Amistad Failure

Amistad is a 1997 American historical drama film based on the true story of the mutiny that occurred aboard La Amistad (Spanish for “friendship”) in 1839. The ship is traveling from Cuba to the United States and has a cargo of Africans captured in Sierra Leone and held at the Lomboko slave fortress. It begins with Cinqué, a Mende tribe leader, freeing himself, leading to the massacre of the entire crew, save the two Spanish navigators. Instead of sailing the Africans back to Sierra Leone, the cunning navigators bring them to the coast of America, where the fifty-three slaves are captured by the American Navy and sent to jail as runaways, doomed to die for killing the slave traders. A lawyer named Roger Sherman Baldwin, hired by the abolitionist Arthur Tappan and his black partner Theodore Joadson, decides to take their case.

Baldwin first argues how the Africans were captured and planned to be sold illegally in the United States by bringing up documents found hidden aboard La Amistad, proving that the Mende people were actually
In the beginning, Van Buren is shown campaigning for reelection at a whistle-stop train tour, but in the 1840s, candidates did not campaign. People in the movie were constantly talking about the upcoming Civil War, which lay twenty years in the future; twenty years before the Civil War, no one would have dreamed of a war. The film also gives the impression that John Quincy Adams’ powerful speech alone persuaded the Supreme Court. Although Adams did speak for the Africans before the Supreme Court, it was Baldwin’s arguments that won the case. Theodore Joadson is a fictional character and I felt he was an optional character; he was brought in most likely to show the growth of black abolitionism. I would also have liked the movie to focus more on the blacks rather than mostly on