purpose of giving testimony "in any proceedings that may be ordered by the authorities of Cuba in the matter" This was done before the court in Connecticut had assembled to consider the case. Worse yet, the Cabinet, in anticipation that the District Court would decide against the liberty of the negroes, prepared to hurry them off to Cuba before an appeal could be taken. The proof of this is found in a letter written by Secretary Forsyth in which he said: "I have to state, by direction of the President, that if the decision of the court is such as is anticipated, the order of the President is to be carried into execution unless an appeal shall actually have been interposed. You are not to take it for granted that it will be interposed."
Had the Court decided as Van Buren hoped it would do, the negroes would have been marched from the court-room to the United States ship "Washington", and sent, as fast as wind and tide could drive her, to Havana.
By the decision of the Court the negroes freed were only those that had been imported from Africa in the Portuguese ship Teçora. Antonio, claimed as the property of Captain Ferrar, of the "Amistad", was by law a slave, and he would have been delivered to the Spanish authorities had not some conductors on the underground railroad come to hisaid. He had simply disappeared. The schooner was sold for salvage. Mills' Register (October 31, 1840) says she was old and Cuban built. She sold for $245.
Drake in his "Revelations of a Slave-Smuggler" speaks of the "Amistad" as a schooner that belonged to a joint-stock slave-smuggling company "connected with leading American and Spanish mercantile
