Interesting, but much less so than the history it revises.

Rating: 6/10 (5 September 1999)

Movies about historical subjects often fictionalize. Amistad has a strong ideological slant and revises history accordingly. A review essay in the February 1998 issue of Commentary Magazine describes the movie's bias and offers examples. Here are others. (An excellent historical account is "Mutiny on the Amistad" by Howard Jones.)
The film consistently overstates the black and understates the white role in the effort to free the Africans: 1. The historical role of Dwight Janes (a white New London abolitionist) of alerting American abolitionists to the arrest of the Africans is transferred to Joadson, a fictitious black abolitionist.
2. The historical role of Baldwin and Tappan (both white abolitionists) in requesting the help of ex-president John Quincy Adams early in the case is transferred primarily to Joadson, whose appeal is portrayed as more intellectually and morally cogent than Tappan's. 3. The historical role of Adams in helping defense counsel to improve their case by peppering them with legal questions is transferred to Cinqué, the African leader.
4. The historical pressure from white public opinion in the North, widely favorable to the Africans, is omitted. 5. The film gives no sign of the impressive intellectual strength in the white abolitionist ranks, e.g., the speed and acumen with which central issues in the case were grasped. Within a few days of the Africans' arrest, Janes had outlined the argument in their defense that would be adopted by the Supreme Court. Within two weeks, Seth Staples and Theodore Sedgwick, white abolitionist lawyers, had addressed a memo to President Van Buren, reinforcing the Janes analysis and arguing powerfully against any executive move to take the case away from the courts.
Fictions are employed to suggest that the story's blacks are sharper and wiser than the whites: 1. Joadson's opinion that the destruction of slavery is necessary to complete the American revolution, rudely put down by Adams at their first meeting, is echoed and vindicated by the close of Adams' argument before the Court. Here a person who never existed is represented as making an argument in a meeting that never took place, supporting a thesis that Adams never adopted.
2. Cinqué's superb intelligence enables him to figure out what Baldwin means by drawing lines in the sand, to raise a host of possibly relevant legal points and to teach Adams the perspective that crowns his argument. The divination, the legal advice and the crowning argument were all fanciful.
The film also misleads by anachronistically positing the danger of civil war if the Africans won in court: a fictitious warning by the Southern Senator John Calhoun that their release would be a long step toward war and a fictitious willingness by Adams to accept that result as completing the American revolution. This grossly exaggerates the portentousness of the case. People were not predicting or threatening civil war, despite events far more divisive than a Supreme Court decision based on the illegality of the transatlantic slave trade. The beauty of this case for the abolitionists was that the men who claimed to own these Africans were not Americans. Here actual slavery could be vigorously and triumphantly combatted by the substantial body of white opinion that considered slavery and the slave trade morally wrong, but did not wish to press abolition on the South.
More important, the film creates a false impression re the kind of arguments presented to the Supreme Court in behalf of the Africans, and the basis of their victory. It suggests that the captives were freed because Adams persuaded the court to stand tall with the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers. But in fact only a few seconds of Adams' eight-hour argument referred to the Declaration, and the argument that counted with the Court was made by Baldwin.
According to the Court's opinion, the question was whether these Africans were owned by the Spanish claimants. The decision that they were not was based on a law and a fact: the Spanish law banning the Atlantic slave trade, and the fact of fraud in the ship's papers identifying the Africans as ladinos.
The injustice of slavery is now so central to our moral code that it may be hard for people to understand how any Supreme Court decision could stop short of it, if the justices were responding to the merits. But the Court was applying the positive law of its time. It accepted the rationale argued by the abolitionists from the beginning (Janes to the abolitionist leaders, Staples and Sedgwick to Van Buren) and presented by Baldwin as his second argument. This rationale protected mutinous blacks, provided they had been illegally held as slaves.
In his first argument, Baldwin sought a wider protection, a rule under which the status of a black fugitive would be determined not by the federal government but by the state to which he fled. By this proposal mutinous blacks fleeing places other than the American South could be declared free on their arrival in a free Northern state, regardless of their slave status elsewhere. But this argument (which the Court's opinion ignored) was as firmly confined to positive law as the argument that triumphed. In an early sentence, Baldwin invoked "the great principles of the Revolution," the Declaration of Independence and "the genius of our institutions," but he did not profess to derive his legal conclusions from these premises.

Adams made JUSTICE in caps a continuing theme of his speech, but he was not thereby referring to any provision of the Declaration or any position on the morality of slavery. He was arraigning the Van Buren administration in detail and at length for favoring the Spanish claims when justice required impartiality, and for intervening in ways that justice would have barred. An ex President exposing the machinations of the current chief executive, a former Secretary of State examining and scolding every step and misstep of the present Secretary!
Yes, a helluva story: - the reality much more interesting than the transmogrifications!