The legal process begun by the abolitionists in Hartford now entered its second phase: the battle in the district court over whether the Amistad blacks were slaves and therefore the property of Ruiz and Montes. If it could be established that the blacks were not property, both Lieutenant Gedney and the United States marshal in Connecticut would have acted illegally and the Spaniards would have no legitimate claims. To undermine the property argument, the abolitionists would have to establish that the captives, by Spanish laws and treaties, were not slaves. They could not argue against human bondage on the basis of its alleged immorality; Judge Thompson had made that clear. They now intended to make the case a national concern and then seek changes through the legal system that would undermine slavery and promote their ideals.
But whereas Theodore Sedgwick and others were convinced that they had to seek the blacks’ freedom on the narrow ground of a violation of Spanish laws and treaties, Christian abolitionists like Lewis Tappan wanted more. They hoped to convince the court—and the American people—that the Amistad blacks were native Africans, kidnapped from their homeland and deserving freedom on the basis of universal, God-given rights. Not even the president of the United States would then have the power to intervene. In their legal encounter in the circuit court, they had had only a slight chance to win because the law regarding a writ of habeas corpus was vague at best. In the second round, that in the district court, the chances were even slimmer, for legislation supporting slavery in the United States was fairly specific. Furthermore, the district judge was Andrew T. Judson, an anti-abolitionist known for his racist views. The abolitionists’ only hope was to keep the Amistad matter focused on the irreconcilable conflict between natural rights and positive law. Such an approach entailed a further exposition of the evils of slavery and the slave trade, as well as an all-out effort to demonstrate the humanity of the Amistad captives.
For Lewis Tappan the Amistad mutiny was a “Providential occurrence.” Lawyers and jurists would publicly argue the great questions of liberty and property; Americans could see the Africans in the free state they had enjoyed before white men had corrupted them; and it would become possible to turn the increasing hostility toward the slave trade to the recognition that one could not abolish the trade without also ending slavery—“the market that invites the supply.” Tappan intended to keep the Amistad case before the American public, for, as he explained to a fellow abolitionist, the Reverend Leonard Bacon of New Haven, Judge Thompson’s denial of human justice to the blacks was a “simple truth” that would have “lasting effect.” Tappan added, “I have long thought that the heart of the nation would not be effectually touched except through the power of sympathy—either for martyred abolition- ists—or murdered slaves—but did not anticipate such a mysterious Providence as has occurred.” The outcome of the recent trial should cause debates “that will bring up the whole subject matter of slave as well as the slave trade.”1
Indeed, one way the Amistad affair attracted national attention was by involving nationally known figures. John Quincy Adams had agreed to provide informal legal advice to defense counsel. Though not an abolitionist, Adams staunchly opposed slavery as inhumane and contrary to the principles underlying the Declaration of Independence. Adams admitted in his memoirs that the Amistad case occupied much of his time and all of his “good feelings.” He was perplexed by the “multitude of questions” aroused by the matter. Ellis Gray Loring, the Boston attorney and abolitionist follower of William Lloyd Garrison, had sought Adams’s feelings about the case and soon received permission to forward his ideas to Tappan, who turned them over to the blacks’ defense attorneys.2
Adams carefully studied the legal and moral issues before replying to Loring’s inquiries in early October 1839. He recommended that the defense consider several questions in presenting its case before the district court. What was Gedney’s authority for seizing the vessel, cargo, and passengers and for taking them to New London? How could American officials justify holding the blacks for piracy and murder? What were the legal grounds for holding the children as witnesses? Were they too young to offer testimony? If the youths were slaves, were they competent to testify in matters relating to piracy and murder? By what authority did the court hold the blacks at the same time on criminal charges and as claimed property? If they belonged to Ruiz and Montes, did not the laws of slavery require forfeiture of property when slaves committed piracy and murder?3
If the judge had no right to commit the blacks to prison, Adams continued, were they not by writ of habeas corpus returnable before a judge of the state of Connecticut? Though Thompson cited the Palmer case of 1818 in declaring that the circuit court had no jurisdiction over crimes committed on a foreign vessel on the high seas, Adams noted that two years after that Supreme Court decision Congress authorized punishment for piracy, thereby approving jurisdiction. Thompson made an unfortunate reference to the Antelope decision in asserting that slaves were property and had to be returned to owners; Chief Justice John Marshall had made it clear that the Supreme Court was divided over the question and had established no principle. Moreover, the blacks on the Antelope were unquestionably slaves, whereas those on the Amistad were “free men in possession of the ship itself” who held the two Spaniards as property. Adams concluded that the blacks’ “only practical protection” for personal liberty was a writ of habeas corpus.4
