Is Amistad a true story? John Quincy Adams really argued the case — the speech Anthony Hopkins gives was written in 1997
Spielberg's courtroom drama sticks closer to the record than most people assume, right up until the summation everyone remembers. Here's which parts happened, which were assembled, and what the real argument sounded like.
The rebellion happened, the trial happened, and a former president of the United States really did stand up in the Supreme Court to argue for the captives. What he said there is available in print, and it bears almost no resemblance to the scene in the film.
Amistad came out on 10 December 1997, directed by Steven Spielberg from a David Franzoni script, with Djimon Hounsou as Sengbe Pieh — called Cinqué — and Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams. The core is accurate. In 1839, Mende captives aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad seized the ship off Cuba, were intercepted by the U.S. revenue cutter Washington, and became the subject of a property dispute involving Spanish slavers, American salvage claimants, and the Van Buren administration. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1841.
What Adams actually did
He was 73 and had not argued before the Court in decades when the abolitionist Lewis Tappan recruited him. He spoke for roughly eight and a half hours: about four and a half hours in late February 1841, then four more on 1 March, after the Court adjourned because Justice Philip Barbour had died mid-case.
His argument ran along lines the film mostly skips. He hammered the executive branch for interfering in a judicial matter to please Spain, went at the documents, and reached for the Declaration of Independence — which was hanging in the courtroom — to make the natural-rights case. Justice Joseph Story wrote the 7-1 decision on 9 March 1841. Adams was never paid.
The speech in the movie
Hopkins gets a long, quiet summation built around ancestry. He explains the Mende practice of invoking one's forebears, then turns to the busts of the founders in the chamber and names them — Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and his own father, John Adams — before asking for the courage to do what is right, closing on a line about civil war being the last battle of the American Revolution.
None of it is from the 1841 transcript. It was written for the film by Franzoni and Steven Zaillian, and it is the only part of Amistad most viewers can quote.
Cinqué's outburst of "Give us free" in the courtroom is also invented.
What else was assembled
- Theodore Joadson — Morgan Freeman's abolitionist is a composite character with no historical original, and a point of contention among historians.
- The judge swap — the film has the administration replace the district judge with a pliable young appointee. The real judge, Andrew Judson, ruled for the Africans.
- Lomboko — the film ends with the Royal Navy shelling the slave fortress. The real Lomboko was destroyed in 1849, years after the case.
- The framing — Columbia's Eric Foner pointed out that the case turned on the international slave trade, already illegal by treaty, and had nothing to do with slavery as it existed inside the United States.
Thirty-five survivors sailed for Sierra Leone in late 1841, paid for by abolitionists rather than by any court.
The film was sued before release by novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, who claimed $10 million over material she said came from her 1989 book Echo of Lions. It made $58.3 million on a $39 million budget and took four Oscar nominations, including one for Hopkins.
For the record: Adams kept a diary his whole life. On the day the decision came down, the entry is short.