Amistad
Produced by Steven Spielberg, Debbie Allen, and Colin Wilson
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by David Franzoni
Released by Dreamworks

If Amistad is not yet a household word like E.T. or Jurassic Park, it may soon be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it. Amistad is really two movies. One, about the 19th-century slave commerce between West Africa and Latin America, is a powerful piece of filmmaking. The other, about American politics and law, is completely hokey and misleading.

Nobody knows for sure, but from the mid-1500’s to the mid-1800’s, 11-15 million black Africans were transported to the New World, a vast undeveloped region with a voracious appetite for unskilled labor. Every maritime nation in Europe participated in this trade. Only about six percent of the Africans ended up in North America, the vast majority going to South America and the Caribbean. By the time of the Amistad incident (1839), the market was largely limited to Cuba (a Spanish colony) and Brazil (a Portuguese dependency). And the only shippers involved were Spaniards, Portuguese, and New Englanders.

In case you haven’t heard, the Amistad was a Spanish ship bound from West Africa with captured slaves to be sold in Cuba. The captives revolted and killed most of the crew. After drifting for a long time, the ship was intercepted by a U.S. Navy vessel and taken into a Connecticut port. (How it got that far north is not made clear in the movie.)

Thus die Amistad case relates largely to the history of West Africa and Latin America. Only by an accident of navigation did it become an American issue, and then only as a case in admiralty and diplomacy. In the long run, it was a minor case that set no precedents. Spielberg wants to make this incident bear the whole weight of the American slavery that lasted two and a half centuries and the Great Unpleasantness that ended it. Thousands of Amistad study kits have been sent out to schools with this goal. The trouble is, as an account of American history, Amistad will not bear the weight. The Amistad had no influence on the nearly four million American slaves in America on the eve of the Civil War (most of whom had been here for generations), on the 385,000 slaveholding families, on the 488,000 free blacks (90 percent of whom, contrary to the usual assumption, were in the South), nor on the issues and events which led to the bloodiest war in American history.

One of Spielberg’s assistants called me early on, wanting advice on the characterization of John C. Calhoun, whom I am supposed to know something about. For a moment, visions of fat Hollywood fees danced before my eyes. Then, I remembered what Grandmother said: Stand up straight, look ’em in the eye, and always tell the truth. I had to say Calhoun had nothing to do with the Amistad case and nothing to say about it. (The assistant, by the way, identified himself as a South Carolinian. By his speech and the fact that he had had a scholarship to Harvard, I assumed he is an African-American. He was very good, almost as slick as a young Strom Thurmond. I would advise him to come home and go into politics.)

Calhoun is shown in the movie (and the actor who plays him is very good) as declaiming about slavery and impending civil war in relation to the case. This did not happen and could not have. I have since learned where the filmmakers got this notion. Like Ken Burns, Spielberg’s people have been taken in by the great Boston-o-centric stream of American myth and “history.” They got the idea of using Calhoun, as well as the idea that the case was some kind of major event and triumph for Adams, from Samuel F. Bemis’s romanticized biography, John Quincy Adams and the Union. The idea of having Adams, one of the nastiest major figures in American history, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins as a shrewd, cuddly old teddy bear could only have come from Hollywood. Get his picture sometime, look at that cold hateful face, and you will understand why Randolph of Roanoke called him Blifel, after the puritan hypocrite in Tom Jones.

Bemis claimed that Calhoun introduced resolutions in the Senate on the Amistad case to thwart Adams. He even quoted two of the resolutions, conveniently leaving out the third, which was specific. In fact, Calhoun’s concern at this time was a different question. British officials in the Bahamas were undertaking to free the slaves on American coastal vessels that came by accident into their waters. (It was common for plantation families to move with their slaves from the South Atlantic to the Gulf Coast states by ship.) The British freed any slaves who came into their hands, although they later paid an indemnity to the United States for this action, an admission of illegality.

Adams was at this time a marginalized figure, a failed President who could not even get elected governor of Massachusetts. Calhoun was much more influential. By falsely setting up Adams as an antagonist to Calhoun, Bemis, and the movie, lend more importance to Adams than is deserved. There is also the question of motivation. It is all a love of liberty on Adams’ part, according to this rendering. (And part as well of the larger myth that, to free the suffering black man, the South had to be brutally conquered.) The fact is that Adams had become President in a election that was brokered in the House of Representatives under cries of “corrupt bargain.” He had proceeded to propose grandiose plans of centralization and mercantilism, repudiating everything that had been taught by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. He was immediately shot down and destroyed by Southern strict constructionists. He hated what one of his descendants called “the sable genius of the South” and devoted his last years to attacking it at its weakest point, slavery. Contrary to Bemis, Spielberg, et al., his “motivation” had nothing to do with freedom or with the welfare of people of African origin.

Foreign importation of slaves was illegal and negligible after 1808. Participation in the slave trade to other countries was also illegal for Americans. But in fact. New Englanders, who had plenty of shipping and entrepreneurial energy, continued to invest and participate in the traffic from Africa to Latin America on a considerable scale. This included the Brown family, who endowed Brown University, and Thomas H. Perkins, the Boston merchant prince who bankrolled Daniel Webster’s career, as well as many lesser fry. The last known New England slave ship, sailing from Maine, was captured in 1862, a year in which oceans of blood were being shed for the alleged purpose of freeing the slaves.