Loring doubted that all of Adams’s observations would hold up in court. He agreed that Gedney’s actions were wrong, noting that Sedgwick had called them unauthorized and illegal. But Gedney would probably attempt to justify his acts by the congressional law of March 1819 that permitted salvage in cases where the president authorized naval commanders to seize any vessel “the crew whereof shall be armed & which shall have attempted or committed any piratical aggression.” One may argue that Thompson had no legal right to confine the blacks to jail after ruling that the circuit court lacked jurisdiction; but the prosecution would doubtless have countered that the Spaniards had under oath accused them of the offenses. Loring thought that slave codes permitted incarceration of slaves as both property and suspected criminals. If the courts found slaves guilty of a crime, he believed, the right to ownership would be suspended only while they were in jail. Once released, the slaves would revert to the master. Finally, Loring was certain that a state judge could release a person under a writ of habeas corpus, even though that person was in jail for violating a federal law. This was a controversial question, Loring admitted, but he thought that legal authorities held this view.5
As Loring viewed the case, the defense had to show that the color of the Amistad captives had determined the verdict. “Can any one believe,” he asked, “that Judge Thompson would have remanded white men to prison, there to lie for months, or years perhaps, till the question of their freedom had been regularly adjudicated by the court of the highest appeal?” The only remedy was a “wholesale & quickened state of public opinion.”6
On November 19, the day district court convened, Adams expanded his thoughts about the Amistad case in another letter to Loring. Adams emphasized that Gedney’s seizure of the vessel was the “foundation of all the other questions of the case.” From that illegal act on, the blacks were victims of false imprisonment. The congressional act of 1819 did not justify Gedney’s action, for it applied to piracy by a crew upon another vessel, and could have no bearing upon a rebellion led by “passenger slaves.” Furthermore, Thompson had justified his decision by the Palmer case—that American courts had no jurisdiction over piracy of a foreign vessel—and this was “directly adverse” to Gedney’s claim to authority. Thompson’s decision, Adams declared, constituted abdication of a right necessary to any nation: jurisdiction over pirates, regardless of national origin. The Amistad case should also have come to trial because Thompson had no duty to “prejudge a case of life and death.” The blacks were not slaves at the time of capture, Adams insisted; they had freed themselves by “self-emancipation.” Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795 made no reference to fugitive or self-emancipated slaves, and one could never demand the surrender of rebellious slaves on the basis of some general provision relating to the return of property. If slaves were property, Adams asserted, they were property of a “peculiar character” and had to be “specially named.” The Amistad blacks had exercised their “natural right to liberty by conspiracy, insurrection, homicide and the capture of the ship.”7
The abolitionists had found an important ally in their emphasis on natural rights, but recent newspaper stories reminded them that they still faced widespread racial prejudice. As one Southern newspaper insisted and several Northern papers agreed, color was “incompatible with freedom.” Cinqué, especially, was not above reproach—even if the stories were untrue. The New York Evening Star, in a brief article entitled “Cat out of the Bag,” reported Tappan’s alleged admission that Cinqué “owed a debt in Africa and GAVE A MAN for half of it, and not being able to satisfy the balance of the claim, was violently seized himself” With satisfaction, the New Orleans Times Picayune declared that the “black piratical murderer” was a “slave dealer and a slave seller himself.” A correspondent to the New York Morning Herald spoke derisively of the “poor Africans,” “who have nothing to do, but eat, drink, and turn somersaults—a far more happy life than they ever enjoyed in Africa.” The paper published an engraving allegedly showing a “faithful representation” of a scene in the Hartford jail: Cinqué kissing a young white girl handed him by her mother, while another black was turning a somersault; white visitors who were “fashionable, pious, learned, and gay people of Connecticut,” all listening to “lectures and instructions in African philosophy and civilization”; the blacks “scratching themselves and laughing at the ‘white mans’ with great glee.” In the corner of the engraving, the paper noted, was a “very excellent likeness” of Tappan with his white hat off, “looking upon the hero Cinqué enjoying the sweet lips of the white little girl, and drinking in the new philosophy with great sanctimoniousness.” Only time, according to the New York Advertiser & Express, would show “what mischievous consequences may follow their ridiculous fraternizing with the barbarians who would, probably, eat them, if they could catch them in their native country!”8
With a month to pass before district court proceedings began, Tappan resorted to a legal measure designed to prolong the litigation even further and thereby keep the affair before the nation. He arranged to have the Amistad blacks bring civil suits against Ruiz and Montes for assault and battery and for false imprisonment. Such suits would entail jury trials, which would further publicize the cause. They also had another advantage in that they would shift the proceedings from Connecticut (where slavery was legal until 1848) to New York (a free state), where they had a better chance to win. If they did win, the decisions might dissuade Judge Judson, a Democrat, from deciding in favor of the Van Buren administration’s wish to return the blacks to Spanish authorities. The chances of winning were small, as Tappan realized, but the very act of bringing the suits would cause a public sensation.
