  | Book Details Title: Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts |
Book DescriptionReview ‘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’An expert autopsy of crime and punishment in the Old South with striking relevance for today. Leading historian of Southern history Jeff Forret meticulously narrates the ordeals of twenty-seven Black Virginians, whose enslavement was compounded by convictions and whose transport to Louisiana at the hands of a Washington, DC slave trader led to a dozen years each in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Forret shows the guts of a horrific injustice that supports ongoing structural violence against African Americans.’ Calvin Schermerhorn, author of Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery’… meticulously researched and superbly crafted … This is a vivid and absorbing account of the exploitation of human beings whose suffering meant profit for others, all of which is part of our nation’s history.’ Roger Bishop, BookPage Read more Book Description 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. Read more 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. Read more Customers Review:This is a very thorough history of slave trader William H. Williams of Washington, DC who ran the infamous Yellow House. It was a boarding stable of sorts for slaves who were being held between points of transport, and some were viewed for possible sale. This is also the place where Solomon Northup found himself after being drugged and kidnapped, and where he was later sold into slavery, despite being a free man from New York. He later wrote about his experiences in his autobiography titled Twelve Years A Slave.Williams’ Gang is filled with information on the state of the slave’s situation in the US and also for various dealers in human chattel, aka bondsmen and women in the 1800s. When in 1840, Williams gets involved in buying 27 convict slaves, who were only to be sold and taken outside the US territory. He had even been made to put up a bond to that effect. But that’s not quite how it worked out, and legal matters ensued that went on for decades. A good read for anyone interested in slavery in this time period of history. | |
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