American sailors stopped the ship, and brought everyone to the mainland. No one knew what to do with the Africans. Were they criminals? Slaves? If so, who did they belong to?

　　The Africans did not speak English or Spanish, so they could not explain themselves. The government jailed the Africans in New Haven, Connecticut while officials tried to decide what to do. The slave ship was called the Amistad, and the case became known as the Amistad case.

　　One of the leaders of the abolitionist movement, a man named Lewis Tappen, was very wealthy. Howard Jones says that Mr. Tappen sought to use the Amistad case to gain support for ending slavery.

　　What Tappen wanted to do was to use his almost unlimited financial resources to take these people to court, the Amistad captives, 53 of them, and show that they were human beings, that they had a right to be free.

　　The abolitionists found a free black man who spoke both English and Mende, the language of a few of the Africans. This translator helped explain what happened.

　　The Mende said they had been kidnapped from their homes in West Africa. They were forced to march to the coast. There, white slave traders bought them.

　　At that time, the United States, Spain and many other countries had signed treaties to ban the international slave trade. The United States had also made buying slaves from Africa illegal, but the government did not enforce the law.

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