Issued on March 9, 1841, the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Amistad was the most significant one issued by the Court on the question of slavery before the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The case arose from a U.S. Navy seizure of the schooner La Amistad, its passengers, and its cargo in 1839. Among the passengers—or cargo, as slave traders and owners would have it—were fifty-three Africans, a man named Antonio enslaved by the captain, and two Spaniards. The Spaniards claimed that the Africans were their slaves, but the Africans asserted they were free. For the next two years, American abolitionists provided legal counsel to the Africans, hoping to secure their freedom and to record a legal victory in the battle against slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which had been declared illegal around the world earlier in the century.