Van Buren was to the slavocrats even more obsequious than Jackson. His spirit was shown, among other things, by the Amistad case, in 1839. The schooner Amistad was sailing between Havana and Puerto Principe with a cargo of negroes kidnapped in Africa. Under the lead of a bright negro named Cinque the captives revolted and killed or confined all the crew but two, whom they commanded to steer the ship for Africa. Instead, these directed her to the United States coast, where she was seized off Long Island by a war vessel and brought into New London. The negroes were, even by Spanish law, not slaves but free men, as Spain had prohibited the slave trade. Yet when their case was tried before the district court, Mr. Van Buren spared no effort to procure their release to the Spanish claimants. He even had a government vessel all ready to convey the poor victims back to Cuba. The district court having decided for the blacks, the government attorney appealed to the circuit court, thence also to the supreme court. Final judgment happily re-affirmed that the men were free. The supreme court trial was the occasion of one of John Quincy Adams's most splendid forensic victories, he being the counsel for the negroes. The attitude of the administration in this affair greatly injured the party in the North, the more as it but illustrated a spirit and policy which had grown characteristic of the party's head. In several instances previous to this time, when ships conveying slaves from one of the United States to another, entered the ports of the Bahama Islands through stress of weather, England had, while freeing them, allowed some compensation. Now, having emancipated the slaves in her own West Indian possessions, she declined longer to continue that practice. Her first refusal touched the slaves on the ship Enterprise, which had put in at Port Hamilton in 1835. Jackson's administration in vain sought indemnity, Van Buren, then Secretary of State, designating this business as "the most immediately pressing" before the English embassy. [1840]