The suits might have been precipitated by the publication of the two Spaniards’ “Narrative” of the mutiny in which they attempted to exonerate themselves of charges that they had cruelly abused the blacks on the Amistad. Tappan dismissed it as a “lame account” that needed correctives by the publication of the captives’ own story. Ruiz and Montes contradicted themselves, he declared. How could they have engaged in conversations with the African captives? Civil suits against the Spaniards would permit the blacks to present their side in court. To Joseph Sturge, his friend and fellow abolitionist in England, Tappan explained that the purpose of the suits was to determine whether a man, “although he is black,” could find justice in the American court system.9
To counter the Spaniards’ narrative, the abolitionist George E. Day published two long letters to the editors of the New York Journal of Commerce (owned by the Tappan brothers), which presented the blacks’ version of the mutiny. Day had been a professor at the New York Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, and he had established a limited communication with the blacks through sign language. His letters probably embellished things, but they achieved their purpose of arousing considerable public sympathy. Day claimed that Cinqué recalled that in Havana nearly all of the blacks were in tears, including himself, “because they had come from the same country, and were now to be parted forever.” Separate accounts by Cinqué, Grabeau, and others agreed that the blacks on the Amistad had undergone cruel treatment throughout the voyage—having been driven to hunger and thirst by inadequate provisions and, after repeated beatings and floggings, having had vinegar and gunpowder rubbed into their wounds. Cinqué claimed that he had led the others in revolt because the cook said, they would be eaten upon reaching land. Grabeau declared that this had “made their hearts burn.” Their only objective, Cinqué asserted, was freedom, and “if he tells a lie, God sees him by day and by night.”10
To discredit the Spaniards’ account further, Tappan informed the Reverend Bacon in New Haven that he wanted affidavits from the captives calling for the arrest of Ruiz and Montes. Such a move, Tappan hoped, would draw more attention to the case by causing a furor among both the proslavery press and Southern slaveowners. Ruiz had recently left Hartford, and Tappan wanted Dwight P. Janes in New London to have both men arrested if they appeared. Staples, according to Tappan, thought that Baldwin should have Ruiz arrested in New Haven. In any event, Tappan wrote Baldwin, it was better to have the men arrested in Connecticut than in New York; this suggests that he was less interested in winning the case than in confronting proslavery elements for the sake of publicity.11
But both Spaniards had already arrived in New York City, where on October 17 Tappan himself carried the writs to the sheriff and volunteered to accompany his deputy in pointing out the accused. The two men encountered Ruiz and Montes at their hotel, where the deputy sheriff arrested the Spaniards on two civil suits in state court for assault and battery and for false imprisonment. To complicate the matter, Tappan had arranged for one of the suits to come from the New York court of common pleas and the other from the state’s superior court. Cinqué and another of the captives, Fuliwa, had given the affidavits in New Haven, demanding joint damage claims totaling $3,000. After bail was set at $1,000 each, both Spaniards were taken to the city prison. The real objective of the abolitionists, according to the New York Commercial Advertiser, was to force another public discussion of the legal questions.12
The arrests caused the national sensation that Tappan had envisioned. He happily wrote Sturge that the Amistad case was “exciting the attention of the American people.” Sturge later claimed that, “more than all,” the abolitionists’ purpose was to keep the blacks “constantly before the public, not only for their own sakes, but that a portion of the sympathy and right feeling which was elicited in their favor might be reflected towards the native slave population of the country, whose claim to freedom [rested] upon the same ground of natural and indefeasible right.” Theodore Dwight Weld assured Gerrit Smith that the Amistad case had done “wonders” for the abolitionist cause. “God’s Providence is the Monarch Emancipator!”13 If Tappan had meant the arrests of Ruiz and Montes to maintain public interest in the case, he could have devised no better scheme.
