Echo of Lions — Barbara Chase-Riboud

From the author who brought Sally Hemings to vibrant life for millions of readers comes another controversial and fascinating historical figure -- Joseph Cinque. Here is the story of a black man desperate to return to his country, and a white man trying to save his own from the approaching disaster of civil war. The young African who would become famous as Joseph Cinque, and the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, across whose path Cinque exploded like a comet, are the protagonists of this powerful and haunting epic of the only successful slave rebellion in the history of America and American jurisprudence.

On August 22, 1839, a low-lying, mysterious schooner lay off Montauk, New York. Her topsail gone, her remaining sails tattered and carrying no flag of nationality, she drifted like a derelict. This was the Amistad, a Baltimore built Spanish slaver whose cargo of fifty-three slaves had mutinied, killed the captain and crew, and tried to sail home to West Africa. For fifty-nine days they had zigzagged up the coast of the United States until they were captured and imprisoned in New Haven. Their leader, Joseph Cinque, was branded a murderer and a slave pirate by some, and a revolutionary and defender of his liberty by others in a nation already in the throes of dividing itself into slave and free. Cinque electrified this bitter feud, as an ex-president came to his defense, raising issues that became the first civil rights case in the history of the United States to reach the Supreme Court.