Four days after the Spanish slave schooner Amistad set sail from Havana on June 28, 1839, the captive Africans rose up, killed the captain, and seized control of the ship. The escapees were subsequently apprehended, and their legal battle for freedom eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where their cause was successfully argued by former president John Quincy Adams. This account by the author of the George Washington Book Prize-winning The Slave Ship profiles these African rebels who risked death in order to be free.