Supreme Court rules on Amistad slave ship mutiny case


Year
1841
Month Day
March 09

At the end of a historic case, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, with only one dissent, that the African slaves who seized control of the Amistad slave ship had been illegally forced into slavery, and thus are free under American law.

In 1807, the U.S. Congress joined with Great Britain in abolishing the African slave trade, although the trading of slaves within the U.S. was not prohibited. Despite the international ban on the importation of African slaves, Cuba continued to transport captive Africans to its sugar plantations until the 1860s, and Brazil to its coffee plantations until the 1850s.

On June 28, 1839, 53 slaves recently captured in Africa left Havana, Cuba, aboard the Amistad schooner for a life of slavery on a sugar plantation at Puerto Principe, Cuba. Three days later, Sengbe Pieh, a Membe African known as Cinque, freed himself and the other slaves and planned a mutiny. Early in the morning of July 2, in the midst of a storm, the Africans rose up against their captors and, using sugar-cane knives found in the hold, killed the captain of the vessel and a crewmember. Two other crewmembers were either thrown overboard or escaped, and Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, the two Cubans who had purchased the slaves, were captured. Cinque ordered the Cubans to sail the Amistad east back to Africa. During the day, Ruiz and Montes complied, but at night they would turn the vessel in a northerly direction, toward U.S. waters. After almost nearly two difficult months at sea, during which time more than a dozen Africans perished, what became known as the “black schooner” was first spotted by American vessels.

On August 26, the USS Washington, a U.S. Navy brig, seized the Amistad off the coast of Long Island and escorted it to New London, Connecticut. Ruiz and Montes were freed, and the Africans were imprisoned pending an investigation of the Amistad revolt. The two Cubans demanded the return of their supposedly Cuban-born slaves, while the Spanish government called for the Africans’ extradition to Cuba to stand trial for piracy and murder. In opposition to both groups, American abolitionists advocated the return of the illegally bought slaves to Africa.

The story of the Amistad mutiny garnered widespread attention, and U.S. abolitionists succeeded in winning a trial in a U.S. court. Before a federal district court in Connecticut, Cinque, who was taught English by his new American friends, testified on his own behalf. On January 13, 1840, Judge Andrew Judson ruled that the Africans were illegally enslaved, that they would not be returned to Cuba to stand trial for piracy and murder, and that they should be granted free passage back to Africa. The Spanish authorities and U.S. President Martin Van Buren appealed the decision, but another federal district court upheld Judson’s findings. President Van Buren, in opposition to the abolitionist faction in Congress, appealed the decision again.

On February 22, 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing the Amistad case. U.S. Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who served as the sixth president of the United States from 1825 to 1829, joined the Africans’ defense team. In Congress, Adams had been an eloquent opponent of slavery, and before the nation’s highest court he presented a coherent argument for the release of Cinque and the 34 other survivors of the Amistad.

On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and had thus exercised a natural right to fight for their freedom. In November, with the financial assistance of their abolitionist allies, the Amistad Africans departed America aboard the Gentleman on a voyage back to West Africa. Some of the Africans helped establish a Christian mission in Sierra Leone, but most, like Cinque, returned to their homelands in the African interior. One of the survivors, who was a child when taken aboard the Amistad as a slave, eventually returned to the United States. Originally named Margru, she studied at Ohio’s integrated and coeducational Oberlin College in the late 1840s, before returning to Sierra Leone as evangelical missionary Sara Margru Kinson.

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Hong Kong ceded to the British


Year
1841
Month Day
January 20

During the First Opium War, China cedes the island of Hong Kong to the British with the signing of the Chuenpi Convention, an agreement seeking an end to the first Anglo-Chinese conflict.

In 1839, Britain invaded China to crush opposition to its interference in the country’s economic and political affairs. One of Britain’s first acts of the war was to occupy Hong Kong, a sparsely inhabited island off the coast of southeast China. In 1841, China ceded the island to the British, and in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was signed, formally ending the First Opium War.

