Amistad Analysis

Opening:

Explanation:

In order to understand the development of the Amistad case, an evaluation of the slave trade and laws outlawing the slave trade will be needed. The Transatlantic slave trade was the transportation of, “10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century” (Lewis 1). This began in the late 14th and 15th century with Portugal's use of African slaves for sugar plantations located on the Cape Verde, Madeira, and Caribbean islands in the eastern Atlantic.Continued by the Dutch, English, and French in the 1600s and 1700s. And ended by European and American countries in the beginning of the 19th century. Before the 1600s no more than approximately 10,000 Africans were transported, “ in the 17th century, however, demand for slave labour rose sharply with the growth of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake region in North America” (Lewis 1). To outlaw this slave trade, nations implemented are variety of slave laws. One being a system of treaties constructed by the British in the early nineteenth century to “suppress both the supply of and the demand for slaves, as well as to deal with third parties involved in the trade”(Keene 2). This treaty system was enforced by

One example of this would be that the ship of slaves were being illegally traded across the world, which is why in the of the film it was the reason why they were sent home. Another notable case of this is in the Declaration of Independence, it states that all men are created equal, as for slaves, they were treated an an inferior class, working for someone with higher authority and nothing could be done because nobody would listen to a slave. On top of that, most slaves did not even know the english language, so they had no say in society