The Antelope: The Ordeal of the Recaptured Africans in the Administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams

by John T. Noonan Jr.

Account of the eight-year ordeal that resulted when in 1820, a ship containing 281 slaves was intercepted off the Florida coast by a U.S. Treasury cutter.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

John Thomas Noonan, Jr. (1926-2017) was a Senior Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with chambers in San Francisco, California. He was appointed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan.

Affiliations:
United States. Court of Appeals (9th Circuit)
University of California, Berkeley. School of Law
University of Notre Dame. Law School

Reviews

[James Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I turned to this book, which had been sitting on my shelf for some time, after watching the movie The Amistad (a case which arose a few decades after The Antelope). Noonan's history is exceedingly dry but exceedingly well documented. It is indeed, in the words of one of the Supreme Court Justices involved, a rather "peculiar case" where the status of the slaves in question as either property or people, free or slave, was hashed out ever too slowly over an eight year period while the blacks themselves suffered (nearly 50% dying) as captives of a US Marshall.