Captain Nathaniel Gordon, the Only American Executed for Violating the Slave Trade Laws

Captain Nathaniel Gordon, the Only American Executed for Violating the Slave Trade Laws James A. Rowley Early on an August morning in 1862, the lookouts on the USS Mohican, a member of the African Squadron, sang out, "Full-rigged ship off the port bow." Steaming across the broad entrance to the Congo River, intent on apprehending violators of American slave trade laws, the Mohican, Comdr. SyIvanus W. Godon, signaled the Erie to show its colors. The Erie responded by raising the American flag and shortening sail. Godon, dispatched an armed boat, and, on boarding the 500-ton ship, his party discovered 897 Africans concealed below the deck, tightly packed together. Godon directed his capture to the port of Monrovia, Liberia, where the hapless Africans were handed over to an American agent. He sent the Erie's captain Nathaniel Gordon , to New York for trial in a Federal court. ' The United States had prohibited importation of slaves in 1807, as did Great Britain three weeks later. Increasingly condemned by the Western world, the transatlantic slave trade—with its uprooting of peoples, brutal transport to the Americas, and consignment of its victims to perpetual slavery —bore a more serious aspect than domestic slavery, which continued in the British Empire until 1834 and in the United States until 1865. Broadening its legislative attack, in 1800 the United States prohibited American participation in the foreign trade, which had continued to Brazil and Cuba as well as to some extent to the United States. In 1820 Congress took the extraordinary step of declaring the slave trade piracy and prescribing the death penalty for persons found guilty of violating the laws. The United States at this 1 Apparently no scholarly history of Capt. Nathaniel Gordon and his trial exists, but a good popular account is William S. Fitzgerald, "Make Him an Example," American History Illustrated 17, no. 9(lç83):40-45. WarrenS. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal law, 18371862 (Berkeley: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1963), 137; United States Congress, Senate Executive Documents (hereafter, cited as SED), 35th Cong., 2d sess., 1861, 3, pt. 1:8-9. Civil War History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, © 1993 by The Kent State University Press CAPTAIN NATHANIEL GORDON217 time stood alone among nations in branding participants in the black traffic as pirates.2 Assigned to enforce this draconian measure was the United States Navy. Congress found it easy to legislate against the trade but hard to appropriate funds to enforce the laws. A cluster of factors worked mischief in efforts at enforcement. Southern slaveholders were sensitive to a vigorous assault by the national government on the trade. Great Britain had become the selfappointed constable of the seas in staunching the trade, and patriotic Americans resisted British zeal in boarding suspect American vessels, remembering British impressment of American sailors before the War of 1812. A spirit of diplomatic independence and frugality characterized Congress. It appropriated meager amounts, sometimes as little as five thousand dollars per year, to enforce its policy. Naval action in these circumstances could only be minimal . A House of Representatives report to the Seventeenth Congress revealed that the first United States cruiser reached Africa in March 1820 and remained only "a few weeks." Since that display of the flag only four other vessels in two years had made visits. But "since the middle of last November ... no vessel has been, nor, as your committee is informed, is, under orders for that service." Similarly, the courts were lax in efforts to convict persons accused of violating the slave trade laws. Until 1862 no American suffered the mandatory capital punishment.3 International denunciation of the trade mounted in the second third of the nineteenth century. Pope Gregory XVI in 1839 declared the traffic "utterly unworthy of the Christian name." European nations prohibited the trade, and a five-power treaty—the United States conspicuously absent—stigmatized the trade as piracy and agreed signatories might search one another's suspected vessels. Conscious of international pressures, the United States, in an 1842 agreement with Great Britain—the world's leading maritime power as well as enemy of the traffic—undertook to maintain a squadron of at least eighty guns to patrol the West...