Rarely is the most down-trodden man the most angry.  No matter what ideology they espoused, of history’s best-remembered revolutionaries - from Maximillien Robespierre to Sir Roger Casement, from George Washington to Che Guevara - a great many have actually sprouted from the ruling class that they sought to overthrow.  Disenfranchised even of their ability to fight back, rarely do the most abused rise up against their oppressors.  However, once in a blue moon, they do.

In 1839, one such group of disenfranchised and down-trodden did throw off their chains.  They were a group of trans-Atlantic passengers on a Spanish ferry, heading to the United States for a new life: a life of imprisonment, slavery, and inhumanity.  La Amistad carried a cargo of enslaved Africans, who had been illegally brought into the Americas despite a 20-year-old ban on the slave trade.

However, on the 2nd July of that year, the captives, led by Joseph Cinqué, rose up in revolt, killed the captain, took control of the Amistad, and ordered its return to Africa.  Due to deception by the ship’s navigator, the ship instead headed for New York, where they were captured by the US Navy and sold as slaves.  Only due to the Constitutional oversight of a free and independent legislature were the slaves declared as they legally always had been: free men.

The Amistad case is one of the most famous steps in the history of the abolition of slavery in the United States, and thereafter those parts of the world that still practised the barbarity.  Those that fought back on 2nd July 1839 were down-trodden and disenfranchised, the lowest of the low, but fought back because their slavery was so explicit and so complete.

However, all those oppressed by the power of the state, small and mighty alike, are enslaved as if held in chattel.  Just as the deprival of life by force is murder and the deprival of property by force is theft, so the deprival of liberty by force, always and everywhere, is slavery.