Reel History 9: Amistad

In 1839, a Spanish ship named La Amistad, transporting 53 Mende slaves from one Cuban port to another, was taken over by its cargo, who killed the captain and most of the crew. The former captives, led by Sengbe Pieh (or Joseph Cinque, his given American name), demanded that the ship's navigator take them back to Sierra Leone, but he instead took them to Long Island, New York, where they were detained and endured a two-year long debate over their legal status. Were they free Africans or Spanish property, and where were they to go?

Amistad is the story of not only those slaves and their legal struggles, but of the United States as a whole and its struggle with slavery. In this movie we are given a tour of the American slave mentality, traversing the countryside with Martin Van Buren (seen stumping for the next election at a time when politicians didn't stump) and John C. Calhoun as they speak about impending war and black people's freedom, a crash course on the main players in anti-abolitionism. This is the problem with the movie; in an effort to give it lots of context and place it within the history of abolition, it compresses history in an effort to tell a stirring story.

And you can't say that Amistad isn't stirring. It's a Steven Spielberg film- heck, it might be THE Spielberg film. If you took the elements that Spielberg is both praised and criticized for, Amistad has them all- the swell of the score as Djimon Hounsou shouts 'give us free!' over and over again; the speech Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams gives to the Supreme Court which convinces them to give the Mende their freedom; the overly emotional moments towards the end that, depending on the viewer, may break down the rest of the movie (see: Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan). Some will think these things are beautiful and they resonate with them emotionally; others think it hokey and cheap. I am inclined to go with the latter more often than the former, but it's a long movie with lots in it; I will say definitively that Anthony Hopkins as former president and legal representative John Quincy Adams is the best (former) presidential performance I've seen in a movie yet, so there's a plus.

But Spielberg's methods mean that the history offered in the movie, however emotional, isn't exactly true to life. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University and a man much more qualified to talk about historical inaccuracies than I, runs through some of the problems of the movie in this article. But if you're not inclined to read that, here are the problems that match the thesis of this here blog post: the characters of the movie are constantly bringing up the impending Civil War (which was twenty years in the future), and talk about the case as if it has a bearing on slavery at home (when it fact it was all about the international slave trade, which had been outlawed).

The latter issue is the bigger one. The movie revolves around lawyer Roger Baldwin (played by Matthew McConaughey) realizing that slaves aren't property, they're people. Apart from making white people the focus of yet another story ultimately about black people, it doesn't reflect the truth about slavery in America. As Foner says:

Most seriously, Amistad presents a highly misleading account of the case’s historical significance, in the process sugarcoating the relationship between the American judiciary and slavery. The film gives the distinct impression that the Supreme Court was convinced by Adams' plea to repudiate slavery in favor of the natural rights of man, thus taking a major step on the road to abolition.

The Amistad case is made more important than it actually was; Foner again: 

Incongruous as it may seem, it was perfectly possible in the nineteenth century to condemn the importation of slaves from Africa while simultaneously defending slavery and the flourishing slave trade within the United States. 

He highlights another case of slave revolt, this one with a less pleasing American slant:

In October 1841, in an uncanny parallel to events on the Amistad, American slaves being transported from Virginia to Louisiana on the Creole seized control of the ship, killing some crew members and directing the mate to sail to the Bahamas. For fifteen years, American Secretaries of State unsuccessfully badgered British authorities to return the slaves as both murderers and “the recognized property” of American citizens. This was far more typical of the government’s stance toward slavery than the Amistad affair.

Another less-than-fun fact that sheds a less-than-flattering light on the Supreme Court: 16 years after the Amistad case in 1857, the Court made their landmark decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford argument, saying that African Americans, free or not, were not and could not be American citizens and therefore could not sue in federal court, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in federal territories acquired after the founding of the nation. A 7-2 ruling, this case was much more a factor in the inevitable Civil War than the Amistad case, but it seems Spielberg just couldn't resist giving that power to his own movie, albeit with a more positive spin for the Court and the country.

But hey, as a bit of history, it's one that definitely needs to be told. It's just not as important as Spielberg is leading us to believe.

NEXT TIME: Gangs of New York, violence, and immigration