Stacking Arms: The Question of Surrendering Black Merchant Sailors
May 23, 1861, began just as any other day on the whaling vessels John Adamas, Mermaid, and Panama. After dawn, sailors scrubbed the decks, surveyed their equipment, and prepared for breakfast as the three ships’ masters scanned the horizon in hope of sighting a whale. They had been at sea for some time, and between the three ships, their holds held 215 barrels of “sperm and black whale oil.”[1] Instead of sighting another kill, however, lookouts instead reported a steamer closing them. Being sailing vessels, they could do nothing but wait to see what the steamer wanted. As it closed, the unknown ship fired a cannon and hoisted the Confederate flag. With little choice, the three whalers lowered their own flags, the Stars and Stripes, in surrender.
The steamer was the Confederate privateer Calhoun, under the charge of John Wilson, a celebrated merchant captain. Though lightly armed with five small cannon – one 18-pounder, two 12-pounders, and two 6-pounders – the privateer still packed enough of a punch to overwhelm any merchant ship it encountered, especially three unarmed whalers.[2] In fact, by that time Calhoun had already captured the merchant ships Ocean Eagle, Ella, and Milan. As the Confederates happily took control of the whalers and their valuable oil, they also took control of 63 crewmen. This created a significant conundrum, for eight of those surrendered sailors were freemen.
As officers boarded the whalers to inspect paperwork and officially condemn them as prizes, the Black men looked on, wondering if their fate was sealed with a future destiny of bondage. All eight Black sailors, whose names have been lost to history, signed contracts to work on the whalers back in New England, and as each whaler was condemned, the Black sailors immediately proclaimed “to be free.”[3] Their entreaties were ignored.
Calhoun brought all three whalers to the Mississippi River’s delta, about 90 miles from the capture point, and then upriver to New Orleans. The Confederate press celebrated Calhoun’s actions. “Good for the privateers!” one newspaper proclaimed.[4] Another boasted Calhoun was “admirably equipped” with “the bravest experienced men onboard.”[5] Despite this, it was an odd spectacle, as the scene was a civilian ship capturing three civilian ships. Not a single person involved was in either the United States or Confederate military or naval forces, and only Calhoun’s letter of marque provided any legitimacy to the endeavor.
After docking at New Orleans, paperwork for the whalers was sent to the local admiralty court for evaluation. If the judge determined the captures legitimate, the ships and cargo could be sold for a handsome profit. As that process began, the question arose of what to do with the whaling sailors. As with Calhoun’s previous captures, the Anglo sailors were released on a parole and allowed free into New Orleans and to travel home if they wished, though the whaling masters were issued a summons “to appear before the prize court of Louisiana” as witnesses in the admiralty court proceedings.[6] Indeed, most of the whaling officers returned to New England, traveling from New Orleans to Memphis to St. Louis to Boston. Most of the crews quickly “shipped in two American vessels, under British colors, for Liverpool.”[7]
The matter was quite different for the Black sailors. After docking at the Crescent City, all eight were transferred to Sgt. M. LeClerc of the New Orleans police and “locked up in the Second District station.”[8] The district’s recorder, A. Blache, sent word to the city’s marshal, C.B. Beverly, to take custody of these men, as they were foreigners captured under national circumstances. According to one Crescent City French-language paper, Beverly refused to assume custody, claiming he wanted nothing to do with them.[9]
This left Blache to determine next steps; he kept “the prisoners in custody, firmly believing it would not only be bad policy, but a dangerous one, to let them loose upon the community.”[10] Even in New Orleans, the city with more freeman than anywhere else in the Confederacy, eight freemen from New England ships openly walking the city’s streets was considered dangerous.
Blache quickly wrote a letter to Judah P. Benjamin, at that time the Confederacy’s attorney general. After summarizing the situation, Blache simply asked: “What shall I do with them?”[11] The eight Black sailors must have immediately suspected their freedom was quickly being evaporated. Talk plastered Boston and other New England cities in the 1850’s of Southerners dispatching bounty hunters to capture and bring freemen south into slavery. Expanding these thoughts were recorded cases like that of Solomon Northup, kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into slavery in the very city they were now locked up in. New York’s Journal of Commerce put it aptly, openly questioning whether the captured Black sailors would be “sold like silks and other merchandise for the benefit of the captors,” as if they were part of the ship’s captured cargo.[12]
Benjamin passed the buck in his response, claiming that the Black sailors were not under Confederate control and thus Louisiana’s laws should determine their fate. Upon receiving a copy of Benjamin’s reply, the French-language paper L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orleans speculated that all eight would be quickly released and ordered to depart the Confederacy.[13] Indeed, to the surprise of the eight freemen, they were indeed released. Having avoided the auction block, all eight quickly departed New Orleans for New England, hoping to put their ordeal behind them.
