The Clown Prince of Slavery
In 1820, Congress forbade Americans from participating in the international slave trade, making slave-running an act of piracy, a hanging offense. It was an easy gesture. America had no need to import more slaves; between 1790 and the start of the Civil War the domestic slave population in the U.S. soared from around seven hundred thousand to over four million. Conditions were the opposite in Cuba and Brazil, however, where slaves working on the vast sugar plantations and in the gold mines perished at appalling rates. Constantly hungry for new slaves from Africa, Cuba and Brazil bought at least two million in the first half of the nineteenth century. Running slaves to those countries was an extremely lucrative business that Americans found irresistible, and the government did almost nothing to enforce the ban. In the whole long history of the transatlantic slave trade, only one American sea captain ever swung for it, and that wasn’t until the very end of the practice, in 1862, when the Lincoln administration chose to make an example of him.
To evade the British and U.S. warships trying to stop them, slave-runners needed fast ships. Launched from a Long Island shipyard in 1857, the Wanderer was the most impressive racing yacht of its time. With its sleek, revolutionary design it could make an astounding twenty knots, outrunning any ship at sea, including steamers. It was also sumptuously appointed, because it was a rich man’s toy. The owner, Colonel John Johnson, was a member of the New York Yacht Club. He was not a New Yorker but a Louisianan, owner of a cotton plantation. In 1858 Johnson sold the Wanderer to another Southerner, a Charleston man named William Corrie. Corrie was acting as a front for yet another Southerner with New York connections: Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar.
The wide-flung Lamar family included a future Supreme Court justice, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, and a former president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar. Charles’s father Gazaway Bugg Lamar was one of the wealthiest men in Savannah, an innovator in steamboat shipping, a cotton factor with large interests in several plantations and warehouses, and director of Savannah’s Bank of Commerce. In 1846 Gazaway moved to Brooklyn and helped found the Bank of the Republic, originally on Hanover Square and then on Wall Street. Among other transactions the bank sold Georgia state bonds (the Georgia governor was an in-law) to New York investors.
Like most Southern gentry, his son Charles harbored uncompromising opinions about slavery. He felt it was the height of hypocrisy that buying and selling domestic slaves was perfectly legal, but bringing new slaves over from Africa carried the death penalty. His adventures in the African slave trade were less about making money – he had that to burn – than about proving a point and defying laws he considered unjust.
In New York, Corrie had no trouble hiring a crew. At Port Jefferson on Long Island the Wanderer was provisioned as though it were heading on a world cruise, including water tanks with a capacity of fifteen thousand gallons. Everyone on the waterfront could see what was going on, and when the yacht sailed out of Port Jefferson a Navy ship intercepted it and forced it to dock at the Battery in Manhattan. There an assistant district attorney came aboard, with the U.S. Marshal for New York – Captain Isaiah Rynders, a long-time Tammany Hall ruffian and as corruptible as any lawman could be. Corrie treated them to a splendid luncheon at the rosewood captain’s table, they left in a jolly mood, and the Wanderer was free to make for Charleston.
From there, Corrie sailed across the Atlantic to the mouth of the Congo, where he shoved more than four hundred captured Africans, mostly boys, below decks. The Wanderer effortlessly outran British and American warships to make it home. At the end of November 1858 it reached Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia, and the Africans were percolated into the existing slave population of the area. All Savannah buzzed with excited rumors. A slave ship from Africa was something no Georgians had seen in some time. Folks gawked at the African “greenhorns” as though they were celebrities.
The press in New York and Washington picked up the story, forcing President James Buchanan to a reluctant show of action. Federal marshals in Georgia impounded the Wanderer, arrested a few of the crew, and went looking for the Africans. A district attorney brought indictments against Charles Lamar and a handful of the others the following spring. It wasn’t easy bringing Lamar to trial in Savannah, where he was not only local royalty but now a hero for having so brazenly defied the Yankees. He played the role to the hilt and had a grand time doing it. When the government auctioned the Wanderer, as it usually did with impounded slave ships, Lamar bid on it, and only one Savannah man dared to bid against him. Lamar outbid this rival by one dollar, then reputedly gave him a beating for his impudence.
Now that he was the owner (again) of the ship, Lamar claimed that everything it had held was also his property, including not only its incriminating logs and other paperwork from the trip, but its cargo of Africans as well. A local judge actually ordered that two of them be handed over to him. In New York, the Tribune and the Times ran flabbergasted editorials, with the Times marveling that “a slave-dealer, a kidnapper of negroes, a felon guilty of an act equivalent in the meaning of the statute to piracy,” was allowed “to snap his fingers in the face of the law” in an act of “cowardly pilfering and spiritless piracy.” Lamar fired off letters to both the Tribune and the Times, challenging editors Horace Greeley and Henry Raymond to duels.
The American Colonization Society, which “repatriated” American blacks to Africa, raised fifty thousand dollars to send some of Lamar’s rounded-up Africans to Liberia, where it promised to find them gainful employment. Lamar offered to match the sum, joking that he’d find work for them too, right here in America. He took to going everywhere with one of his new boy slaves, whom he called Corrie. Meanwhile in Charleston, three grand juries refused to bring charges against the real Corrie for his part in the escapade.
The Wanderer’s arrested crewmen stood trial late in 1859 and won easy acquittals. In 1860, facing the high improbability that any jury of Southern men would convict Lamar of a capital offense, the government dropped its case against him. Late that year Lamar and accomplices broke into a Savannah jail to free another man who’d been involved in the Wanderer exploit. A judge sentenced Lamar to thirty days, and allowed him to spend it under house arrest. When the Civil War commenced, Lamar joined the Confederate army, attained the rank of colonel, and was one of the last rebel officers to die in battle, on April 16, 1865.
That left his father, Gazaway Bugg Lamar, to carry on the family tradition of defying the Yankees. In the months leading up to the war he’d shipped rifles from New York to Savannah. When the war got under way he claimed that as a Southerner his life was “repeatedly threatened by mobs” of patriotic New Yorkers and moved back to Savannah. There he became a major stockholder in the Importing and Exporting Company of Georgia, set up to run Union blockades. He also bought and warehoused a huge cache of cotton, predicting that the price would soar as war cut off production and shipping.
When Union troops under William Tecumseh Sherman occupied Savannah in December 1864, Sherman sent Lincoln a “Christmas present” of twenty-five thousand bales of cotton seized on its waterfront – most of it Gazaway Lamar’s stash. The old man was furious. Then, shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, the war department ordered Lamar’s arrest on suspicion of having conspired, with Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders, in the president’s murder. Released after three months when no evidence of the conspiracy materialized, Lamar returned to Savannah and was soon arrested again for trying to hide what was left of his cotton from the occupying military authorities. A military court convicted him and briefly imprisoned him again. He spent the rest of his life filing lawsuits against the federal government, and in 1874 won an astounding half-million-dollar judgment. He died six months later, a vindicated but embittered old Confederate to the end.
by John Strausbaugh