Jim Jordan. The Slave-Trader's Letter-Book: Charles Lamar, the Wanderer, and Other Tales of the African Slave Trade. UnCivil Wars Series. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 352 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8203-5196-4; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-5687-7.
Reviewed by Chris Blakley (University of California, Los Angeles)
Published on H-Slavery (January, 2020)
Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler (University of South Carolina)
Jim Jordan’s history of the Georgia businessman Charles Lamar, the slave ship Wanderer, and the world of illicit slaving in the late antebellum world opens with the story of a serendipitous, albeit unusual discovery. In 2009, while conducting research on the Wanderer, Jordan stumbled across a trunk full of business papers from the Lamar family in a private home in New Jersey. The trunk contained numerous pamphlets, checks, warehouse receipts, and legal documents, and an astonishing collection of letter-books detailing Lamar’s involvement in illegal slaving, among other business and political ventures. Inspired by his find, Jordan has produced a narrative interweaving the infamous voyage of the penultimate slave ship to reach the United States with Lamar’s engagement in Latin American filibustering schemes in the 1850s, the African apprentice movement envisioned by southern slaveholders, and the intersection of African American slavery with the South and East Asian “coolie” trade of the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to earlier interpretations of Lamar’s career, Jordan sets out to prove that through his various enterprises Lamar did not show any particular brilliance as a businessman but rather “failed at almost every business venture” he pursued (p. 7). Lamar’s turbulent life and unscrupulous dealing provides a starting point for understanding the complex intersection of slavery, finance, risk taking, and the violence produced by diaspora in the antebellum period.
The Slave Trader’s Letter-Book is divided into two parts. The first is a mostly biographical narrative of Lamar with a focus on his investment in the slaving expedition of the Wanderer in 1858 and the legal aftermath of the voyage as its participants faced judgment in court for trafficking Africans to the United States. The second half of the book presents two sets of correspondence, totaling seventy letters written by Lamar: one collection concerning the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade and another set of letters on Lamar’s other business activities.
In 1824, Charles Augustus Lafayaette Lamar was born into a wealthy Savannah family. Their fortune derived from the mercantile efforts of Charles’s father, Gazaway Bugg Lamar, whose businesses involved shipping, wharfage, factoring, banking, insurance, and slaveholding. Jordan introduces Charles Lamar through a narrative account of the wreck of the steam packet Pulaski as it traveled from Savannah to Baltimore in 1838. Among those who initially survived after the ship’s boiler exploded were Lamar, his family members, and two enslaved women. One of the enslaved women, we learn, chanted to herself in her own language while she struggled to stay alive on a raft drifting upon the ocean.
Fourteen years after he survived the Pulaski incident, Lamar gradually assumed a role within his father’s businesses in Savannah. Lamar’s trading networks tapped commodity chains near and far, including coffee from Santo Domingo, corn from Boston, and lard and molasses suppliers in Georgia. The Lamar family pursued ventures involving the technological infrastructure of the antebellum economy, especially steamboats, wharves, railroads, banks, and roads. Charles immersed himself as well into Savannah’s civic life, joining well-heeled rifle and horse-racing clubs, and married the daughter of a judge sitting on the US District Court.
Beyond Savannah, Lamar supported the efforts of filibusters like General Narciso López, who failed to overthrow the Spanish government in Cuba in 1851. Filibusters, like the well-known mercenary William Walker, hoped to expand slavery’s territory beyond the borders of the United States into Latin America to guarantee its future as an institution. In his discussion of American filibustering expeditions in Latin America, Jordan centers Cuba as a primary destination for illegal slaving voyages and a target of filibustering during the 1830s and 1840s. Lamar and other slaveholders throughout the South supported López’s efforts to establish an independent Cuba and after his failure formed an annexationist group, the Order of the Lone Star, which subsequently planned another expedition to capture the island. Despite their failures, Lamar continued to support filibustering efforts elsewhere in Latin America.
In addition to his interests in illegal slaving, Lamar and his associates in Georgia entered into the legal domestic slave trade between Georgia and Louisiana. At the same time, he risked investing in another venture, a gold mine near Augusta, where enslaved people mined for gold ores with little success. By the early 1850s, Lamar and others began to publicly broach the question of reopening the Atlantic slave trade and argued that the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves passed by Congress in 1807 violated southerners’ constitutional rights. In his overview of the abolition of the slave trade, Jordan skillfully situates Lamar’s interest in reopening the trade alongside the establishment of the West Africa Squadron, the legal abolition of the trade throughout the Atlantic world, the slave mutinies aboard the Amistad in 1839 and the Creole in 1841, and the role of port cities—especially New York, New Orleans, Matanzas, and Rio de Janeiro—in the contraband slave trade. Jordan also provides context for the developing African apprentice movement among slaveholders in relation to the experiences of recaptured Africans seized by the West Africa Squadron and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone, after being “liberated” by anti-slaving patrols. He further links these histories to the “coolie” trade that brought South and East Asian laborers to the Americas. Lamar, it seems, entertained the idea of sending the Wanderer to China to acquire “coolie” laborers. However, he ultimately staked his fortune on a slaving voyage to West Central Africa.