News of the arrests angered anti-abolitionists in the North as well as defenders of slavery in the South. The conservative New Yorker Philip Hone noted in his diary the great excitement caused by this “outrageous proceeding.” Under the “specious cloak of an abstract opposition to slavery,” the abolitionist fanatics could start a civil war. Several Northern newspapers were irate. According to one, the “savages” of the Amistad were “merely the tools of the abolitionists in this gross act of inhumanity and outrage.” It was ridiculous, added another, that pirates and robbers could have their victims thrown into jail. Others remarked that the abolitionists, as “self-constituted agents” of the blacks, were guilty of a “continued perversion of truth,” and had made their protégés “quite obstinate and unmanageable.” Two foreigners had sought court protection after narrowly escaping death and were instead thrown into jail on the “suborned affidavit of an uneducated ignorant heathen.” In a statement foreshadowing controversies soon to erupt over sojourner and fugitive slaves, the New York Advertiser & Express declared, “The next step we shall hear of will be the arrest and imprisonment of Southern gentlemen traveling in the Northern States at the suit of their own servants.” The Southern press naturally joined the chorus. In an article entitled “STRANGE PROCEDURE,” the New Orleans Times Picayune accused the abolitionists of “going to all lengths to screen the black murderers from the consequences of their crimes.” The Richmond Enquirer declared that the abolitionists should be in “lunatic asylums.” Did they plan to “make the blacks our masters?”14
The Spanish reaction to the arrests was also instant and heated. The Spanish paper in New York, Noticioso de Ambos Mundos, asked how these “unfortunate, friendless Spaniards” could be imprisoned. It was shameful that the abolitionists should “discredit the cause of freedom” by supporting “notorious murderers” and “savages.” The new Spanish minister to the United States, Pedro Alcántara de Argaiz, hotly protested the arrests as a “scandalous deed,” claiming that a foreign court had no jurisdiction in matters out of its province and repeating his predecessor’s argument that the president should surrender the blacks to Spanish authorities. The depositions, Argaiz remarked, were “so identical as to appear to have been dictated by one and the same individual.” The blacks have admitted to “their state of slavery by confessing that they have been sold.” When and where did a slave have “civil rights”? Pinckney’s Treaty, Argaiz pointed out, stipulated that in cases of seizure for “offenses committed by any citizen or subject of the one party within the jurisdiction of the other, the same shall be made and prosecuted . . . according to the regular course of proceedings usual in such cases.” New York courts should never have listened to the blacks’ complaints, for the alleged offenses had not occurred within their jurisdiction. In an ironic twist, Argaiz urged the executive to use a writ of habeas corpus to secure freedom and indemnification for Ruiz and Montes.15
The Van Buren administration was again in an uncomfortable situation. Eastern newspapers agreed with the Spanish minister that the president should surrender the blacks because American ships might likewise need aid if forced into Cuban waters. And yet the abolitionists had aroused so much public sympathy for the blacks that this once obvious remedy was no longer so obvious. Van Buren could not make a move that would condemn the Amistad blacks to certain execution in Cuba and turn reform-minded Americans against a White House that seemed inhumane. In reply to Argaiz’s note, Forsyth made a major concession to the abolitionists’ argument that they, of course, could not have known. The suits against Ruiz and Montes, he noted, came from “certain colored men, natives of Africa,” who in a “simple case of resort by individuals against others” sought recompense in courts “equally open to all without distinction.” The president could not intervene in this judicial matter.16
The Van Buren administration was attempting to squirm out of the tight position the abolitionists had forced it into. In doing so, Forsyth had adopted two irreconcilable legal positions at the same time, and yet both furthered the secretary’s purpose of keeping the matter under executive control. Whereas he had earlier leaned toward returning the blacks as property in accord with Pinckney’s Treaty, he now privately referred to the Amistad captives as Africans and not as slaves, implying that the White House had conceded the abolitionists’ major claim that the blacks were persons victimized by the slave trade. If this change in policy appeared consistent only with political expediency, it explains Holabirďs surprising switch in tactics during the circuit court hearing of the preceding September. The stance offered the district judge the option of authorizing the president to return the blacks to Africa, in line with the congressional act of 1819. Furthermore, while Forsyth had admitted that the blacks were individuals having the right to bring civil suits in American courts, he also pointed out that Ruiz and Montes could seek indemnification in those same courts.17
