When an Old Man Spoke for Those Who Had No Voice

On March 9, 1841, seventy-three-year-old John Quincy Adams rose before the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The former president, long retired from the White House, had been asked to defend a group of West Africans who could not speak for themselves in an American courtroom. Two years earlier, Sengbe Pieh — known to Americans as Joseph Cinqué — and fifty-two other Mende people had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone, illegally shipped to Cuba aboard the Portuguese slaver Tecora, and sold in Havana. When their captors loaded them onto the schooner La Amistad, Cinqué led a revolt. The ship was seized off Long Island, and the Africans were jailed in New Haven, Connecticut, while Spain demanded their return as property.

Adams argued for eight and a half hours over two days. He pointed to the Declaration of Independence hanging on the courtroom wall and insisted that these men and women were not cargo — they were human beings with an inherent right to freedom. Justice Joseph Story, writing for the majority, agreed. The Court declared the Africans free.

The psalmist writes, "He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free" (Psalm 146:7). God's justice sometimes arrives through unlikely instruments — a retired statesman, a courtroom argument, a legal system forced to confront its own contradictions. The God who upholds the cause of the oppressed is never without a way to deliver them.