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Amistad: The Middle Passage

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The movie Amistad, which was set in 1839, begins with many slaves on board a ship. One slave, Cinque, works very hard to get a nail out of the ship La Amistad. The removal of the nail allows him to become free. He then lets out other slaves. These slaves attack the crewmembers. This represents what is known as The Middle Passage. In class we learned that The Middle Passage was the movement or selling of people of African decent, also known as slaves, to the new colonies. In the movie, they referred to slaves as “goods”. The book also informs us that slaves are people that are taken into warfare. The slaves that are worth the most are healthy, young males, even though they were already weakened from the trip to the new world.
When the La Amistad lands on the United States Territory, the slaves are all banded together by chains and put in a jail. The slaves depicted in this movie were treated as if they were animals. They were given very little food and water. The treatment of the slaves stripped them of their humanity. In class we learned that there was …show more content…

The abolitionists brought Baldwin to the scene. His theory is that the slaves were either property or human beings. In law, property cannot be charged of murder; therefore are they humans or whose property they were was the question that was faced in trial. President Van Buren was under a lot of pressure from Queen Isabella of Spain. The case then moves to the United States Supreme Court where Adams represents the slaves. The justices in the movie were all slaveholders so this was going to be very challenging to prove a point. Adam’s speech involved that under the Declaration of Independence all men are created equal. A point was also brought up that if the Africans would have been white that they would be called “heroes”. The reason they would be called heroes is because they were trying to kill those that were imposing to take their freedoms

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