United States v. Amistad

Impact

Some historians believe that the Amistad case may have helped defeat Martin Van Buren in his quest to be reelected president in 1840. When the case came to his attention, he backed the initial U.S. position as formed by Secretary of State John Forsyth, which favored the claims of Spain and urged that the Africans be returned to Cuba as pirates, murderers, and escaped slaves. Both Van Buren, a Democrat, and his opponent, William Henry Harrison, courted the southern vote, and neither wanted to be perceived as soft on the issue of slavery. Although the Amistad case did not figure directly in the election campaign, it formed part of the backdrop of American regional politics in the pre–Civil War decades.

The outcome of the case galvanized the abolition movement, but it angered much of the South. As a legal precedent, the case has been cited only once in a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision. The reality was that the case had limited direct impact. It had freed the Africans, but not the slave Antonio. The evidence presented at the initial admiralty trial proved that the Africans were free and not slaves. Moreover, the U.S. attorney had admitted that they were not slaves but free. This admission foreclosed any further argument by the Van Buren administration on behalf of the Spanish. Consequently the case has to be seen as one decided strictly upon its facts. However, Story did use the international law on the slave trade to make clear that a free black man had rights in American courts—an important holding in the ultimate collapse of the slave system.