Who should defend, in the Supreme Court, these poor outcasts--ignorant, degraded, wretched--who, fired with a noble energy, had burst the shackles of slavery, and by a wave of fortune had been thrown into the midst of a people professing freedom, yet keeping their feet on the necks of millions of slaves?
The eyes of all the friends of human rights turned instinctively to JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

Nor were their expectations disappointed.

Without hesitation he espoused the cause of the Amistad negroes.

At the age of seventy-four, he appeared in the Supreme Court of the United States to advocate their cause.

He entered upon this labor with the enthusiasm of a youthful barrister, and displayed forensic talents, a critical knowledge of law, and of the inalienable rights of man, which would have added to the renown of the most eminent jurists of the day.
"When he went to the Supreme Court, after an absence of thirty years, and arose to defend a body of friendless negroes, torn from their home and most unjustly held in thrall--when he asked the Judges to excuse him at once both for the trembling faults of age and the inexperience of youth, having labored so long elsewhere that he had forgotten the rules of court--when he summed up the conclusion of the whole matter, and brought before those judicial but yet moistening eyes, the great men whom he had once met there--Chase, Cushing, Martin, Livingston, and Marshal himself; and while he remembered that they were 'gone, gone, all gone,' remembered also the eternal Justice that is never gone--the sight was sublime.