The import of slaves was banned by the United States Congress in 1808, as soon as the twenty year restriction imposed by the Constitution expired and twelve years later made engaging in the banned slave trade a form of piracy punishable by death. From 1837 though 1860, seventy four cases were filed by the U.S. regarding this provision but convictions were few and sentences mostly light, although one individual was sentenced to death but was given clemency by President Buchanan in 1857.
On this date in 1861 an individual was convicted and sentence to death in a courtroom in New York City. That sentence would be carried out on February 21, 1862. Nathaniel Gordon would be the first American executed for engaging in the slave trade and the last to be executed for piracy.
Gordon was born in Portland, Maine in 1826 to a seafaring and, apparently, slaving family; when he was twelve his father was arrested for engaging in the slave trade. By the late 1840s he was captaining ships engaged in the slave trade. We have evidence of some specific voyages - in 1851 he evaded British warships to bring 500 slaves to Brazil and later that decade brought slaves to Cuba.
On August 7, 1860, he loaded 897 slaves on his ship while at Shark's Point at the mouth of the Congo River in Angola. He obtained the captives from local African brokers and Portuguese factor, trading hogsheads of Cuban whiskey, rice, and farina in exchange.
Two hours after leaving he was boarded by the USS Mohican, part of the naval squadron occasionally deployed by the U.S. to interdict the slave trade. In the decades before the Civil War the U.S. Navy freed approximately 20,000 Africans from slave ships. The British effort was even more substantial. From 1808 to 1867 the British deployed a sizable portion of their navy to stop the Atlantic slave trade. Estimates of slaves freed by the British range from 80,000 to 150,000 and over 2,000 naval personnel died while on the patrols. From 1870 to the 1890s the British effort switched to the Indian Ocean in an effort to stop the Muslim slave trade.(1)
The Mohican took the slaves to Liberia which points out one of the conundrums by the efforts to stop the slave trade. When a slave ship was captured, the slaves could not be taken back to their port of embarkation because they would be re-enslaved whether by the Portuguese in Angola or by the African Kingdoms along the shores to the north. The American solution was to bring them to Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves, while the British usually brought the former slaves to their possessions in the Caribbean where they would work as indentured servants for several years and then be freed from all obligations.
Gordon was taken to New York City where he was charged though apparently confident of acquittal based on past history. His first trial in June 1861, by which time the Civil War had started, ended in a hung jury, a result in which bribery may have played a role. At his second trial that fall, the jury was sequestered, and rendered a guilty verdict. Connecticut Federal District Court Judge WD Shipman sentenced Gordon to death adding these words:
Let me implore you to seek the spiritual guidance of the ministers of religion; and let your repentance be as humble and thorough as your crime was great. Do not attempt to hide its enormity from yourself; think of the cruelty and wickedness of seizing nearly a thousand fellow beings, who never did you harm, and thrusting them beneath the decks of a small ship, beneath a burning tropical sun, to die in of disease or suffocation, or be transported to distant lands, and be consigned, they and their posterity, to a fate far more cruel than death.
Think of the sufferings of the unhappy beings whom you crowded on the Erie; of their helpless agony and terror as you took them from their native land; and especially of their miseries on the ---- ----- place of your capture to Monrovia! Remember that you showed mercy to none, carrying off as you did not only those of your own sex, but women and helpless children.
Do not flatter yourself that because they belonged to a different race from yourself, your guilt is therefore lessened – rather fear that it is increased. In the just and generous heart, the humble and the weak inspire compassion, and call for pity and forbearance. As you are soon to pass into the presence of that God of the black man as well as the white man, who is no respecter of persons, do not indulge for a moment the thought that he hears with indifference the cry of the humblest of his children. Do not imagine that because others shared in the guilt of this enterprise, yours, is thereby diminished; but remember the awful admonition of your Bible, "Though hand joined in hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished."
Following sentencing, there were several efforts to seek clemency from President Abraham Lincoln, who was known to be loathe to impose death penalties. Efforts included a petition, signed by 11,000 New Yorkers pleading for mercy. Lincoln rejected all the petitions, including appeals from visitors to the White House, though he granted Gordon an extra two weeks to arrange his affairs before the hanging, which occurred the following February 21. The night before, Gordon attempted suicide by poison but was revived.
It is reported(2) that subsequently President Lincoln remarked of the affair:
I believe I am kindly enough in nature, and can be moved to pity and to pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive or the arm of man can execute; but any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon.
On March 8, 1862 Harper's Weekly published a detailed account of Gordon's slave trading, the suicide attempt, and execution which you can find here.
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(1) Following the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, several West African kingdoms actually increased their slave raiding of tribes in the interior in order to acquire agricultural workers to grow cash crops to replace the revenue lost by the end of the slave trade. In the latter part of the 19th century the British engaged in several wars to stop this internal slave trade. The same occurred in East Africa where Britain engaged in a brief war with Zanzibar to stop its slave trade.
(2) I use "reported" because although I've now seen the quote in several places, I remain uncertain of its provenance.
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