Forsyth’s intention seems unmistakable: he sought to relieve the president of responsibility in the case. But this objective was becoming increasingly elusive. Had the secretary of state agreed that Van Buren could interpose his authority in New York, as Argaiz wanted, the action would have raised an outcry from states’ rightists in both the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic party. More important, the action would have exceeded the powers of the executive. There appeared to be only one way out of this quandary. If the president conceded the matter to the state courts, he could escape blame for the outcome and, at the same time, dignify the move by referring to provisions in the Constitution. Moreover, the chances were that Judson, a loyal supporter of the administration, might resolve the entire problem by ruling that the president should surrender the blacks as property to Spanish authorities, in line with Pinckney’s Treaty. It appears safe to say that when the Van Buren administration weighed the alternatives, its most important consideration was reelection.
The White House was deeply concerned about the proceedings in New York and resorted to questionable tactics designed to further a court decision favorable to Ruiz and Montes. Although Forsyth told Argaiz that the executive could not intervene in civil suits, he committed that office to actions that constituted a violation of its powers. In a note (a copy of which he gave Argaiz), he informed the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, Benjamin F. Butler, that to assure the release of the two Spaniards and to win an indemnity, Butler’s office should be “useful” to Ruiz and Montes and offer “advice” and “aid, if necessary.”18 The Van Buren administration had renounced interference with the judicial process, and yet it had offered the Spaniards assistance needed to win the case. No help, of course, went to the blacks, and this raises questions about legal ethics as well as about the legality itself. The two parties were not receiving equally the constitutional guarantees of fair legal treatment. Justice did not consist in the presidency’s helping one side and not the other.
Amid growing excitement Judge Inglis of the New York Court of Common Pleas held preliminary hearings in his chambers on October 22. Neither plaintiffs nor defendants were present, and attorneys for both sides were extraordinarily careful about presenting their cases before a judge equally cautious about hearing the charges. Counsel for Ruiz and Montes—a young, hot-tempered lawyer of Spanish extraction, John Purroy—declared that his clients could not put up bail of $1,000 each and would go to jail. Ruiz, Purroy insisted, had not known and still did not know that Cinqué was African by birth. Ruiz and Montes had loaded their fifty-three blacks onto the Amistad before dark, not during the night to avoid British cruisers, as the opposition had alleged. The blacks had not been in manacles on board and had had sufficient provisions. Ruiz thought that Tappan had brought the suit against him and had done so without the plaintiff's approval or knowledge. At one point Purroy lashed out at Tappan, who was present at the hearing, calling him a “Judas” and “arch fiend.” Seth Staples responded by castigating the lawyer, noting that the “Spirit of Slavery” had so darkened the atmosphere that its “direful influence” had “debauched” this court and the entire nation. After Inglis brought the proceedings back to order, Theodore Sedgwick, also representing the blacks, argued that the jury process was the only way to decide whether his clients were free or slave. The least Ruiz and Montes could claim was that they had bought contraband goods and aided the slave trade.19
Within a week Inglis convened a second session in his chambers, during which he noted the importance of slavery to the case. He explained that by general rule he could not judge the merits of a cause in chambers and that therefore he could not decide whether the plaintiff was a slave belonging to Ruiz. In a statement that infuriated abolitionists, Inglis explained that should he rule that Cinqué was a slave, the plaintiff's case would collapse, for a slave could not bring civil action against his master. Inglis knew that slavery was the central issue in the controversy, but he assumed that at this introductory stage of the proceeding the plaintiff had a right to bring action for personal injury, without making reference to the relationship of master and slave.20
Inglis was ready to give his opinion in this hearing. The only questions before the court, he said, were whether the plaintiff could show that the defendants had violated his personal rights, and, if so, whether bail at $1,000 was too high. Inglis decreed that the court could not hold Montes for assault, because He had been a bystander when the cook on the Amistad hit Cinqué. Ruiz, however, had given “apparent consent” to the trespass and was therefore a “co-trespasser.” He claimed to be Cinqué’s owner and yet had done nothing to stop the cook from striking the plaintiff. But the affidavits did not establish that Ruiz either put Cinqué on the Amistad or imprisoned him. They also did not link Ruiz with the claimed kidnapping in Africa; nor did they affirm “atrocity or oppression” beyond the alleged imprisonment. The judge could not believe that a jury would award sufficient damages to the plaintiff to justify a bail so high. Inglis freed Montes on common, or nominal, bail, which actually released him on his own recognizance, and reduced Ruiz’s bail to $250.21
