Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts by Jeff Forret

Abstract

Reviewed by: Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts by Jeff Forret Richard Bell Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts. By Jeff Forret. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 470. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-108-49303-1.) He had painted the building yellow. It was three stories high, made of brick, and daubed in plaster that he had slathered in an eggy hue. First-time visitors to this residential block just south and west of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., sometimes mistook this yellow structure for a happy private home, unaware that it was actually one of the busiest slave prisons anywhere in North America. William H. Williams owned and operated the Yellow House between 1836 and 1850, using it as a detention center and depot for enslaved people he had purchased from across the Chesapeake region. From this private prison, across the street from the modern-day site of the Hirshhorn Museum, Williams dispatched "untold thousands of slaves" in coastwise shipments to buyers in New Orleans and across the country (p. 7). Indeed, Zachary Taylor, future president and Baton Rouge resident, was among the firm's customers. Williams was a driven and determined operator who was always looking for fresh opportunities to line his pockets, and in 1840 he believed he had discovered a new source of income: convict slaves. That September he purchased from the commonwealth of Virginia twenty-one enslaved men and six enslaved women incarcerated in the Richmond penitentiary. Virginia's governor had authorized their sale and transportation outside the United States—an unusual but not unheard-of practice—and Williams planned to take them to the Red River region of Texas, an independent country friendly to slavery. But then things began going wrong. When the ship stopped in Mobile, Alabama, locals, disturbed by the possibility that Williams might try to sell these convicted felons domestically, hounded him out of town. In New Orleans, where he stopped next, he was arrested on suspicion of the same. State officials there confiscated his enslaved captives, incarcerated them in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Baton Rouge, and, over the next several years, sent many of them to labor on all manner of public works projects. In Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts, Jeff Forret reconstructs this extraordinary odyssey using the voluminous court records created by the ensuing legal proceedings, which dragged on for almost two decades and eventually entangled Louisiana's highest court, its legislature, and even the Supreme Court of the United States. The result is a rich and layered history of the domestic slave trade as seen through the "sordid business dealings" of one of its most ambitious traffickers (p. 8). It is in conversation with recent scholarship on this species of legal human trafficking by Joshua Rothman, Walter Johnson, Steven Deyle, and Robert Gudmestad, and there are several stand-out chapters: one, on Williams's business practices; [End Page 913] another, on the ban on slave trading in Washington, D.C., enacted in 1850 that forced him to shutter and sell the Yellow House to a florist who made "bo[u]quets made 'to order'" (p. 289); and a third on the compensated emancipation of enslaved people in the District of Columbia in 1862. Yet the great strength of Williams' Gang—its breadth and depth—is also its weakness. Forret, a previous winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize, is a tenacious researcher, but he follows too many rabbits down too many holes to maintain forward motion. We learn too little about the enslaved themselves, but far more than we need to know about the many white lawyers and judges who played supporting roles in this unfolding drama. Williams' Gang also lurches unsteadily between thematic analysis and narrative. As a result, chronologies are often scrambled (for example, the Civil War plays out immediately before a chapter on the 1840s), and readers are left uncertain as to these events' larger significance, an impassioned epilogue sketching the contours of racialized mass incarceration in our own era notwithstanding. Richard Bell University of Maryland Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical...