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

Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy.

by HowardJones (Oxford, 271 pp., $22.95)

AS HISTORIANS have exhausted thelarger issues of American history, they have turned to the smaller, and sometimes to legal cases--especially those of the nineteenth century, when points of law were being tied together into a loose fabric that would cover much of the nation's later history. Howard Jones has chosen the Amistad case of 1839-41. But the smaller can illuminate the larger, and let it be said quickly that Mutiny on the Amistad is no legal chronicle but an analysis of an important moment in American history that casts a light upon politics and society during the preceding half-century, back to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and similarly illumines the approaching Civil War.

The author begins with the captureof the Amistad off Long Island by an American naval lieutenant. Aboard ship were four children and 39 black adults, plus a crew of two Spanish seamen and a slave--the blacks had murdered the captain and the cook. In a flashback one sees the reasons for violence: the capture of the blacks in their native Africa, the long voyage to Cuba, then transshipment to what was to have been slavery in Puerto Rico. By 1839, Spain had outlawed the slave trade, but Cubans easily continued it by use of false flags, bogus passports, and bribery of local Spanish officials.

To describe what happened once theU.S. Navy toward the sloop into New Haven is to lose the story. The tale itself stands out in the book's opening chapters and in the illustrations. The latter are almost breathtakingly beautiful --the low, slim ship lying offshore, sails partly furled; in the distance, some unnamed merchantman disappearing in a gorgeous fluff of canvas. Likewise the handsome drawings of the defendants as they appeared during the trials: The painting of the blacks' leader, Joseph Cinque, is unforgettable, a mixture of intelligence and concern on his proud, youthful face, and willingness to await the decision of fate.

The case caught the popular attention.In the era of Phineas T. Barnum, the plight of the imprisoned blacks easily turned into a circus. In New Haven visitors tramped through the jail (admission was 12 and one-half cents) gazing at the captives, who smiled in return and often laughed-- their jailer had told them that if they did not laugh they might scare white visitors. For the still curious, some would-be artist, turned huckster, managed a painting, 135 feet long, replete with horrible scenes of death and destruction. Peale's Museum in New York re-created the captives in wax, along with scenes of the mutiny. Boston's Amory Hall had wax figures too, with hair from the captives' heads.

All the while the legalities werespun out, together with many irrelevancies, as the case wound through federal courts--district, circuit, at last the Supreme Court. Abolitionists in the North secured counsel for the imprisoned blacks and created as much of a hullabaloo as they could, hoping to demonstrate the dangers as well as the essential evil of slavery. After prayer and much writing in his diary, the former President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, championed the cause of Freedom (as he would have written it) against the Slave Power, acting as a lawyer for the defense, and typically espied politics in the behavior toward the case by President Martin Van Buren. The redoubtable JQA's vision was hardly clouded. Although Van Buren, true to his role as the Fox of Kinderhook, never revealed what he thought of the Amistad case, even in his loquacious Autobiography, it is a fairly sure bet that he wanted the Amistad's human cargo sent back to Cuba or Africa, posthaste, for the good of his re-election in 1840 and generally for the good of the Democratic Party.

To his credit, Jones has done twothings with this book: He has set out both the human problem and the legal complexities. The result perhaps is a less gripping volume than it might have been, for to combine such disparate themes, the one exciting and moving, the other necessarily detailed and likely to be dull, would have been a trick for any writer. But the legal story is necessary, for several reasons. For one, it shows the litigious nature of early America, when ten lawyers easily could stand on the point of a needle; the mind of early national America was legal to a fault. Secondly, the book's legal explanations show the almost mystical reverence of that age for the Declaration of Independence, the rights of man, the need for government to protect people--a timeless heritage. When old J. Q. Adams drew his audience back to the era of his youth, when he had known the Founding Fathers, his listeners moved back with him in their minds' eyes, even if (as in the case of Justice Joseph Story) they saw that he was being emotional. Thirdly, the book's legal explanations show how politics and human passion had entered legal issues and were drawing the country ineluctably into the Civil War. And lastly, the book demonstrates the learning of Justice Story, one of the nation's truly great lawyers. With eloquence that almost swept Story off his feet, Adams had called upon natural law, morality, all to obtain freedom for the Amistad's captives, to prevent their return to Spanish Cuba, where they would have been tried and probably executed. Story wrote to his wife that it was an "extraordinary argument . . . extraordinary . . . for its power, for its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the record and points of discussion.' Writing the opinion of the court, however, he invoked American law, not higher law, affirming the right of self-defense by persons held illegally.

Freed by American law, not by judiciallegislation, the Amistad's captives sailed back to Africa aboard a ship oddly named the Gentleman, and thereupon disappeared into history.