There was even a popular movie made about it, in 1994, produced by Steven Spielberg, but the Amistad case remains fairly unknown. The legal case, concerning a group of Africans kidnapped from Sierra Leone who mutinied and were captured by Americans in Long Island harbor, went all the way to the highest court in the land, and the subsequent decision changed the course of slavery in America forever.

On this day, March 9, in 1841 the Supreme Court ruled that the mutineers were nobody’s property, effectively freeing them from incarceration and from claims by the Spanish and the Portuguese. The court ruled that as the Africans were kidnapped in contravention of all existing treaties, the United States could not find them “property” lost on the high seas that under international treaty had to be returned.

In short, before the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case, the Amistad decision was the most important legal event concerning slavery in the United States. It gave abolitionists a platform for presenting the horrors of slavery, and for portraying the taken men as not slaves but able-minded men taken from their homes and deprived of their freedom.