The Amistad Case is one of the most important to ever come before US courts. It influenced the abolitionist movement and proved that many influential people in the United States were in favor of abolishing slavery on the whole. At the end of a historic case, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, with only one dissent, that the enslaved Africans who seized control of the Amistad slave ship had been illegally forced into slavery, and thus are free under American law.