Ruiz’s attorney planned an immediate appeal to prevent future litigation. Nearly forty other blacks from the Amistad, Purroy feared, could bring similar suits against his client.22
Inglis’s ruling won approval in the state’s higher courts. The superior court upheld the decision against Ruiz and stipulated that no one could begin a similar process against either of the Spaniards until a jury had decided the present case of Cinqué v. Ruiz. In the other suit, Fulah [Fuliwa] v. Ruiz, the New York Supreme Court used the same grounds for a decision that Inglis had used. Bail was also $250, affirming the court’s jurisdiction and the plaintiff's right to a jury decision on the question of his freedom and the amount of injury sustained.23
Minister Argaiz expressed incredulity at the ruling. The whole world, he declared, knew that a court could not deal with “crimes or delinquencies committed in other countries, or other jurisdictions, and under other laws.” Furthermore, no court would admit “petitions or accusations of slaves against their masters.” Was there no federal power to “interpose its authority to put down the irregularity of these proceedings?” Surely the United States government had the power to halt Ruiz’s “suffering” and “unjust and unlawful imprisonment.” Argaiz warned that if the secretary of state was unable to execute the treaty of 1795, the treaty likewise did not bind Spain.24
The abolitionists, meanwhile, did not let the matter rest. Despite the superior court’s decision, another Amistad captive, Tonni, brought the same charges before the circuit court, which set bail at $800. The case threatened to become farcical because Ruiz was still in jail on Cinqué’s charge. The abolitionists insisted that this was not a new proceeding; it was the continuation of a process already begun. The Richmond Enquirer complained that the “ultra-abolitionists” had gone too far. Raising the specter of future arguments over fugitive slaves, it asked whether this meant that “if a master from the South claimed his slave in New York, the abolitionists would be able to secure an affidavit from the slave that asserted his freedom and claimed damages for his detention—thus placing the master before a state judge to put up bail or go to prison, and with the entire case resting in a prejudiced and fanatical jury.” If the abolitionists’ purpose was to stir the South’s fears, they were successful. For the moment, though, the Emancipator rejoiced that the abolitionists had won a “great point” in showing that blacks could bring civil suits.25
For the Van Buren administration, the outlook seemed grim—especially since Butler himself did not appear to be doing enough in New York. He had offered his services to Ruiz’s defense counsel. He visited Ruiz in jail, trying to secure more facts in the case. From Purroy he acquired a copy of the papers and a statement of proceedings. After checking into the law of Cuba with Purroy and then contacting a Spanish lawyer who had been for many years a judge in Havana, Butler could find no new arguments for Ruiz’s release. Although American courts lacked jurisdiction over criminal offenses by foreigners within the territory of a foreign state, under the principle of reciprocity they had jurisdiction over civil suits between foreigners inside the United States that arose under contracts made in a foreign state, as long as Americans could also institute similar civil actions in that foreign state. The former judge in Cuba affirmed that Cuban courts would allow such civil suits there. Butler believed that the only recourse was to go ahead with the trial, confident that a jury would acquit Ruiz. If the court rendered an adverse decision, he would advise the proper steps for appeal, even to the United States Supreme Court.26
The atmosphere intensified as charges appeared in the New York Evening Journal that the Van Buren administration had made an arrangement whereby Ruiz would flee the country after procuring bail. Butler defended the White House. He admitted that both he and Ruiz’s attorney, Purroy, had advised Ruiz to post bail and free himself—but not to escape. Ruiz, however, had refused to do so, claiming it was the duty of the United States government to secure his release. It was a “national matter,” he insisted. Butler emphasized to Ruiz that he, as a district attorney in New York, had no power to provide or secure bail for him and that his only action could be to offer advice and aid. But Ruiz preferred to remain in jail, continuing to argue that he was part of a larger issue—one between his government and that of the United States—and that his incarceration was a small price to pay for principle.27 His decision for confinement eased accusations of collusion between the White House and Ruiz, but it did not relieve the embarrassment occasioned by the constitutional workings of federal-state relations and of the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government.
