District Court decreed that one man, not
of the recent importation, should, by the treaty of 1795 with Spain,
be restored to his master; the rest, delivered to the President of
the United States, to be by him transported to their homes in
Africa.

Before the case could come before the United States Supreme Court,
the President (Mr. Van Buren), upon the requisition of the Spanish
minister, had the negroes conveyed, by the United States schooner
_Grampus_, back to Havannah and to slavery, under the treaty of
1795.

The case created an immense excitement among the friends and foes of
slavery. The point made by the counsel for the negroes being that
they were not slaves, but free Africans, freshly brought to Cuba,
contrary to the latest enacted laws of Spain. The schooner _Amistad_
started on her voyage to Africa in June, 1839, reached New London in
August, and was sent back in January, 1840.]

BUTLER PLACE, April 5th, 1840.
DEAREST HARRIET,

I have received both your letters concerning Dorothy's health. The one
which you sent by the _British Queen_ came before one you previously
wrote me from Liverpool, and destroyed all the pleasure I should have
received from the cheerful spirit in which the latter was written.

I was reading the other evening a sermon of Dr. Channing's, suggested by
the miserable destruction of a steamboat with the loss of upwards of a
hundred lives; among them, one precious to all who knew him perished, a
man who, I think, had few equals, and to whose uncommon character all
who ever knew him bear witness.

The fate of so excellent a human being, cut off in the flower of his
age, in the midst of a career of uncommon worth and usefulness, inspired
Dr. Channing, who was his dear friend, with one of the finest discourses
in which Christian faith ever "justified the ways of God to Man."

In reading that eloquent sermon, so full of hope, of trust, of
resignation, and rational acknowledgment of the great purposes of
sorrow, my thoughts turned to you, dearest Harriet, and dwelt upon your
present trial, and on the impending loss of your dear friend. I have not
the sermon by me, or I could scarce resist transcribing passages from
it; but if you can procure it, do. It was written on the occasion of the
burning of the steamboat _Lexington_, and in memory of Dr. Charles
Follen.

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