Amistad & New Haven

COLLECTION HISTORY

The people behind the place.

The Amistad story reached New Haven because Africans who had been kidnapped and illegally enslaved resisted. Aboard La Amistad in 1839, Sengbe Pieh and his companions fought to regain their freedom. Their capture by an American vessel brought them into another legal system and another confinement. The portraits and drawings in this collection should be read as images of people struggling for self-determination, not merely as illustrations of a court case. [SGC94-S2]

From September 1839 until August 1840, the survivors were held in the jail on the east side of New Haven Green. They exercised on the Green, while paying spectators visited the jail. Support, curiosity and exploitation occupied the same streets. They were later moved to a warehouse in Westville while the case continued. This was not the Whalley Avenue jail that burned in 1910; that later building had a separate history. [SGC94-S1]

On March 9, 1841, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Africans’ favor. The legal victory did not undo kidnapping, the Atlantic crossing or the lives lost along the way. Images of the vessel, contemporary portraits and James Covey’s testimony preserve different aspects of that struggle. Historical printed titles sometimes misidentify origins or use language that the archive does not adopt as fact. [SGC94-S2]

New Haven later placed a memorial by sculptor Edward Hamilton at the former jail site, dedicated in 1992. Photographs of the modern Freedom Schooner belong to this later work of remembrance. They show a reconstruction built to carry the story forward, not a surviving photograph of the 1839 ship. [SGC94-S3]