After several failed ventures in launching illegal slaving voyages, Lamar purchased the luxury yacht Wanderer in 1858 with the intent to repurpose the clipper ship as a slaver. At the outset, Lamar collaborated on a slaving voyage with men connected to the filibustering movement, especially one of the ship’s captains, John Egbert Farnum. Farnum, Jordan notes, participated in López’s failed expedition to Cuba in 1850 and Walker’s Nicaraguan expeditions and mustered a regiment of soldiers in New York to support John Quitman’s plans to invade Cuba in 1855. Lamar also invited the secessionist newspaper editor Leonidas Spratt to join his slaving plans. On July 3, 1858, after being outfitted for its voyage while docked at Port Jefferson, New York, and under the pretense of embarking on a pleasure cruise, the Wanderer departed the port of Charleston, South Carolina, for Port of Spain, Trinidad. Upon reaching Trinidad, the ship sailed east across the Atlantic toward the Congo River. On September 16, the ship arrived at Punta de Lenha, a port on the Congo, where the captains quickly placed an order with a Portuguese or Spanish slaver for approximately five hundred slaves. While waiting to collect their human cargo, the Wanderer crew entertained guests, including officers of the West Africa Squadron, and sailed south to Benguela. In October, the slaver returned north to the Congo to purchase the 487 captives their agent assembled for sale. While Jordan does describe aspects of the middle passage, including how the crew enlisted several captives as “constables” to surveil and discipline others enslaved, he does not include any significant detail or analysis surrounding several basic questions, such as ethnicity, language, religion, or culture of the slaves (p. 77).
Forty-three days after disembarking from the Congo, the captives arrived on Jekyll Island on November 28, 1858. Jordan narrates the slow, gradual sale of the captives by Lamar’s associates, including the planter and slave mart operator John Montmollin. The number of slaves from the voyage were dispersed to slaveholders in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and further afield. At the outset of the sales, Lamar offered one young boy as a gift to Hillary Fraser, a steam tug captain, and the visible presence of the boy gradually led to news that West Central Africans had arrived on the Georgia coast. From this point on, Jordan’s narrative turns to the legal history of the Wanderer as the various participants in the syndicate, including Lamar, the captains, and the crew, were tried by the US district attorneys for the crime of piracy in 1859 and 1860. Jordan recounts how District Attorney Joseph Ganahl sought to acquire several of the captives as evidence against Lamar’s syndicate, including young boys who survived the Wanderer voyage. Others appeared as well, including two African men, Gumbo and Cuffee, who Lamar claimed were not survivors of the Wanderer but his own native-born slaves. In the midst of the trials, Lamar taunted the prosecutors by defiantly parading an enslaved young man named “Corrie,” a reference to one of the Wanderer captains, on a buggy through the streets of Savannah. Lamar coerced the boy to smile, tip his hat to a passerby, and repeat words spoken to him by strangers. Later in the trial, Lamar continued to tour the state with two enslaved boys, whom he touted as “young wanderers” in open defiance of the government’s attorneys.
Jordan narrates the courtroom drama and intrigue surrounding Lamar, at this stage heavily in debt due to the costs of the voyage, and the Wanderer case with skill and attention to detail. Lamar’s defiance of the trials and contempt for the district attorneys, including a dramatic jailbreak of the ship’s supercargo, the man responsible for overseeing the Wanderer’s human cargo and later sale, is richly presented. During the trials, Lamar frequently feuded with newspapers and their editors over coverage of the case, including the New York Times, which published editorials criticizing him and his associates. While awaiting the court’s judgment, he continued to plan new slaving expeditions in defiance of the law. By May 1860, Lamar and the rest of the Wanderer syndicate were ultimately found not guilty by the jury in Savannah who asserted that the prosecution failed to prove that Lamar or his associates engaged in an illegal Atlantic slaving voyage.
The Slave Trader’s Letter-Book concludes with a focus on Lamar’s later life after the Wanderer trials. Lamar supported secession and wrote to his son after the trials that he hoped “Lincoln may be elected. I want dissolution & have I think contributed more than any man South for it” (p. 136). After the trials, Lamar turned to his father for financial help and struggled to play a role in the family’s involvement in the guano trade, banking, and cotton factoring. In 1861, at the outset of the Civil War, Lamar organized a cavalry regiment to serve in the armed forces of the newly declared Confederate States of America; however, for reasons that are unclear, his own men threw him out of the regiment. Two years later, his father described him in a letter to Jefferson Davis as a “prime mover in secession” and pleaded that his son deserved a new commission in the Confederacy’s army (p. 141). In 1862, Lamar joined a Confederate diplomatic mission to Europe seeking political, financial, and military support for their nation’s cause. His tour included visits to Liverpool, London, Paris, and Geneva, where he met with the Confederacy’s diplomats to Great Britain, France, and Switzerland. While in France, the Confederacy’s minister to that nation, James Slidell, hoped to discuss the possibility of making the new nation a French protectorate. As for the Wanderer, after being stolen, taken to Madeira, and captured by a blockade squadron, the ship became the property of the Union navy in 1863, which subsequently used it during the war as a tender and patrol boat. In 1865, after returning to Georgia and rejoining the army, Lamar died while fighting at the Battle of Columbus. After the battle, a Yankee soldier plundered Lamar’s pocket watch from his corpse. Jordan notes that after the war, Lamar’s father, Gazaway, won a judgment totaling $579,343.51 from the federal government in 1875 as compensation for cotton confiscated from his warehouses during the war. To date, the United States government has never paid reparations for slavery to the over forty million descendants of enslaved people of African descent.
