 Good afternoon. My name is Jonathan White and today I'm going to tell you about a book I've written recently called Shipwrecked. I'm going to use this story of the slave trade in a man that I imagine most of you have never heard of named Appleton Oaksmith to talk about how the Lincoln administration destroyed the slave trade during the American Civil War. To tell the story, we actually have to go way back to 1787 to the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution declared that the slave trade from Africa to the United States could continue for 20 years. But if the Congress wanted to end it, it could. In 1807, Thomas Jefferson signed a law that ended the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. And so after a 20-year period, Congress abolished the transatlantic slave trade. In 1820, Congress declared that slave trading would be piracy. And that meant that you could be executed for this crime. But unfortunately, the slave trade continued and Africans were kidnapped on the West Coast of Africa and transported to the New World for years and years and years after the slave trade was made illegal. Now, I want to tell a famous story from the Civil War. And I'm going to use that to then transition into talking about a less famous one from the Civil War era. And this involved a man named Nathaniel Gordon. In August of 1860, Nathaniel Gordon went to the West Coast of Africa in a ship called the Erie. He kidnapped 897 Africans and put them onto the hold of his ship. Most of these people were women and children. Some of them were as young as six months. And Nathaniel Gordon was going for the most vulnerable of the Africans that he could seize. And as he put them onto his ship, he used a knife and he cut off all the clothing off of the adult men and women so that they were completely naked and he separated the men and women into different parts of the ship. It took him 45 minutes to do that. He was clearly an expert at the trade. This was probably at least his fourth voyage involved in slave trading from the 1850s and into the year 1860. The thing about Nathaniel Gordon on this voyage, though, was that he was caught by a U.S. ship that was part of the Africa Squadron on the West Coast of Africa. And he made it out to the Atlantic Ocean. He was captured by this Union or this U.S. Naval Squadron vessel. And the Africans were found below decks. And this is a photograph that shows you some other Africans, not from Gordon's ship, but some other Africans who were captured. And Gordon was then sent to New York City for trial. And the thing about New York City in the 1850s and 1860s was New York had become the financial hub of the transatlantic slave trade. And slave traders had moved from Brazil and other parts of the world to Manhattan. And this is where they operated the slave trade out of. And so Gordon was sent to New York City where he was put into prison and he awaited trial. The thing about the trial at this point was that the Buchanan administration was in charge of the federal government. And up until this point for the previous 40 years since 1820 to 1860, no one had ever really been punished for slave trading. They knew it was piracy. They knew they could be executed. But slave traders really also knew that they had nothing to fear because federal administrations decided that they just wouldn't prosecute these cases very, very strongly. And so Gordon went to jail in New York City. He was put in what we would today considered a minimum security prison where he was allowed to go out of the prison and walk around New York City and have fancy dinners. And he acted like a gentleman. He knew there was nothing to fear. He went to trial for the first time and the prosecution went after him, but he was not convicted. He had a hung jury. And it's probably because members of the jury were bribed. That was not uncommon in the 19th century. But then Abraham Lincoln was elected and he put into place a new prosecutor in New York City, a new U.S. Marshal. They moved Nathaniel Gordon to what we would today consider a maximum security prison called the tombs or the halls of justice in Midtown Manhattan. He was no longer allowed to roam the streets and they decided that they would prosecute him a second time. And the second trial, they sequestered the jury so that the jury couldn't be bribed and couldn't be influenced. And this time Nathaniel Gordon was sentenced to be executed. He was convicted and sentenced to be executed. Now you might think that this is a great moment in the history of morality in this country that a man who has been involved in the slave trade is finally going to meet his just desserts. He's finally going to get the punishment that he and so many others deserved. But believe it or not, thousands of Northerners wrote to Abraham Lincoln and asked him to pardon Gordon or at least to commute the sentence so that he wouldn't be executed. This is an example of one petition that Lincoln received. This was signed by hundreds of people. They make the case that Gordon was the husband of a young wife. She was devoted to him. She had a young son with him. He had a nice mother. He had some good sisters. He had a lot of friends. You shouldn't execute a guy like this. And so they pleaded with Lincoln to pardon Gordon or to commute his sentence so that he wouldn't be executed. Other people wrote to Lincoln and said, you know, Nathaniel Gordon never expected to be punished for this crime because no one else has been punished for it before and it wouldn't be right to punish him. And so Lincoln is getting many petitions, many of which actually resided the National Archives. This petition here that you see