"Amistad" HTH Trivia Quiz

Answer: a carefree, 11-year-old girl

Isabella II ruled Spain from 1843 to 1868. Born in 1830, she would have been 11 at the time of the Supreme Court decision. She was declared queen in 1833 when her father died, with her mother as regent. She would have been 9 when the first hearing was held regarding the Amistad and the Africans.

The film makes her appear carefree when she is shown bouncing on her bed as a child would.

Answer: He returns to Africa.

At the end of the film we see Cinque and Covey on a ship returning to Africa. We hear a narrator say that when he returned to Africa he found his village destroyed and his family sold into slavery. In a 1953 book titled "Slave Mutiny", writer William A. Owens claimed that Cinque became a slave holder and possibly trader after his return to Sierra Leone.

But recently others, including Yale graduate student Joseph Yanielli in 2009, argue that those claims are unfounded.

Answer: Mende

The Mende are a West African people, living mostly in what is today Sierra Leone. The Zulu live in South Africa, while Berbers are a North African people. The Yoruba live closest to the Mende of the three choices, living predominantly in Nigeria. Cinque's membership in the Mende becomes apparent when James Covey, a Mende speaker employed in the British fleet, is found by Professor Gibbs and becomes Cinque's interpreter.

Answer: Southern slave owners

Retired Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun appeared in the film as Justice Joseph Story, who read the verdict. Interestingly, one of the justices in 1841 was Henry Baldwin, but was not related to Roger Baldwin. Regarding the film's characterization of the makeup of the Court, however, only five of the nine justices were Southerners, and one of those, John Catron, was born in Pennsylvania, although he spent his adult life in Tennessee.

Answer: destroyed by the English navy

Lomboko was the slave fortress, or slave factory, located in Sierra Leone. Rather than being a single massive fortress, it actually occupied several islands at the mouth of the Gallinas River. As shown at the end of the movie, it was destroyed in 1849 by the Royal Navy.

Answer: The Amistad Africans are free men fighting for their freedom.

The Supreme Court is convinced that the Amistad Africans were born in Africa and did not satisfy the definition of slaves.

Answer: It was legal in the United States, but the slave trade was not..

Slavery was legal in the U.S. until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, but the slave trade was abolished there in 1808. It was also abolished in the British West Indies in 1807 and in Spanish-held territory in 1820. While half of the US states allowed slavery at the time of the Amistad case, half of US states did not.

However, fourteen years after the Amistad decision, in 1859, the Supreme Court ruled in "Dred Scott v. Sandford" that slavery was legal throughout the United States, thus striking down laws in several Northern states making it illegal.

The Chief Justice in the Dred Scott case was Roger Taney, who had also been one of the justices in the Amistad case.

Answer: John Quincy Adams

J.Q. Adams, sixth President of the United States, was the son of John Adams, the country's first vice president and second President. One of the points made by Cinque in the film and in Adams' argument before the Supreme Court, and stressed by the film's makers, is our connection to our ancestors.

As Cinque said to Adams, "I will reach back and draw them (his ancestors) into me. And they must come. For at this moment I am the whole reasons they have existed at all." Adams was played in the film by Anthony Hopkins, who was nominated for an Academy Award. Playing Martin Van Buren, who was the President at the time of the trial, was Nigel Hawthorne. Ironically, both film presidents were played by British actors, Hopkins having been born in Wales and Hawthorne in England and raised in South Africa.

When the film was being made, some people objected to using Brits as American presidents.

Answer: The Africans are from different tribes.

When Gibbs and Baldwin bring a table into the jail cell of the Africans, presumably to do paperwork in interviewing the Blacks, one group of Africans demand to have the table taken off their "land" and placed in an area occupied by a different group. Thus we see different groups of prisoners are jealous of their space, vis-à-vis that of other groups.

Although the film initially presents Professor Gibbs as incompetent and at a loss as to interpreting the language of the Africans, in actual fact it is Gibbs who discovers the Ensign Covey, who becomes instrumental in translating for Cinque, in the harbor by counting in Mende.

Answer: member of the House of Representatives

Adams' speech before the Supreme Court lasted over seven hours spanning two days. His career in the House of Representatives lasted from 1830, after having lost the election of 1828, until his death in 1848.