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Black History and Blacks in U.S. History
A Nation Divided
(1840-1861)

Amistad

Amistad
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 5
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   5.52

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    anti-slavery, jubilant, resold, towed, unchained, slavery, seaman, affected, bribe, saying, settled, slave, script, story, punish, defend
     content words:    United States, Sierra Leone, Sengbe Pieh, Jose Ruiz, Long Island, New York, New London, Spanish Ruiz, Joseph Cinqué, Former President John Quincy Adams

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Amistad
By Jane Runyon 		  
1     The story of the Amistad reads like a movie script. As a matter of fact, Hollywood made the story into a movie in 1997. The story is true. The events took place over a two year period in the 1840's. The results affected the way people in the United States saw slavery.
 
2     The story of the Amistad began in Africa. African natives in the area around Sierra Leone were kidnapped. They were sold into slavery. They were put on board ships and sent to islands in the Caribbean. There they were resold. They were sold to plantation owners in the Caribbean. They could also be sold to southern colonies of America.
 
3     Sengbe Pieh was a captured African. He had lived happily with his wife and children near the town of Mani. His village was about a ten day walk from the west coast of Africa. He was a farmer. While working in his field one day, he was taken captive. He was taken to the coast and put on board a ship that was sailing to Cuba.
 
4     While in Cuba, Sengbe was sold to a Spanish plantation owner named Ruiz. Jose Ruiz purchased forty-eight other slaves at the same time. He hired a ship to take his new workers to his plantation three hundred miles away from Havana. The ship Ruiz hired was called the Amistad.

Paragraphs 5 to 14:
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