28th Congress, 1st Session, H.R. 328. ... A Bill to Indemnify the Owners of the Spanish Schooner Amistad.

£3,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A very rare survival, shedding additional light on the long tail of the Amistad case. Slip bills were printed in limited numbers for use within Congress and, as such, are rarely seen in commerce . “During the moonless early hours of July 2, 1839, several captive Africans quietly slipped out of their fetters in the hold of the slave schooner La Amistad . One of them had managed to break a padlock, which made it possible to remove the chain that reeved them together and held them down in the hold below the main deck of the vessel. Forty-nine men and four children made up the human cargo of the Amistad […] In a matter of minutes the Amistad rebels had turned the ship’s wooden world upside down” (Rediker, 1-2). Having taken control of the ship, they naturally wanted to sail home to Sierra Leone. However, none of them knew how to navigate. The schooner was intercepted eight weeks later by a US Navy survey ship and taken to New London, Connecticut. Their astonishing legal battle commenced at this moment. The United States v. The Amistad trial tested the recently implemented treaty between Britain and Spain abolishing the transatlantic trading of slaves (1817). The African men and women aboard the ship were abducted in Sierra Leone, before being illegally sold in Havana, where at this time the law prohibited the sale of persons not already bonded in slavery. When the captives mutinied and overpowered the ship’s captains, they were acting lawfully as free men fighting to escape illeg

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