on the screen is from Record Group 204 at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Lincoln is getting all of these petitions asking for Gordon to be pardoned and Lincoln has to decide what to do. Well, Lincoln was dead set on enforcing the law, making sure that slave trading would be ended in the United States or slave trading from the west coast of Africa to the United States would end. And so Lincoln decided not to give in to all of these people who were seeking pardon. In February of 1862, Gordon's wife and mother came to the White House to try to meet with Lincoln and try to persuade him, you've got to please pardon Nathaniel, and Lincoln refused to meet with them. The truth is, in February of 1862, at the time that Gordon's wife and mother came to the White House, Lincoln was suffering very badly. His two sons, his two younger sons, Willie and Tad, were both very ill and Willie mortally so he would die by before the end of the month. And so Lincoln just couldn't deal with the thought of meeting with these women and talking to them about pardoning Gordon. But Lincoln did make a decision that had an impact. He issued a two week stay of execution and this is the document that's a scan from the National Archives from Record Group 59, where Lincoln said to Nathaniel Gordon, essentially, okay, you didn't think you were going to be executed. I'm going to give you two weeks to prepare for what's coming. And if you look at this document, Lincoln says, in granting this respite, it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that relinquishing all expectation of pardon by human authority. He refer himself to the mercy of the common God and father of all men. And I think this is a pretty incredible statement for Lincoln to say, because people like Nathaniel Gordon saw Africans and African Americans as subhuman. They were only merchandise to be traded. There was there was no value in them as far as Gordon was concerned as people only as labor. And Lincoln in granting this respite this two week period was saying, keep in mind that they are human beings who are who are part of humanity that have a common God and father and they deserve the dignity and respect that all people deserve. And in another part of this respite Gordon Lincoln said that Gordon needed to prepare for the awful change which awaits him. And so Lincoln gave a two week respite and the execution then was carried out on February 21 1862. Nathaniel Gordon tried to commit suicide the night before the execution someone snuck some poison into the tombs and he took it, and the guards heard him and they rushed in and they saw what had happened but they would not allow him to cheat the gallows they got a doctor who pumped his stomach he vomited out the poison, and then they walked him to the gallows the next day, and made sure that justice was done. Now, the story of Nathaniel Gordon is a fairly famous one. A lot of Lincoln scholars a lot of Civil War buffs they know about Nathaniel Gordon, he's the only American to ever be executed by the federal government for the crime of slave trading. And this story is is very well known justifiably so because of what of what it shows us about Lincoln's commitment to destroying the slave trade. About six or seven years ago, I had maybe eight years ago I had the idea to write a history of the slave trade during the Civil War I knew the story of Nathaniel Gordon. I knew that there were a lot of other people as well. And so I collected together a lot of names of men I knew were involved in the slave trade and I gave them to a student research assistant of mine a guy named Daniel Glenn. And I said to Daniel, I want you to go into newspaper databases and start looking at these, looking at these names and see what you can find. And one day Daniel came into my office and he said, Have you ever heard of Appleton Oak Smith? And I thought, Appleton Oak Smith, that's a really strange name. No, I haven't heard of that one. And Daniel said to me, Well, Appleton Oak Smith's name keeps coming up in all of these searches. A lot of the articles I'm finding are about Appleton Oak Smith. And so Daniel kept digging and then I started digging and I thought, Okay, I'm going to do a chapter on Appleton Oak Smith. And the more I, the more digging I did, the more fascinated I became with his story and I decided that he deserved a biography of his own to tell his story and how it touched on so many aspects of American history. And so I kind of eschewed the idea of doing a broad history of the slave trade during the Civil War. And instead I decided to write a book that I now call Shipwrecked, a true Civil War story of mutinies jail breaks blockade running and the slave trade. And what I want to do in the next few moments is tell you the story of Appleton Oak Smith and his family, and how his story gets involved in this complicated history of the slave trade in the United States and the great steps that Lincoln took to destroy the slave trade. And I hope that this little teaser will will gain you some interest in in his story and the book. Appleton Oak Smith's mother was a woman named Elizabeth Oak Smith. And she was a very prominent first wave feminist in the early to mid 19th century she was a lecturer and essayist a poet a playwright a journalist she was dabbling in all sorts of different areas of writing. And I am convinced that if the story that comes out in shipwrecked hadn't happened that we would still know Elizabeth Oak Smith today in the same way that we know Susan B Anthony or Elizabeth Katie Stanton she was that prominent in early feminism. Now you might notice that Elizabeth Oak Smith's name is spelled differently