While one could consider Cinque a lion, the harsh fact remains that not all lions are free. In this case, Cinque becomes a caged lion, eager to be set free again, and at the same time, unlike the lion as animal, willing to accept the leadership of the weak among the group being transported on the "Amistad." The questions that the movie, "Amistad" raises are not black and white. First of all, the slaves on board the ship mutinied and killed all or nearly all the Spanish crew. The first question, then, is: knowing they were about to be sold into slavery, did they have a right to mutiny? The second question is as former President John Quincy Adams argued, whether they had every right to be removed from the drifting ship and allowed to land and be granted asylum and eventual civil liberties and citizen ship (if they wanted it). It is clear, some two decades before the Civil War and the Emancipation Declaration, that potential black slaves had little or no rights in America. John Quincy Adams was not expected (nor really willing) to be their spokesman. He was interested in the law and its proper application. He certainly was far from what today we would call a "left-wing liberal." No wonder that he suggested that the slaves who survived would have to tell their own stories, unembellished and unadorned by white morality. His point was less patriotic than one might assume at first viewing. The problem with the remnants of the Amistad slave "population" was whether to prosecute them for mutiny, permit them to land in the United States, or to send them back to their native land (where, one can easily assumer, they might be picked up again by slave traders and undergo the same deprivation a second time). Adams' argument centered on whether the slaves, seized by the U.S. from the "Amistad" were property, as the Spanish owners claimed, and whether they should be returned as such property to the so-called "rightful" owners.
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