| On this day, Joseph Cinqué led 53 recently abducted Africans in the Amistad mutiny, a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish schooner sailing from Havana to Puerto Príncipe, Cuba. The slaves spared the life of a Spanish navigator so that he could sail them home to Sierra Leone, but instead he headed the ship northward, and it was later seized by the U.S. Navy. The mutineers' trial resulted in a surprising victory for the American abolitionist movement in 1841 when the U.S. Supreme Court freed the ... |