WHAT HAPPENED TO AMISTAD SLAVE JOSEPH CINQUE UPON HIS RETURN TO AFRICA

The missionary ship arrived in the African port of Freetown in mid-January. The missionaries themselves had grand plans: to establish a mission station in Sierra Leone and imbue the African natives of that region with the fundamentals of Christianity and Western civilization.

But not everyone aboard the vessel shared that same vision.

Meet Joseph. He is no missionary. He has simply come along for the ride. The missionaries have no idea what Joseph plans to do once he arrives, and they are in for the shock of their lives. For while the passionately sincere founding members of the American Missionary Society intended only to build a mission center in the Mende territory, somebody among them was going to hunt African natives, capture them, and sell them. That someone, named Joseph, would become a slave trader.

Not only was such activity morally reprehensible to the missionaries who journeyed to Sierra Leone in 1840, it was also illegal. This is surprising, isn't it? For in an era when slavery itself was institutionalized and thriving, the African slave trade was generally prohibited, even under United States law.

This apparent contradiction was, in fact, at the very center of the legal arguments involving the Amistad case. By now, nearly everybody knows the story of the Spanish slave ship Amistad, subdued by its own captive slaves in 1839. They attempted to sail the vessel back to Africa but instead arrived in the United States. The slaves were jailed in Connecticut, and an international controversy erupted.

The Spanish government stepped in, demanding the return of the Amistad and its human cargo to its rightful owners, the slaves' masters—a pair of Cubans named Ruiz and Montes. They charged the Africans with piracy and murder. The abolitionists countered, arguing that since the slave trade was illegal according to the laws of both the United States and Spain, everyone connected with the capture and transport of the Amistad slaves should themselves be tried for piracy.

Then there was Joseph Cinqué, the slave who led the rebellion aboard the Amistad. Through an interpreter, he spoke so powerfully of his plight that the case was propelled through the lower courts all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. After all arguments were heard, the kidnapped Africans were set free. Cinqué became a hero, so famous that his story would become the subject of a Steven Spielberg movie, so revered in revolutionary circles that even the leader of the kidnappers of Patty Hearst would adopt his name.

Now, remember Joseph—the one you met earlier? The fellow who traveled to Africa with the missionaries and became a slave trader in Sierra Leone? Joseph was not a white American. He was not a European. He was an African native, the hereditary ruler of Komende, an aristocrat among his people. He had been gone for some time and was now returning to Sierra Leone to claim his rightful throne.

And, oh yes, to begin trading slaves.

In history books, it is a mere mention—an obscure footnote to an otherwise heroic life story. Yet if you never knew it, now you will never forget it: that after the United States Supreme Court set him free (a court comprised predominantly of judges from the pre-Civil War South), the slave once named Joseph by his captors returned to his homeland and became a slave trader himself.

Now you know the rest of the story.