group's informal representative.
A group of abolitionists led by Lewis Tappan, Rev. Joshua Leavitt and Rev. Simeon Jocelyn formed the Amistad Committee to raise funds for their legal defense. The greatest difficulty was to get the prisoners’ version of the story. Several attempts to find an interpreter failed, but eventually Professor J. W. Gibbs of Yale Divinity School discovered James Covey. Covey was an ex-slave serving on a British naval ship in New York, who was from Sierra Leone and could speak the Mende language. With a great stir of excitement the Amistad Committee, launched a campaign”–Appeal to the Friends of Liberty”–to raise funds for the welfare of the “Amistad negroes,” as the captives were popularly called, as well as to pay counsel to defend them.
President Martin Van Buren concerned about winning votes from the southern slave-holders in the forthcoming general election of 1840, was in favor of handing the captives over to the Spanish authorities to pacify Spain. But since there was no extradition treaty with Spain, Van Buren could not do this. He wanted to avoid a diplomatic scandal over the Africans. The district attorney, a personal appointee of the President, claimed that they should be held at the President’s pleasure. Van Buren even sent a warship to New Haven, Connecticut, with instructions to seize the prisoners without delay, should the verdict go against them, so that the abolitionists would have no time to file an appeal.
The case became known as "United States v. The Amistad." Renown New Haven lawyer Roger Baldwin was chosen by the Amistad committee to defend the Africans. He had been a governor and U.S senator. Baldwin accepted the case. He was joined by brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, fellow abolitionists. Lewis had once written that slavery was "the worm at the root of the ree of Liberty. Unless killed the tree will die". The defense posture was that the Blacks should be freed on the basis of the natural law, American and Spanish laws banning the slave trade. Because many of the Blacks were sick and malnourished, and one had just died, public support rallied for the Africans. In addition, the lawyers shrewdly leaked details to the newspapaers whose subsequesnt articles generated sympathy for the Africans nationwide.
Every day the case grew more complex and generated more publicity. Once Spain had officially requested the ship's return under the 1795 Pinchkey Treaty with the United States, the case became an international drama. The U.S attorney reiterated Spain's rights, but Roger Baldwin argued that the real issue as neither legal rights nor treaty right laws, but rather the color of the African's skin. When Cinqué took the stand, he proved to be an eloquent speaker. The case turn into political, legal, and moral issues. While each side argued it briefs, the White House suddenly shifted positions. Swayed by national sympathy for the African captives, the Van Buren administration now recognized the Africans as free men brought into the United States jurisdiction illegally.
Counsel for the defense urged the President not to have the case decided “in the recesses of the cabinet,” where the slaves could not be defended. When the circuit court finally gave its decision in January 1840 the U.S. district court ruled that the Africans had mutinied only to gain back their due freedom after being illegally kidnapped and sold. That as the prisoners had been kidnapped into slavery, they were legally free. They should therefore be transported back to Africa from where they had been taken against their will. Many people contested this decision, among them the President himself, who ordered the district attorney to appeal to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the survivors were being taught to read and write in classes organized by the abolitionists.
After appealing the decision to the Circuit Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision, the U.S. attorney appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Former President and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams came out of retirement and face the predominantly southern Supreme Court bench. At 73 years old, and 30 years out of practice, the ex-President was reluctant to accept the case lest he should jeopardize the lives of the Africans by failing to win. In a masterpiece of American law, Adams presented the case of the Africans’ freedom as a test of the American republic’s sincerity in the ideals it espoused abroad. After preparing an elaborate defense, Old Man Eloquent, as Adams came to be called thereafter, addressed the court for a total of thirteen hours. The original verdict was upheld in March 1841, the Supreme Court ruled that the Africans mutinied to regain their freedom after being kidnapped and sold illegally.
Cinqué and his fellow Africans were found to have rightfully defended themselves from being enslaved through the illegal Atlantic slave trade. The advocacy of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, together with defense lawyer, Roger Sherman Baldwin, was critical to the Africans' defense. The court ordered the Africans freed and returned to Africa, if they wished. When the final verdict was communicated to the Africans, Cinqué replied in broken English, "Me glad--me tank the American men--me glad." This decision angered President Martin Van Buren, who worried about relations with Spain and implications for domestic slavery. The U.S government did not provide any aid to the acquitted Mende People. The United Missionary Society, a Black group founded by James W.C. Pennington, helped raise money for the return of thirty-five of the survivors to Sierra Leone in 1842.
Cinqué and the other Mende reached their homeland in 1842. In Sierra Leone, Cinqué encountered civil war. He and his company maintained contact with the local mission for a while, but Cinqué left to trade along the coast. Some maintained that he had moved to Jamaica. Others held that he had become a merchant or a chief, perhaps trading in slaves himself. The Amistad affair, prompted by the revolt of Joseph Cinqué, had far-reaching consequences. By the time the case ended, it had so embittered feelings between the north and the slave-holding south, that it must be accounted one of the events leading to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860. The decision of the court was not in itself an attack on slavery, but it drew the abolitionists together and prevented the movement from breaking up. Joseph Cinqué was the slave who's courage and braveness fought his way back to Africa.