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Compare And Contrast Amistad

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Abstract

In 1997, Amistad was filmed. My abstract (Internet) is going to be the compare and the contrast over two credible sources over Amistad the movie and others opinions. Amistad‘s situations go deeper than such anachronisms as President Martin Van Buren campaigning for reelection on a whistle-stop train tour. In 1840, candidates did not campaign or people constantly talking about the coming Civil War, which lay twenty years in the future. Despite the producer’s orgy of self-congratulation for rescuing black heroes from oblivion, the main characters of Amistad are white, not black. In fact, Amistad case revolved around the Atlantic slave trade — by 1840 outlawed by international treaty — and had nothing whatever to do with slavery as …show more content…

This situation violated all of the treaties then in existence. Fifty-three Africans were sold by two Spanish planters and put aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad for shipment to a Caribbean plantation. On July 1, 1839, the Africans seized the ship, murdered the captain and the cook, and ordered the sailors to sail to Africa. On August 24, 1839, Amistad was seized off Long Island, NY, by the U.S. brig Washington. The planters were released and the Africans were incarcerated in New Haven, CT on charges of murder. ("The Amistad Case | National Archives." National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 31 Oct. …show more content…

The two Spaniards who had enslaved the Africans were freed by the Americans, and the slaves were put in jail. President Martin Van Buren along with many newspaper editors, favored extraditing the Africans to Cuba. But abolitionists and other northern sympathizers won an American trial for them.
At a hearing in Hartford, the federal district court judge ruled that the Africans were not responsible for their actions because, they had been slaved the incorrect way. The case got pushed to the Supreme Court, where president John Quincy Adams, defending the Africans, argued that they should be reunited with their freedom. The Court agreed stated that since the International slave trade was illegal, person escaping should be recognized as free under the American law. (History.com Staff. "Amistad Case." History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2009. Web. 1 Dec. 2016.)
The White House position in this situation was weak. Officials refused to question the validity of the certificates of ownership, which had assigned Spanish names to each of the captives even though none of them spoke that language. Presidential spokesmen stated that the captives had been slaves in Cuba, despite the fact that the international slave trade had been banned 20 years earlier and the children were no more than nine years old and spoke an African

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