than her sons, she went by Elizabeth and then her middle name Oaks and then her husband's last name Smith. And her son's last name is Oak Smith as one word without it the ES it's just kind of smushed together. And to give you a sense of how progressive she was in her time. She either thought the last name Smith was too boring, or she didn't want her kids to have her husband surname. And so she got the state of New York to legally change her kids last names to Oak Smith she smushed together her middle name and her married name into a new last name. And if you look at the name Oak Smith today, they're always going to either be her sons or their descendants because it was a made up last name. Now, as I mentioned she was very prominent in the feminist movement in the 1840s and 50s. She traveled in literary circles she was friends with Edgar Allen Poe Henry Wasworth Longfellow Horace Greeley, very prominent writers of the 19th century. And she would speak on behalf of women's rights but she was also in favor of ending slavery. And this is actually a cartoon that showed up in a minstrel book that shows her dressed as a black woman to try to mock her. So she was involved with some abolitionists, but primarily in the 1850s. Her work was women's rights women's suffrage. When she was 16 years old. She married an older man named Seba Smith, Seba Smith was in his 30s at the time. And from what I can tell her marriage in its earliest days appears to have been a happy one. As their lives got harder throughout the 1830s and 40s and 50s and 60s their marriage really crumbled and by the 1880s. When she was an older woman and elderly woman she wrote a memoir where she described her marriage and you could see the bitterness that had developed in in her heart against her husband, but early on they appear to have had a happy marriage. Now Seba Smith is famous today because he created a fictional character named Jack Downing and Jack Downing was a sort of fictional advisor to Andrew Jackson. He traveled to Washington DC and would advise Jackson on what he should do during his presidency. And many readers read and love Jack Downing it didn't matter if you were a Democrat or a wig. Everyone in the 1830s and 40s loved him so Lincoln loved him and Lincoln's primary opponent Steven Douglas loved him. Andrew Jackson loved him and his primary political opponent Henry Clay loved him that Davey Crockett loved him. Everybody loved Jack Downing. So Appleton Oak Smith, the man will talk about was raised by these two prominent prominent literary figures Elizabeth Oak Smith and Seba Smith. Now, even though Appleton Oak Smith love to write and love to read and learn four languages and were raised by these very educated people. His heart and his passion was with the ocean. And so when he was 16 years old he traveled to China, where he participated in a merchant voyage. Then in the 1840s he went around the coast of South America to San Francisco. And he kept a journal all the way around the coast of South America. And while he was in San Francisco, he thought that he would spend his time in San Francisco he was really captivated by the city at this time during the gold rush. But there was a tremendous amount of crime and arson in San Francisco during the gold rush the city was burned down several times and there was really no law and order. In San Francisco in 1851 they established a vigilance committee where local people said, we're going to bring law and order and they started doing vigilante justice to try to bring law and order and stop the arson in San Francisco. And for a while, Appleton Oak Smith was involved with the vigilance committee and he thought this is how he would live, but he was sort of so put off by the crime and the violence and the arson that he decided to leave San Francisco. He acquired a ship called the Mary Adeline and this is a drawing that he made of the ship. And he took on passengers in San Francisco and he went back along the coast of South America. And as he went he took the passengers and dropped them off in different places and along the way he was looking for a cargo that he could take back to New York which is where his family was living at this time. But he was never able to find a cargo that would take him to New York and instead when he got to Rio de Janeiro, he got a cargo that was bound for the west coast of Africa. And this is where he's going to begin to make international headlines for work that might be potentially involved in the slave trade. He loaded the cargo in Rio, he went across the Atlantic Ocean, he made it to the Congo River. And when he got there, a British warship called the Dolphin, the HMS Dolphin, found him approaching, and they came up alongside of him and Appleton allowed them to board his ship. Now under international law in 1852, an American sailor did not have to let a British sailor onto his ship to search for evidence of slave trading. There was no treaty between the United States and Great Britain that would allow for this right of search. And Appleton did not need to let the sailors on but he let them on anyway, and it is likely that these British sailors snooped around a bit and were looking for evidence of slave trading. We know through records that the British National Archives that they had captured a British slave trader a week earlier, and so they would have known what to look for and they likely did not see any evidence of slave trading. My thought is that if Appleton was on a slave trading voyage on this trip to the West Coast of Africa, he likely was not yet fully aware of what he was embarking on that the Portuguese who were aboard his ship and that he would be meeting with