"All We Want Is Make Us Free"? The Voyage of Amistad's Children through the Worlds of the Illegal Slave Trade

In Steven Spielberg’s dramatization of the trial of the Amistad occupants, Cinqué the African “leader”, stands up and begins chanting “Give us, us free!” It is a powerful and persuasive testament to man’s inhumanity to man. It is also a complete and utter fabrication. Not only was Cinqué imprisoned in New Haven, but the utterance itself is a corruption of a letter by Ka-Le, one of four child captives, to John Quincy Adams. This essay traces the lives of the Amistad children as they proceeded across the Atlantic to elaborate the processes of enslavement as they pertained to children, the legal regimes to which these children were subject, and the children’s limited capacity to express the autonomy and agency of the “freedom” that Ka-le claimed. The lives of the Amistad children are emblematic of the dramatic increase in the proportion of children in the mostly “illegal” nineteenth-century slave trade.  The conceptual complexity of the slave identity of children is particularly visible in the context of the illegal trade, because slavers consciously tried to circumvent accepted practices of enslavement and of emerging international law. At a number of stages in the legal process, aspects of their lives, such as their ages and cultural backgrounds, were deployed to strengthen the case that they were children, born and raised free in West Africa. Furthermore, a careful examination of the evidence suggests the intriguing possibility that their youth and dependency were largely responsible for why they had become “slaves” in the first place in Africa. A focus on the lives of the Amistad children will demonstrate how the multiple cultural, social and legal worlds through which the children moved proved central to the outcome of the case.