The U.S. Navy confiscated the Amistad off Culloden Point, Long Island, New York, on August 26, 1839. Courtesy of New Haven Museum.
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In 1839, the Portuguese slavers kidnapped 53 Mende people from what is now Sierra Leone in Africa and sailed to Cuba and sold them into slavery. Sailing from one port in Cuba to another on the ship La Amistad, the enslaved people mutinied and took over the ship, killing the captain and commanding the two remaining Spanish crew to sail them back to Sierra Leone. Instead, the crew sailed north and the ship was seized by the US Revenue-Marine (a predecessor of the Coast Guard) off of Long Island, New York. At this time, while slavery itself was still legal in the United States, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and importing enslaved people were both illegal. The 53 enslaved people argued in US court that they were illegally captured and deserved freedom. The case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Court ruled 7-1 that the captured Mende were illegally taken from their home. The surviving Mende people were returned to West Africa
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