By the 1830’s the British, who had not long before been the largest slave traffickers in the world, had declared emancipation (of a sort) in their colonies and had undertaken to suppress the transatlantic trade by naval power. Many nations, including the United States, approved the object, but they did not approve of Britain’s self-proclaimed right to search and seize other countries’ ships on the high seas, which led to war with Britain in 1812. In 1842, Americans agreed to participate in the suppression of the trade as long as the Brits followed strictly defined rules. Southern naval officers, diplomats, and other officeholders carried out their duties in this regard conscientiously, and generally favored the policy. For instance, Henry A. Wise (later governor of Virginia and a Confederate general), while he was U.S. Minister to Brazil in the 1840’s, made serious efforts to intercept the New Englanders trading Africans to South America.

Except for a few hotheads seeking to provoke the Yankees, there was no interest in the South, even though the demand was high, in slave importations after the early 19th century. No one wanted to disrupt the settled and peaceful system that existed. The Confederate constitution, unlike that of the United States, absolutely forbade foreign slave importations. The determination of Southerners to prevent malicious outsiders to interfere in their society is, of course, an entirely different question. Amistad diverts attention away from the real issues of American history.

But there are other things that the movie also distorts. Adams makes a pretty speech about liberty to the Supreme Court. I cannot find any evidence to prove that this speech was actually delivered. What appears in the printed court record is legalistic, though it is possible the speech could have been made in unrecorded oral argument. In the film, the leader of the Amistad captives, Cinque, is present in the Supreme Court, which did not happen. And there is a totally fictional character, an affluent free black man played by Morgan Freeman. Contra the film, no black man, no matter how affluent, would have been permitted to sit in a courtroom or ride in a carriage with white people in the North in 1839. Especially in Connecticut.

This is mentioned in the film but not dwelt on: the Northern judges ruled against the freedom of the Amistad captives. The Supreme Court, with a majority of slaveholding Southerners, rendered the proper decision: the Africans had been illegally seized and were freed. Then, according to American law, they had to be sent back to Africa. In addition, a law professor tells me that the movie badly distorts the legal issues and proceedings of the case, though these take up most of the film.

Here is the real clincher. Samuel Eliot Morison, one of the leading American historians of all time, wrote in his Oxford History of the American People (1965 edition, p. 520) that Cinque, the leader of the Amistad captives, went back to West Africa and became a slave trader himself! Being from Boston, Morison did not have to give any source for this statement. Some writers have affirmed, others have denied, this story, none of them having cited any source. In fact, except for the court record, everything that has been printed about the Amistad case is in the realm of romance rather than historical scholarship. The court record is full of lawyers’ and diplomats’ lies, but at least it’s a document.

Morison’s story is inherently likely. He was well connected in New England maritime circles. New England ships frequently went to the coast of West Africa to sell rum and buy slaves and could have easily heard news of Cinque. Morison could have had the story word of mouth from an old man who had been there, or his descendants. That Cinque became a slave trader is highly plausible. What else could the man do? His native village had been dispersed. West Africa had little else to trade for European goods except its people. It would have been the best entrepreneurial opportunity open to him. The region’s economy and politics consisted largely of competition between chiefs for market share.

To further develop the hokeyness of Amistad‘s portrayal of American life and politics, let me review the little-known history of another slave ship ease. In 1858, a U.S. Navy vessel intercepted a suspicious looking ship near the Cuban coast. It turned out to be the Echo, out of Providence, Rhode Island, with over 400 Africans on board, many of them in very miserable condition. The officer who captured the slaver was John N. Maffitt, who a few years later would be famous as the commander of the Confederate raider Florida. The captain and owner of the slaver was Edward Townsend, a well-educated man from what passed for a good family in Rhode Island. He alleged that the Africans were all war captives or families of executed criminals and that he had saved them from certain death. He also said that had he completed his voyage, he and his silent investors could have cleared $130,000, a staggering sum in those days.

Maffitt took Townsend to Key West to be prosecuted. The Northern-born federal judge, later a Unionist, refused to take jurisdiction. Maffitt then had him sent to Boston, where the court had jurisdiction on the presumed point of origin of the Echo. There the federal judge also refused to proceed, and Townsend walked free, though guilty of a crime equivalent to piracy in American and international law. (To avoid confusion, it should be pointed out that there was another New England slave ship named Echo that was captured in I860, shortly before the Lincoln crisis in America. Almost two years later, the captain, a man named Gordon from Maine, was hanged by the U.S. government when it was most expedient to convince Europeans that the Union cause was justified by antislavery. As far as I know, this is the only one of thousands of Northerners engaged in the slave trade who was ever punished.)

The Echo, its crew, and captives were taken to Charleston. The people of Charleston provided them with food, clothing, and other necessities and treated them with sympathy. The U.S. District Attorney in Charleston was James Conner, who a few years later would lose a leg fighting in the Confederate Army. Unable to get hold of Townsend, he vigorously prosecuted the crew. However, the juries felt (probably correctly) that the miserable polyglot lot were as much victims as criminals, having been shanghaied or tricked into the voyage. The mortality rate of the Echo captives was over 30 percent. The survivors were returned to Africa, though it was reported that many of them did not want to go. (The story of the Echo case comes from the research of my former student, Dr. John C. Roberson.)

I recount this case to provide some contrast to the cartoon version of American history given in Amistad. The movie presents a distorted picture and very possibly will arouse hatred at a time when it is the last thing needed. The rehearsal of ancient guilt and outrage is not a healthy activity for Americans, African or otherwise. It requires selecting out a few scapegoats to blame for all the long record of the crimes, misfortunes, and follies of mankind. Psychologists call this projection. Its purpose is to save us the trouble of examining our own problems and sins.