  In that way the Amistad supports a fuller interpretation than might otherwise be available. Recall that on the conventional, partial reading, the justification for African self-defense is from public sympathy for their actions. Crummell's natural rights reading not only corrects that idea so that the law ought to bend to pre-existing self-defense rights, but that those rights are inferable from our sentimental nature provides a corollary explanation of precisely why public sympathy arises at all. There is little that nineteenth-century Americans would understand about newly arrived Africans on a slave ship; they do not share language, religion, or much of anything else. But the deeply human response to an absurd, dangerous—and so clearly wrong—circumstance arouses in each of us the passion that was stirred in Cinque. Our sympathy arises, not as a condition of right, but as a consequence of it.