In New Haven, Connecticut, and subsequently in the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., a group of enslaved Africans who had seized control of the Spanish slave ship La Amistad were put on trial for murder and piracy. The case raised fundamental questions about slavery, international law, and human rights, with former President John Quincy Adams arguing before the Supreme Court. In 1841, the Court ruled that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and were entitled to their freedom.

The Amistad case inspired a substantial body of American poetry, from contemporary abolitionist verse by James Monroe Whitfield and others to Robert Hayden's celebrated poem "Middle Passage," which draws directly on the Amistad narrative. The case became a touchstone for African-American poetic tradition, representing both the horror of the Middle Passage and the possibility of legal resistance, and it influenced poets who used the courtroom as a setting for meditations on justice and human dignity.