Excitement over the arrests ultimately came to nothing, however, because Montes had meanwhile left the country for Cuba, and although Ruiz remained in jail for nearly four months, he finally paid bail and joined his companion after realizing that his case was not going to become an international issue. Though he had been depicted as languishing in jail, Ruiz had been in a highly relaxed confinement that allowed him any provisions he could buy and considerable freedom to come and go from his quarters. Because Ruiz appeared confident that the United States would surrender him on application of the Spanish minister, the Emancipator denounced his decision to forgo bail as a “ruse to excite sympathy, and prejudice the community against the Africans and their defenders.” Tappan later sarcastically remarked to an abolitionist friend in England that Ruiz had only wanted to embroil the United States and Spain in controversy—and “merely for stealing half a hundred men and women!”28
Relations with Spain further deteriorated as Argaiz repeatedly tried to persuade the Van Buren administration to intervene and secure Ruiz’s release. Ruiz and Montes, he charged in an unexplained and curious statement, were “victims of an intrigue, as accurately shown by Mr. Forsyth, in the conference which he had with the undersigned on the 21st of October last.” The arrests, Argaiz asserted, had exacerbated the entire Amistad question. Both political and racial considerations, he believed, were involved in the White House stand. Had not Forsyth told him (with a Spanish associate of Argaiz’s present) that the president’s “hands were tied” and that he could not release Montes and Ruiz “without causing a public outcry” among Americans sympathetic to the Amistad captives and hurting his chances for reelection? Argaiz was also “well persuaded” that had the Amistaďs crew been white, the United States “would have observed the rules by which it should be conducted under the constitutional institutions of the country, and would have limited itself to the ascertainment of the facts of the murders.” In a statement laden with sarcasm, Argaiz declared that he did not “comprehend the privilege enjoyed by negroes” in the United States.29
Tappan had succeeded in his major objective of drawing national attention to the Amistad matter by having Ruiz and Montes arrested; however, little of the reaction was favorable. The New York Evening Star claimed that Ruiz’s four-month imprisonment had taken the United States back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition. The New Orleans Times Picayune called for controls on “TAPPANISM.” A letter signed “Vindex” in the New York Advertiser & Express defended the two Spaniards on the ground that they had done what American planters in Cuba did every day: they purchased slaves in the public market for use on island estates. The abolitionists sought not justice for the blacks, Vindex asserted, but more exposure of the Amistad case. Less than a week afterward, “Fiat Justitia” replied to Vindex that both seller and purchaser were guilty; according to the proverb, “the receiver is as bad as the thief” Ruiz had committed a “gross injustice” by “attempting to reduce to perpetual servitude these innocent young men.”30
The Ruiz-Montes episode demonstrated the tenuousness of the abolitionists’ position. Tappan had provided critics with evidence for their charges that the abolitionists were fanatics willing to do anything to further their cause. If he had hoped that the allowance of a civil suit against the Spaniards would confirm that blacks were persons, he had been mistaken. More important, he had encouraged the popular view that the abolitionists, despite their claims of wanting to build a nation based on just laws, seemed determined to bring chaos that would destroy the present government. Tap- pan’s strategy had perhaps cost the abolitionists—and the blacks themselves—more public favor than he would have admitted. And yet, on another level, he had succeeded in placing pressure on the Van Buren administration. The abolitionists’ activist strategy was risky because it relied heavily on public opinion, which was always subject to changing emotions and fluctuation. The delicacy of their reformist approach becomes evident when one realizes that, if newspapers were a reliable index of opinion, public sympathy for the captives considerably dissipated during the Ruiz-Montes controversy. Whatever the final verdict on this series of events, the Amistad captives could not escape their appointed time before District Judge Andrew T. Judson.