Sengbe Pieh

Who is Sengbe Pieh?

Sengbe Pieh, later known in the United States as Joseph Cinqué, was a Mende rice farmer and trader born around 1814 in the village of Mani, in what is now southern Sierra Leone. In 1839, while working in his fields, he was captured by slave raiders and marched to the coastal slave-trading post of Lomboko, from where he was shipped toward Havana, Cuba, along with dozens of other captive Africans. Purchased by two Spanish plantation owners and loaded onto the schooner La Amistad for transport along the Cuban coast, Sengbe Pieh freed himself and fellow captives during the voyage and led a revolt that took control of the ship, killing the captain and cook while sparing two Spaniards to help navigate them back toward Africa. Deceived into sailing toward the United States instead, the Amistad was intercepted off Long Island by an American vessel, and Sengbe Pieh and the other survivors were jailed and tried for mutiny in a case that became a landmark of the American abolitionist movement, United States v. The Amistad. Defended in part by former U.S. president John Quincy Adams, the captives won their case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841, which ruled they had been illegally enslaved and had the right to resist their captors. Sengbe Pieh returned to Sierra Leone later that year, though he apparently never located his family, and little is documented about the remainder of his life before his death around 1879.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Joseph Cinqué" · U.S. National Park Service, "Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinque)" · Britannica, "Joseph Cinque"