United States v. The Amistad was a US Supreme Court case resulting from a slave uprising aboard the Spanish schooner Amistad in July 1839. The captives aboard the Amistad had been illegally kidnapped from Sierra Leone and were taken to Cuba for sale; they rebelled and killed the captain and the cook before forcing the surviving Spaniards Don Jose Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes to take them back to Africa. Instead, the Spanish navigators piloted the ship towards the west, making land near Long Island, New York. The ship was intercepted by the US Navy, and the Africans were imprisoned as runaway slaves, awaiting trial. The slaves were represented by Roger Sherman Baldwin, who was hired by Lewis Tappan and Theodore Joadson, while the Spaniards Ruiz and Montes had their claims to the slaves represented by Secretary of State John Forsyth, and the American sailors Thomas R. Gedney and Richard W. Meade claimed the slaves for themselves as salvage. After the slave ship Tecora was caught illegally transporting slaves (in violation of the Slave Trade Act 1807), the abolitionists argued that the slaves had no other option but to rebel to escape their illegal confinement, and President Martin Van Buren decided that the Afriacn slaves on the Amistad should be freed and allowed to return to Africa. In 1842, the Africans returned to Africa with some American Protestant missionaries.