to discharge the cargo on the West Coast of Africa may have had that in mind and they may not have let him know yet. He never wrote about it at any rate. So the British are on his ship they then depart and Appleton takes the Mary Adeline on to the Congo River, and the current of the Congo River is very powerful, and it forces things way out to see, and as Appleton is trying to navigate his way on to the Congo river. He winds up getting beached along the shoreline. And as he's stuck there 3000 African warriors assemble on the coast, and they begin to attack his ship, and they attack him with muskets and other weapons, and he fights them off as best he can and the ultimately the only thing that saves him are these British warships that had already arrived on his vessel. They come alongside they help fight off the warriors on the shoreline. They go on board they unload the cargo so that his ship becomes lighter it becomes free, and he winds up saving they wind up saving his life. Now, we don't know again whether Appleton was on a slaving voyage on this ship clearly the Africans on the coastline believed he was the British appear to believe that he wasn't, and will know never know for certain at this point. But this incident which becomes known as the Battle of the Congo makes international headlines newspapers throughout the Atlantic world are reporting on what Appleton Oaksmith had been engaged in on the Congo River on the west coast of Africa. Appleton eventually makes it back to New York City. He moves in with his parents, and he gets involved in several other international schemes. One is he becomes a chief lieutenant of William Walker, who is trying to filibuster in Nicaragua and set up a pro slavery empire in Nicaragua. Another one that Appleton Oaksmith gets involved in in the mid 1850s is Cuban liberation. He invests a lot of time and resources into these efforts, and he loses a bundle of money. And by the end of the 1850s, Appleton Oaksmith is essentially flat broke. In 1859, he goes into business with his parents to try to start a literary magazine called the Great Republic, but that goes nowhere. And so he winds up going into business with a fish oil factory owner on Long Island in 1860 or 1861. Now there's a couple of really big moments that are taking place at this time when he's getting into the fish oil business. And that is that secession has come. And in January of 1861 Oaksmith tries to work with the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City to put on pro union rallies in New York to rally the nation not to divide. So he goes out to William Seward, the senator from New York and calls on Seward to come speak to Tammany Hall Democrats in a sort of bipartisan or non partisan way, but he asks Seward to make statements that would be pro slavery, and Seward just ignores him. Another big thing that takes place at this point is that there are changes in the oil industry between 1859 and the early 1860s. Now Appleton is working with this fish oil factory owner on Long Island. He and his co businessmen decide we need whale oil for the fish oil factory. And so they go out Appleton starts buying up whale oil boats, whaling boats to go out and hunt for whale oil and the reason this looks suspicious is that in 1859 petroleum has been discovered in Pennsylvania and so over the next couple of years the whaling industry completely bottoms out. And it looks really really suspicious when a new guy Appleton begins to say I'm going to enter this business. And so in 1861, Appleton purchases a boat in New York City called the Augusta. And he says to the owners why he's buying it, but the people who sell it to him think that it doesn't seem kosher and so they sell him the boat. And then they go immediately to Lincoln's US Marshall, a guy named Robert Murray in the Southern District of New York, and they say this guy Appleton Oaksmith has bought a ship for and he says it's for whaling, but we don't believe him. And so, and here's an image I should have put up of what whaling looked like in the 19th century. So the US authorities decide that they are going to arrest Appleton Oaksmith. Robert Murray, the federal marshal has him arrested, and the prosecutor in New York City a man named Edela Field Smith, who happens to be the same guy who got the conviction for Nathaniel Gordon. Edela Field Smith decides to prosecute the Augusta. And so they seize the ship they seize the cargo that's on it, and they're going to sell it at auction. And Appleton pleads to have his ship returned, but they don't believe him. And ultimately they decide to arrest Appleton. Now, they, they need to come up with a way to arrest Appleton Oaksmith and it you know they they're not yet certain that they can get him for slave trading. But they have a loophole that has come about because of the Civil War. