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William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.
List of contents
Introduction: the slave depot of Washington, DC; 1. An ambush; 2. The Yellow House; 3. Sale and transportation; 4. Mobile to New Orleans; 5. Legal troubles; 6. The Millington Bank; 7. State v. Williams; 8. Slave trading in 'hard times'; 9. Politics of the slave pen; 10. Brothers; 11. The Louisiana State Penitentiary; 12. Closure; 13. Perseverance; 14. Violet; Epilogue: the legal legacy of the domestic slave trade.
About the author
Jeff Forret is Professor of History at Lamar University, Texas. He won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) and has authored Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (2006), among other works.
Summary
Williams' Gang explores a Washington, DC slave trader's legal misadventures associated with transporting convict slaves through New Orleans. Drawing on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave narratives, and penitentiary data, Jeff Forret examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and Southern jurisprudence.
Report
'In Williams' Gang, Jeff Forret takes a journey through some of the dark and often convoluted paths traveled by domestic slave traders and their human merchandise. Taking time along the way to introduce readers to some of the elaborate financial and legal infrastructures that governed and facilitated the domestic slave trade, Forret tells a once infamous but largely forgotten story about the Washington, DC slave trader William H. Williams and the enslaved Virginia convicts he imported illegally to Louisiana. Built on an impressive mountain of archival research and relayed with vivid prose, it is a story Williams himself surely wished would never have been one to tell at all.' Joshua D. Rothman, University of Alabama
