Message of the President of the United States ... Claim of the Owners of the Amistad for Compensation, on Account of the Liberation of the Negroes on Board that Vessel.

[Abolition] [Slavery] [Millard Fillmore]. Message of the President of the United States, Communicating The Correspondence in Relation to the Claim of the Owners of the Amistad for Compensation, on Account of the Liberation of the Negroes on Board that Vessel. [Place of publication not identified]: [publisher not identified], 1851. First edition. Publisher's original self-wrappers. 23 cm. 31st Congress, 2d session, Senate, no. 29. Some creasing and chipping to edges. Some light age toning. Very good.

OCLC shows eight holdings (Yale; Williams Col.; US Coast Guard Acdy.; Queens Borough Pub. Lib.; Univ. S. Maine; TAMU; Texas Southern Univ.) Contains the correspondence from Calderon de la Barca (in English translation) the Minister of Spain to the US Secretaries of State in 1844 - 1851 and the replies of the US Government. In February of 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba, a center for the slave trade. Two Spanish plantation owners, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, purchased 53 Africans and put them aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad to ship them to a Caribbean plantation. On July 1, 1839, the Africans seized the ship, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered Montes and Ruiz to sail to Africa. On August 24, 1839, the Amistad was seized off Long Island, NY, by the U.S. brig Washington. The schooner, its cargo, and all on board were taken to New London, CT. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, stating that they were free individuals. Kidnapped and transported illegally, they had never been slaves. – "The Amistad Case," National Archives online. Here Spain lays out its position that the US actions were "gratuitously cruel persecutions against inoffensive subjects of her Catholic Majesty, … fortunately rare in the annals of civilized nations, has been exhibited in the confiscation of the Amistad, its sale and the arbitrary confinement in public prisons, of the two respectable Spaniards escaped from the murderous dagger of the negroes, who had inflicted a violent death on the captain and crew of that ill-starred vessel." Spain therefore seeks reparations. An interesting primary source regarding an interesting and important event.