Reviewed by: Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts by Jeff Forret Jonathan Daniel Wells (bio) Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts. Jeff Forret. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-2208493031. 482 pp., cloth, $29.95. Before 1850, in the putative land of liberty, several slave-trading firms operated with abandon in the nation’s capital. Among these nefarious businesses, William H. Williams’ Yellow House was one of the most profitable and the best known, a preeminent capitalist enterprise with tentacles reaching far across the slave South. Untold numbers of Black captives were bought and sold, transactions that would likely mean forced transportation to the newly opened and fertile fields of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, where once Native lands would be converted into cotton and sugarcane fields to clothe and feed consumers in rapidly globalizing markets. In this highly detailed, meticulously researched, and engagingly written study, historian Jeff Forret recounts the shady dealings and shrouded lives of the slaver Williams and the twenty-one men and six women who would become the prime figures in a highly interesting series of antebellum court cases that would endure into the Civil War. The controversy launched in 1840 when the enslaved men and women were “convicted”—without due process, of course, and via ad hoc county courts of oyer and terminer—of serious felonies, such as murder and arson. Sentenced to be executed, the enslaved had their lives spared by the Virginia governor, who ordered them to be sold outside of the United States. Upon purchasing the enslaved convicts, Williams promised to sell them in Texas, which was yet to become a part of the Union. The problem, however, was that Williams’ reputation for underhandedness meant that Virginia officials, including Alexandria mayor Bernard Hooe, remained suspicious that he would renege on his promise and sell them in New Orleans instead. Hooe kept a wary eye on Williams’ movements, and when the latter loaded his human cargo onto the Uncas, Virginia officials sent word to counterparts in Mobile and New Orleans that Williams might dock in their ports. [End Page 426] Thanks to such forewarnings, when Williams landed first in Mobile and then in New Orleans, he drifted into communities on high alert, as newspaper notices and a flurry of government communications inflamed public opinion about the approaching ship. The communities, of course, were neither concerned about the fate of the human captives nor alarmed by the injustice of their so-called convictions. No Southern city wanted to be the recipient of potentially dangerous, troublemaking slaves. In fact, in 1817 Louisiana had passed a law prohibiting the importation of enslaved convicts. The problem, as Forret documents in rich and enlightening prose, was that any such persons were by the same law to be sold within the state, thereby undoing the law’s purpose in the first place! Arrested under the contradictory 1817 law in November 1840, Williams and his brother Thomas spent the next two decades in and out of jail as first the Louisiana courts and then the US Supreme Court tried to make sense of state law, Williams’ intentions, and the internecine battles of the domestic slave trade. Forret documents these cases in comprehensive chapters that reveal every nuance of discussion and controversy, but he accomplishes this exhaustive retelling with lively and passionate style. The plight of those arrested as illegally imported enslaved convicts is more obscured, but Forret reveals the agency and individuality of those who had sparked the interstate wrangling. Since it would be foolish to abide by the 1817 law’s contradictory strictures, the men and women were put to labor on public works, foreshadowing the ruthless chain gangs of the New South. Unsurprisingly, Louisiana officials proved insouciant overseers, and by 1843 at least some of the enslaved convicts had died. This study deserves a wide audience, not the least because it reveals the endlessly complicated consequences of holding human beings as property. Williams more than learned this lesson, but he nonetheless fared far better than the enslaved convicts he may or may not have intended to sell in New Orleans. Thanks to the Compromise of 1850...