A top draw for some of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to New England's weekend Sailfest was surely the Freedom Schooner Amistad, replica of the United States' most famous slavery vessel, even as many were unaware of the suspense behind its eventual appearance at the annual tall ships gathering. The original Amistad was the setting for an 1839 mutiny aboard the Spanish slave ship bound for Cuba with 53 kidnapped Africans who were held in a small New Haven, Connecticut jail for a year before President John Quincy Adams convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to release them.