1841

The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Amistad captives, 53 Africans who had seized control of the Spanish slave ship La Amistad in 1839 after being illegally enslaved. Former President John Quincy Adams argued the case before the Supreme Court, and the court's ruling that the Africans had been unlawfully kidnapped and had the right to use force to secure their freedom was a landmark anti-slavery legal victory. The case galvanized the abolitionist movement and demonstrated that the moral and legal arguments against slavery could prevail even in an American court.

Frederick Douglass addressed the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention on Nantucket, delivering his first major public speech about his experiences under slavery. William Lloyd Garrison immediately hired him as a paid lecturer. The speech launched Douglass's formal career as the most prominent Black abolitionist orator of the nineteenth century.