Amistad Case Study

In this legal study, the case of United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 will be examined in relation to a supreme court precedent in the freeing of slaves in the American North . The date of the Supreme Court trial was 1841. The initial location of the Amistad trial began in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut in Hartford, Connecticut, but was eventually tried in Washington D.C. in the U.S. Supreme Court. The liberation of illegally kidnapped slaves was a major shift in the Northern cause for the abolition of slavery in the 1840s. Slavery, after all, was still legal in the U.S., but the Supreme Court Chief justice Joseph Story defined illegality of the kidnapping of the slaves
Thomas Gedney, the captain of the Washington that filed a lawsuit to claiming the rights and cargo of the ship. Antonio Vega, the vice-consul of the Spanish government, argued the claim of owning a slave. Most importantly, the thirty-nine surviving slaves were the primary party involved in the case being judged. Also, John Quincy Adams organized the legal defense for the slaves. President Van Buren was also involved in the political and legal oversight of the case in terms of its impact on the legally mandated slave trade in the United States. These are the important aspects of the various parties involved in the trial of United States v. The Amistad, which involved many different parties claiming the rights to the ownership of the slaves and the cargo that was on board the Portuguese
The Amistad was the issue of freemen status and property rights for the thirty-nine slaves that were being tried in the context of domestic U.S. law and international law. The Supreme Court justices had to decide if international law was a more important legal vantage point than the domestic legality of slavery in the United States: In the larger American system of law, the trial defined a new application of federal jurisdictional procedure and lengthy process of appeal” (Rediker 67). This was the ultimate issue that would decide the freedom or enslavement of the Amistad slaves in the Supreme Court