A Thousand Words a Battle: Jekyll Island
Jekyll Island, Georgia
November 28, 1858
“Is there a bale of cotton to leave our ports for Liverpool, shall not a Northern ship transport it?” asked James DeBow, a southern journalist who confided these sentiments to his readers in the late 1850s. He continued:
Is there a package of broadclothes or a chest of tea to be landed at our warehouses? There is a tribute first to Boston or New York. We look on and admire the growth of the tremendous power there scarcely admitting any excellence in ourselves or willing to make any effort to secure such excellence. Yet we expect to be respected in our rights and deferentially bowed to by the rulers of the North. Vain hope if history be credited.”[1]
Debow was a close friend of a prominent South Carolinian business named Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, and he was not only echoing Lamar’s sentiments, but that of many prominent southerners, who felt stymied by the North’s rising industrial and commerce might in the 1850s.
Charles Lamar was as close to royalty as any American could get when born in the early part of the 19th Century. His father was a prominent Savannah, Georgia, businessman with close ties to Wall Street and its wealthy fraternity. When baby Charles was baptized, the Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette, Revolutionary War hero and confident of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, held the young baby in his arms as holy water was poured over the tike’s head.
Young Charles grew into a man who loathed all things Northern and was an ardent secessionist and defender of the institution of slavery—so much so that he began to plot how to import slaves from Africa even though some 40 years prior, the United States had banned the African slave trade, which had already brought millions of Africans to the expanding country against their will to toil on America’s vast agricultural tracts.
In simple economic terms, “labor” inflation was wrecking the southern slave-based economy. By the 1850s, the paucity of slaves had driven up the costs to southern planters who needed labor to bring their crops to market—namely cotton. A 16-year-old healthy male slave could fetch a price of $1,200 in 1858. “How much longer can a Southern man afford to buy Negros at such prices?” asked The Savannah Daily Morning.[2]
Lamar wrote to friend throwing down the gauntlet:
But this law prohibiting the slave trade is a badge of servitude . . . and not only would I not sustain it, but as I have told you, frankly, from the first, I intended to violate it. If that shall be the only way by which the South can come to right upon this question, I will re-open this question, I will re-open the trade in slaves to foreign countries.[3]
On Independence Day, 1858, a luxurious pleasure schooner named The Wanderer set sail from Charleston bound for the African regions of the Congo. The vessel was one of the finest of the New York Yacht Club, and it was Lamar’s intention to arrive in Africa where it could be transformed into a slave ship.
Six weeks later, The Wanderer was leaving the Congo with 487 kidnapped Africans, some as young as eight years old, jammed together in the former yacht’s hull no more than eight inches apart in the fetal spoon position. Some 87 would-be slaves perished on the return journey, their bodies dumped overboard to lessen the spread of disease.
Dawn, November 28, the sleek schonner appeared off the coast of Jekyll Island, a barrier island ensconced in the southern corner of Georgia’s cluster of isles where great hurricanes unleash salty gales that tumble driftwood upon the labyrinth of sand dunes. Some 400 famished and sea sick Africans were unloaded onto the beach, and within hours were sent to slave markets in Savannah and Charleston.[4]
Though the human cargo had been whisked away to be sold for more than $500 each, making the total profit nearly $250,000, Federal agents from the Buchanan Administration had been tipped off to the criminal exploit, and soon Charles Lamar was in custody to face prosecution for slave trading—a penalty, if convicted, that meant the death penalty.
Given Lamar’s father-in-law was a U.S. District judge and southern juries with slave owner sympathies were never going to convict a wealthy well-connected millionaire, Lamar avoided conviction with little worry. But the news of the acquittal outraged the Northern press. During the trial, The New York Times presciently spoke:
For if they fail to hang the men engaged in this illegality, if their officials are so lax or their juries perjured as to permit this trade to be carried on with impunity, in the face of all our laws against it. . . . The entire population of the North will wage upon it a relentless war of extermination.[5]
Eight days after Appomattox, Colonel Charles Lamar of the 25th Georgia Cavalry died near Columbus, Georgia—killed by a Yankee bullet in the chest as the dimming April twilight was vanishing.
[1] Paul Paskoff and Daniel Wilson, eds., The Cause of the South: Selections from Debow’s Review, 1846-1867, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 183.
[2] L. W. Spratt, “Speech Upon Foreign Slave Trade Before the Legislature of South Carolina,” December 14, 1858, printed in the Savannah Daily Morning News.
[3] Jim Jordan, The Slave-Trader’s Letterbook: Charles Lamar, the Wanderer, and Other Tales of the African Slave Trade, (University of Georgia Press, 2018), 456.
[4] Erik Calonius, The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set its Sails, (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006) 1-5.
[5] Ibid., 216.
Another Lamar family member was the elegantly-named Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who found favor in the North by giving a sentimental eulogy for Charles Sumner in 1874, promoting sectional reconciliation, while vigorously upholding white supremacy when back home in Mississippi through voter fraud, intimidation, and violence. Eighty years later, even John F. Kennedy fell for Lamar’s ruse when he included Lamar as one of eight Senators portrayed in his 1956 Profiles of Courage; but then, Kennedy was seeking the VP nomination that year and it didn’t hurt to ingratiate himself with the powerful Southern Dixiecrats.
An excellent piece, though a word on statistics. The fifth paragraph states that “the United States had banned the African slave trade, which had already brought millions of Africans to the expanding country against their will to toil on America’s vast agricultural tracts.”
In fact, according to my own research as well as that on the ‘Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson, it is safely estimated that of the 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World, only about 388,000 were brought to North America. Allowing for an error as huge as 10% either way – doubtful – the number would be between 350,000 to 427,000.
In these days of hyperbole and erasing/rewriting American history, we must be careful that numbers of 350K-427K do not become “millions.” Many wildly inaccurate portrayals of 19th century America, the Civil War, and slavery, from the novel ‘The Killer Angels’ to its film, ‘Gettysburg’ to books and articles by university professors and political ideologists have unfortunately been taken as gospel, growing a belief system in 21 century Americans that has little to do with reality, and will take several generations to correct.