Britain’s new colony flourished as an East-West trading center and as the commercial gateway and distribution center for southern China. In 1898, Britain was granted an additional 99 years of rule over Hong Kong under the Second Convention of Peking. In September 1984, after years of negotiations, the British and the Chinese signed a formal agreement approving the 1997 turnover of the island in exchange for a Chinese pledge to preserve Hong Kong’s capitalist system. 

On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong was peaceably handed over to China in a ceremony attended by numerous Chinese and British dignitaries. The chief executive under the new Hong Kong government, Tung Chee Hwa, formulated a policy based upon the concept of “one country, two systems,” thus preserving Hong Kong’s role as a principal capitalist center in Asia.

READ MORE: How Hong Kong Came Under ‘One Country, Two Systems

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John Tyler is inaugurated as 10th president

Year
1841
Month Day
April 06

On April 6, 1841, John Tyler is sworn in as president. Tyler was elected as William Harrison’s vice president earlier in 1841 and was suddenly thrust into the role of president when Harrison died one month into office. He was the first vice president to immediately assume the role of president after a sitting president’s untimely exit and set the precedent for succession thereafter.

READ MORE: Why John Tyler May Be the Most Reviled U.S. President Ever

Tyler was a proponent of states’ rights and the perpetuation of slavery, and as such was a threat to his own political party, the Whigs, who advocated a strong federal system. When Tyler vetoed his fellow Whigs’ attempt to reestablish the National Bank, most of his cabinet resigned and he was thrown out of the Whig Party. As he had previously alienated the support of the Democrats by denouncing Andrew Jackson’s policies, Tyler became a president without a party who received death threats from both sides and earned the enmity of Congress. His four years in office were contentious, though he is credited with settling Canadian border disputes with Britain and beginning the annexation of Texas.

In 1844, during a cruise down the Potomac aboard the newly commissioned steam frigate USS Princeton, Tyler himself narrowly escaped death. The ship’s state-of-the-art cannon, called the Peacemaker, exploded when the crew fired a celebratory salute, killing several people aboard, including two members of Tyler’s cabinet and his future wife’s father. Tyler’s unexpected ascendance to the presidency and the near-miss aboard the Princeton earned him the nickname of His Accidency.

After leaving the White House, Tyler tried to broker a peace convention between the North and South on the eve of the Civil War, but failed to reach an agreement with Abraham Lincoln on key issues. Denounced as a traitor by the North, Tyler fell in line with southern secessionists and, in 1861, was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives. He died in 1862.

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President Tyler is burned in effigy outside White House

Year
1841
Month Day
August 16

President John Tyler vetoes a second attempt by Congress to re-establish the Bank of the United States. In response, angry supporters of the bank gathered outside the White House and burned an effigy of Tyler. The protestors were comprised primarily of members of Tyler’s own political party, the Whigs, who dominated Congress at the time.

READ MORE: Why John Tyler May Be the Most Reviled US President Ever

The first federal U.S. Bank, created by Alexander Hamilton and set into place by George Washington in 1791, provided a repository for federal funds and issued currency. However, beginning with President Thomas Jefferson, who opposed the idea of a national bank as “unconstitutional,” anti-Federalists in Congress chipped away at the bank’s power and importance. In 1811, President James Madison and Congress let the bank’s charter expire. Although a second Bank of the United States was implemented in 1819 during James Monroe’s presidency, successive attempts by different Congresses to re-charter the second bank were denied by Presidents Andrew Jackson, in 1832, and Martin Van Buren, in 1837. Tyler, as a senator during Jackson’s tenure, had originally condemned Jackson’s attempts to nullify the bank as an “abuse of executive power.” However, as president in 1841, President Tyler, faced with a U.S. economy plagued by wildly fluctuating currency valuation and bank fraud, made an about-face and “betrayed” the Whigs, declaring the U.S. bank a threat to individual states’ rights. When word of the veto spread, the bank’s Congressional supporters flew into a collective rage and stormed out of the Capitol toward the White House.

The rioters hurled stones at the White House, shot guns into the air and hung an effigy of the president that they then set on fire. The protest is considered one of, if not the most violent demonstration held near the White House. As a result of the unrest, the District of Columbia decided to create its own police force.

