Research Catalog

Mutiny on the Amistad : the saga of a slave revolt and its impact on American abolition, law, and diplomacy / Howard Jones.

Title

Mutiny on the Amistad : the saga of a slave revolt and its impact on American abolition, law, and diplomacy / Howard Jones.

Author

Jones, Howard, 1940-

Publication

New York : Oxford University Press, [1987]
©1987

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	E447 .J66 1987	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Vidal, Gore, 1925-2012

Description

ix, 271 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map, portraits; 24 cm

Summary

Publisher description: This book is the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history in which African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. In 1839, Joseph Cinque led other blacks in a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, in the Caribbean. They steered the ship northward to Montauk, Long Island, where it was seized by an American naval vessel. With the Africans jailed in Connecticut and the Spaniards claiming violation of their property rights, an international controversy erupted. The Amistad affair united abolitionists in the U.S. and England, drove the White House into almost any means to quiet the issue, and placed the U.S. and Spain in a confrontation that threatened to involve England and Cuba. The abolitionists, led by Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and others, argued that equal justice was the central issue in the case. Appealing to natural law, evangelical arguments, and "moral suasion" in proclaiming slavery a sin, they sought to establish that all persons, black and white, have an inherent right of liberty and thereby hoped to erase the color line that formed the racial foundation of slavery. In their eyes, the mutiny on the Amistad offered an ideal opportunity to awaken Americans to the injustice of slavery. In this book, Howard Jones shows how the abolitionists' argument put the "laws of nature" on trial in the U.S., as Tappan and the others refused to accept a legal system claiming to dispense justice while permitting artificial distinctions based on race or color. Jones vividly captures the compelling drama that climaxed in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that freed the captives and allowed them to return to Africa. He notes that many of the abolitionists were nonetheless dissatisfied with the decision because it had not rested on the law of nature; yet, he observes, even they failed to grasp the central importance of the affair: that America's legal system had fulfilled its function of securing justice.

Subject

Genre/Form

Association copies (Provenance)
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-259) and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

The mutiny -- Abolitionists and "This matter of color" -- The politics of justice -- "The inherent property of liberty" -- "A national matter" -- "Neither slave ..." -- The politics of democracy -- "Oh how shall I do justice?" -- "The eternal principles of justice."

ISBN

0195038282
9780195038286
0195038290
9780195038293

LCCN

86008692

OCLC

13455768
SCSB-9951861

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library