Amistad is the powerfully re-imagined history of one of the country's first battles for civil rights. In 1839 fifty-three enslaved Africans, led by a Mende rice farmer named Singbe-Pieh, staged a bloody rebellion on board the Amistad, a Spanish slaver from Cuba. Led by President Van Buren, the pro-slavery American government maintained that the Africans were Spanish property and should by returned to Havana to be tried for murder, but members of the fledgling abolitionist movement forced a series of trials to win their freedom, culminating at the Supreme Court, where the Amistads were defended by former President John Quincy Adams.