Slave Revolts Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Slave Revolts - Assignment Example Set in 1839, Amistad reveals the story of a group of recently captured West African slaves aboard the ship of La Amistad from the coast of Cuba, their unexpected voyage to the United States and their plight for freedom under legal complexities. Their leader Cinque recounts that they were illegally taken to a slave fort in the British territory of Sierra Leone in Africa. They were enslaved and eventually transported and sold to Cuban slave markets. During the transatlantic journey, the slaves suffered from torture, random execution and even rape. Because of the horrible conditions that these men endured, the thirst for freedom conquered their fears that led to a revolt aboard La Amistad. The slaves killed their captors in cold blood and directed the remaining crew to bring them back in their home country. However, the ship crew brought them in the United States instead, and the series of legal battle against slavery followed that eventually reached the Supreme Court. The issue of slavery in society up stretched the immoral and callous truth of treating a fellow human being as an object of property and as a marginal individual. In the course of the Amistad uprising, whites bought black African slaves, or anyone with African descent, for additional labor either for their household or in agricultural plantations. Very little rights were given to slaves, while their fate, reproduction and survival belong solely to their owners. It was an atrocious normal way of life as supported by law and politics during that era. Nonetheless, the centuries-worth of suppression gradually developed into an eruption of violence through rebellion and mass disobedience, which later pushed to the American Civil War (Mann, 2008). In addition to the Amistad case, the U.S. Supreme Court backed up the previous ruling of the lower court to give the