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President Harrison dies of pneumonia, 32 days into office

Year
1841
Month Day
April 04

President William Henry Harrison dies after serving only 32 days in office on this day in 1841. Harrison holds the unfortunate presidential record of shortest term in office.

Ironically, the man with the shortest White House tenure delivered the longest inaugural address in history, which may have been his undoing. This first presidential speech, delivered on a bitterly cold March morning, clocked in at one hour and 45 minutes. Harrison went to bed at the end of inauguration day with a bad cold that soon developed into a fatal case of pneumonia. Some historians have claimed that a case of hepatitis may also have contributed to his demise.

Harrison was the last president born as an English subject before the American Revolution. A native of Virginia, he attended college with the intent of studying medicine, but opted to join the army before finishing his degree. President John Adams took note of Harrison’s exemplary service in the Indian Wars of the Northwest Territories and, in 1801, appointed him governor of the Northwest Territories (now Indiana and Illinois). Harrison later fought in the Battle of the Thames River during the War of 1812. He went on to become a congressman and the ambassador to Colombia before running with John Tyler on the Whig Party ticket in the presidential election of 1840.

Much to the horror of the political establishment, Harrison and Tyler campaigned in a vigorous style considered unseemly in their era. They used Harrison’s nickname, Tippecanoe, which he had earned during a brutal Indian War campaign at Tippecanoe Creek, and concocted the campaign slogan Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Harrison and Tyler held boisterous rallies during which they handed out free bottles of hard cider housed in little log cabin-shaped bottles. Their tactics, however controversial, were successful, and on March 4, 1841, Harrison was sworn in as the ninth U.S. president.

Upon his death, Harrison left behind a widow, Anna, and three surviving children. His grandson, Benjamin, became the 23rd president of the United States in 1889. Unlike his grandfather, Benjamin Harrison served a full term, but lost his re-election bid to Grover Cleveland in 1892.

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First detective story is published

Year
1841
Month Day
April 20

Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” first appears in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. The tale is generally considered to be the first detective story.

The story describes the extraordinary “analytical power” used by Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin to solve a series of murders in Paris. Like the later Sherlock Holmes stories, the tale is narrated by the detective’s roommate.

Following the publication of Poe’s story, detective stories began to grow into novels and English novelist Wilkie Collins published a detective novel, The Moonstone, in 1868. In Collins’ story, the methodical Sergeant Cuff searches for the criminal who stole a sacred Indian moonstone. The novel includes several features of the typical modern mystery, including red herrings, false alibis and climactic scenes.

The greatest fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, first appeared in 1887, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in Scarlet. The cozy English mystery novel became popularized with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series in the 1920s, when other detectives like Lord Peter Wimsey and Ellery Queen were also becoming popular. In the 1930s, sometimes called the golden age of detective stories, the noir detective novel became the mainstay of writers like Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane. Tough female detectives such as Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski became popular in the 1980s.

READ MORE: The Riddle of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death

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Herman Melville sails for the South Seas


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Original:
Year
1841
Month Day
January 03

On January 3 1841, writer Herman Melville ships out on the whaler Acushnet to the South Seas.

Melville was born in New York City in 1819. A childhood bout of scarlet fever permanently weakened his eyesight. He went to sea at age 19, as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool. Two years later, he sailed for the South Seas.

The Acushnet anchored in Polynesia, where Melville took part in a mutiny. He was thrown in jail in Tahiti, escaped, and wandered around the South Sea islands for two years. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, based on his Polynesian adventures. His second book, Omoo (1847), also dealt with the region. Moby-Dick—his third novel, and the one he’s most famous for—initially flopped and was not recognized as a classic for many years.

Meanwhile, Melville bought a farm near Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house in Massachusetts, and the two became close friends. Melville continued writing novels and highly acclaimed short stories. Putnam’s Monthly published “Bartleby the Scrivener” in 1853 and “Benito Cereno” in 1855.

In 1866, Melville won appointment as a customs inspector in New York, which brought him a stable income. He published several volumes of poetry. He continued to write until his death in 1891, and his last novel, Billy Budd, was not published until 1924.

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