There were more lasting implications brought forth because of these eight freemen. In July 1861, Judah Benjamin issued instructions regarding “prisoners of war and persons captured at sea,” which clarified that all persons, with no distinction of race or ethnicity, “captured on private unarmed vessels, and not employed in the public service of the enemy, are not prisoners of war.”[14] Thus, the plight of these eight unnamed freemen theoretically impacted Black sailors later captured by the Confederacy. That theory proved to be hit and miss, however.
The same month Benjamin’s clarifications regarding captures civilian sailors were issued, the privateer Jefferson Davis captured the merchant ship S.J. Waring. A prize crew of five Confederates boarded to take Waring to Charleston. On the merchant was one Black sailor, William Tillman. Kept unconfined by the Confederates, likely to have him act as a servant, Tillman seized an axe one night and killed three of the Confederates, reclaiming control over Waring in the process. The ship was then safely taken to New York, with Tillman hailed as “the hero of this brilliant transaction.”[15] Other freemen sailors were instead impressed into Confederate service, such as David Henry White who was taken from the captured merchant Tonawanda to serve on CSS Alabama. Several Black men that ended up serving on CSS Shenandoah later told diplomats in Australia they had also been forcibly impressed, though Confederates claimed otherwise.
Ultimately, these unnamed eight freemen underwent the scare of their lives while enduring surrender to a Confederate privateer and incarceration in New Orleans. Their ordeal not only impacted the official rules regarding treatment for captured seamen but also shed light on how civilian Black seamen were impacted by the Civil War.
Endnotes:
[1] “Arrival of Prizes,” The Sun, Carrollton, LA, May 29, 1861.
[2] “For Sale,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, July 9, 1861.
[3] “What Shall Be Done With Them?” New Orleans Daily Crescent, May 30, 1861.
[4] “Three More Prizes,” Sunday Delta, New Orleans, LA, May 26, 1861.
[5] “First Prize for a New Orleans Privateer,” The Daily Delta, New Orleans, LA, May 17, 1861.
[6] Wilding to Seward, August 30, 1861, SP: Privateers and Privateering, Subject File of the Confederate States Navy, 1861-1865, M1091, RG 45, US National Archives.
[7] The Captured Whalemen,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript, June 10, 1861.
[8] “The Negro Seamen,” The Daily Delta, New Orleans, LA, May 29, 1861.
[9] “Et le prisonniers,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orleans, Mai 29, 1861.
[10] “What Shall be Done with Them?” New Orleans Daily Crescent, May 30, 1861.
[11] Ibid.
[12] “Effect of the Blockade and Privateering on Commerce,” Charleston Daily Courier, June 5, 1861.
[13] La reponse,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orleans, Juin 5, 1861.
[14] “Prisoners of War and Persons Captured at Sea,” New Orleans Price-Current, July 27, 1861.
[15] “The Situation,” The New York Herald, July 22, 1861.
Thank you. I enjoy learning about the Confederate privateers. The event was included in a west coast newspaper, The Sacramento Union, on June 20, 1861. The Union, referencing a New Orleans Bee article on May 29, reported that there were “ten prisoners of war–eight negroes and two whites–of which seven were from the brig Panama, two from the schooner John Adams, and one from the schooner Mermaid.” The report did not include the prisoners’ names or indicate why two white men were held.
Ref: Sacramento Union, on June 20, 1861 (supplement, p. 2, col 1), https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDU18610620.2.19.2&e
A fascinating, nuanced story. One wonders if mounting Confederate paranoia as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent arming of black soldiers would have led to a different, less positive result.
Interesting. Thank you, Neil. Apart from the legal issues, it’s interesting that the three whalers were, I suppose, in the Gulf of America (nee Mexico) expecting to locate whales. That is not a region one today associates with whaling.