In his conclusion, Jordan returns to the aim of his study, namely, to demonstrate that Lamar is best understood as a reckless, failed businessman, responsible for the enslavement and deaths of almost five hundred people of African descent who endured “the most inhumane circumstances” of the middle passage and enslavement. “It is this,” he writes, “for which Charles Lamar should be remembered. It is a sad and tragic legacy” (p. 155). Jordan’s study of Lamar and the Wanderer voyage and trials is richly detailed and will be valuable for southern and antebellum scholars interested in secession, fire-eaters, and the illegal slave trade. Scholars in these fields certainly owe Jordan a debt of gratitude for transcribing, organizing, and publishing the seventy letters collected in the second half of The Slave Trader’s Letter-Book. However, this book would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with the scholarly fields Jordan alludes to in his introduction. For instance, Lamar’s interests in filibustering in Latin America calls to mind well-known studies on slavery and filibustering in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, especially Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013), numerous books authored by Robert E. May (especially The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 [1973]), and other titles on individual filibusters like Antonio Rafael De la Cova’s Colonel Henry Theodore Titus: Antebellum Soldier of Fortune and Florida Pioneer (2016). Yet Jordan mostly avoids larger questions surrounding the relationships between slavery, filibustering, and US imperialism in the Americas. On the development of the “coolie” trade in the antebellum period, Lamar’s interests in acquiring South and East Asian laborers could have been more fully contextualized by referring to landmark books from that literature.[1] While Jordan’s efforts to shed light on the “little-known” African apprentice movement are worthwhile, engagement with histories of recapture, re-enslavement, and other forms of forced labor would have enriched his narrative of Lamar and those who died or survived the voyage of the Wanderer.[2] Given Jordan’s thesis that Lamar was a business failure more akin to a speculator than an innovator, and his interests in reopening the Atlantic slave trade and expanding slavery’s territory into the Caribbean and Latin America, it is surprising the book does not fully engage with the large, controversial, and rapidly developing literature and debates over the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism.[3] The Slave Trader’s Letter-Book avoids timely and difficult questions raised by this scholarship, in particular to what extent American capitalism in the nineteenth century emerged from global networks involving credit, the financialization of slave trading and slaveholding, and agricultural commodities like cotton and sugar.
Moreover, several passages in this text pose troubling questions for readers. In the penultimate chapter, Jordan recounts how Lamar, in a letter to his wife, fondly inquired after his enslaved property while touring London. “Charles’s affection for his slaves,” writes Jordan, “was not uncommon among southerners. Close bonds often developed between master and servant” (p. 143). By arguing that such sentimental ties were widespread among southern slaveholders and enslaved people, this particular passage dangerously approaches resembling some of the most loathsome ideas of the postbellum Lost Cause mythology, particularly the contention that slaveholders were kind, paternal, or benevolent to enslaved people.[4] Those enslaved by Lamar, including Nannie, Lucy, Nelson, Reuben, George, and others not named in the text, deserve more serious analysis and concern as individual historical subjects who negotiated the complexities of their enslavement rather than simply as the objects of their enslaver’s “affection.”
In the final chapter, Jordan writes that formerly enslaved, emancipated people returned to work for Lamar’s widow, Caro Lamar, after her husband’s death. While Caro described the emancipated people who served her as “faithful and affectionate,” Jordan does not seriously question her perspective as a former slaveholder or consider how emancipated people might have understood the course of their own lives before and after their legal enslavement by the Lamar family and the violence of the Civil War (p. 151). While Jordan’s stated focus is Charles Lamar and the Wanderer, it is unfortunate, given his clear skill as a researcher and his unique archival discovery, that his text does very little to draw attention to those who survived the middle passage or those enslaved by Lamar as historical subjects, or to the ways the archival remnants he found in New Jersey forecloses our understanding of their lives and minds. Raising questions and discussion surrounding the subjectivity of enslaved people in antebellum America and their role within histories of slaving, secession, the Civil War, and emancipation would have enriched Jordan’s narrative by centering the interactions of white southerners and people of African descent, rather than marginalizing the enslaved and those later emancipated.
Notes
[1]. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); and Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008).
[2]. Sharla M. Fett, Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
[3]. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983); Sven Beckert, and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); and Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
[4]. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Charles Reagen Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
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Citation:
Chris Blakley. Review of Jordan, Jim, The Slave-Trader's Letter-Book: Charles Lamar, the Wanderer, and Other Tales of the African Slave Trade.
H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54783
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