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📘 Look at the map, then look at the ledger

In 1781, the Zong was somewhere in the Caribbean, carrying hundreds of enslaved Africans toward Jamaica. A map can show the ship's route; it cannot show the people reduced to numbers in an insurance account. Sickness had spread, navigation

4
lessons
~20 min
to learn
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. The Zong: a massacre turned into a claimExplain how the Zong massacre entered court as a marine-insurance dispute rather than a murder prosecution.The Zong's owners asked insurers to pay for enslaved people thrown overboard, revealing how commerce and law made the trade possible.
  2. The Amistad: revolt becomes a freedom caseTrace how the Amistad revolt became a dispute over kidnapping, property, treaties, and freedom.The captives' origins and the legality of their enslavement determined whether anyone could claim them as property.
  3. Three courts, three different questionsDescribe how the Amistad dispute changed as it moved through the federal courts.District, circuit, and Supreme Courts handled different questions before the Supreme Court recognized the captives' right to freedom.
  4. What these trials changed—and what they did notEvaluate the narrow holdings and wider abolitionist consequences of the Zong and Amistad cases.Neither case ended slavery alone, but both made the legal categories and records of the slave trade available for public challenge.

Questions this course answers

What kind of case was Gregson v Gilbert?

The Zong owners sued their insurers for compensation, framing the deaths as an insured loss rather than bringing a murder prosecution.

Why did the Amistad case turn on the captives' origins?

The lawyers argued that the Africans had been kidnapped and were not lawfully enslaved people whom Spain could demand back.

How did the Supreme Court characterize the Amistad captives' revolt?

The Court concluded that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped and transported, so they were entitled to resist and to be free.

What is the fairest meaning of “these trials changed law”?

The Zong and Amistad rulings were narrow, but their records and reasoning became powerful material in wider struggles over slavery and abolition.

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