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and he did it initially along the East Coast and he expanded it to include the area between Washington DC and New York City and Appleton Oaksmith is in New York City. And so they use Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to arrest Appleton Oaksmith and basically charge him with disloyalty. So no one suspected Appleton of being disloyal, they suspected him of slave trading, but as a pretense, they, they, they suspect him of disloyalty so that they can arrest him. They throw him in prison here at a, at a Fort in New York Harbor called Fort Lafayette. And he was kept in casemate number two. And this is an image from Harper's Weekly that shows casemate number two. And so he's imprisoned here he has no idea that the, what the charges looming are, but he starts pleading with the Lincoln administration that he is not disloyal that he is innocent. There are a number of letters that he wrote to Secretary of State William Seward that are in record group 59 at the National Archives in College Park, where Appleton pleads innocence and says that he is not guilty of any crime. His wife is a woman named Isada Oaksmith. She writes to Abraham Lincoln and this is a letter that she sent to President Lincoln, which is in the National Archives record group 59. And his mother, a very prominent writer writes to Abraham Lincoln and this is a letter she sent to him. And these, these women are pleading for Appleton to be released and they claim that he's done nothing wrong. Well, they keep Appleton in prison for some time. They condemn his ship. This is the US District Judge William Shipman who condemns his ship so that he can no longer have it returned to him. But they worry that they might not be able to get a conviction in New York if they're going to charge him with slave trading they could do it in New York but they worry that maybe there's too many people with Southern sympathies in New York and that they he'll get either a tongue jury or an acquittal, but they've got another out. And that is that Appleton is suspected of buying whaling vessels in New Bedford, Massachusetts as well. And so they release him from Fort Lafayette, they transfer him up to Boston Harbor, and they hold him in a military prison there and they hold him there until they can prepare to transfer him over to civil authorities in Boston. And Appleton doesn't know what's coming and one day in January of 1861 and order comes for his release that he's finally going to be released from military custody, and he's relieved he thinks he's going to go free. And instead when he walks out of Fort Warren, there is instantly the US Marshal in Boston waiting for him. And they rearrest him this time under civil authority, and they transfer him over to the Charles Street Jail, which is the local civil prison, but they would often house federal prisons, prisoners there. And Appleton is imprisoned in in Charles Street Jail, and he's imprisoned in a cell that I believe is now a restaurant called clink. And the Charles Street Jail has become a luxury hotel called the Liberty Hotel. And so you can go there and see how they turned this old prison into a magnificent hotel and there are a couple of restaurants. And if you go into the restaurant clink you're sitting, I think right outside of where his prison cell was. And now he's being held by federal civil authorities under the US Marshal John Keyes in Boston, and the US Attorney Richard Henry Dana Jr. who was a very famous sailor in the 1830s wrote a book called Two Years Before the Mask, and now is the federal prosecutor in Boston. And these are the two guys who are going to go after Appleton Oaksmith. And they bring Oaksmith into court in January of 62, and they charge him with outfitting ships for the slave trade. They couldn't charge him with slave trading. He wasn't caught red handed the way that Nathaniel Gordon was with 897 Africans in the whole of his ship. I did believe that he was buying these vessels and setting them up to go on a slaving voyage. And so that's what they charge him with they they demand a high amount of bail. Oaksmith says I've got no money I've not I'm not a slave trader I don't have any money to pay for bail I don't have any friends who can post bond on my behalf, but the the judge keeps the bail fairly high and Appleton remains in jail. In June of 1862 he goes to trial. And the trial is almost a farce it's one of the most ridiculous things you could ever imagine what Richard Henry Dana brings all sorts of evidence that Appleton appeared to be bringing preparing these ships for the slave trade and not for sailing voyages. Appleton's defense his lawyers defense was to get about 13 women and girls, and to sit them next to him in the courtroom, and to look really pretty and sweet. And hopefully that would win over the sympathies of the jury. At one point Appleton sister in law was testifying from the stand. And I think they plan this in advance because she passes out, and Appleton gets up from the defense table and runs and catches her where she hits the ground. And the jury apparently was taken by the sort of Victorian sentimentalized scene but not taken enough to acquit him. He's ultimately found guilty. And he goes back to jail. And he is awaiting sentencing the sentencing will come in a few months. And while he's awaiting sentencing he somehow escapes. That's exactly how he escaped. There's actually a 50 page federal grand jury report that was taken that's in record group 48 at the National Archives, where they interviewed all of the different guards and jailers and everything to try to figure it out. And so I've got a chapter on his escape where I speculate as to how he might have done it, but we'll likely never know for sure how he did it. At any rate, Appleton escapes from jail in Boston, and makes his way to Havana. He has a brother who has been living in Havana, his brother Sydney, and he moves in with his brother and he recuperates his health. For the next two years, Appleton will work as a Confederate blockade runner, trying to move cotton between Galveston, Texas and Havana Cuba or other points. While he initially had been pro-union again in January of 1861, he had tried to rally for the Union cause, albeit from a pro-slavery perspective. Now in 1862 and 63 and 64, he becomes ardently pro-Confederate. He is very bitter about how he sees himself as having been unjustly treated. And he writes poetry that gets published in Confederate newspapers that sings the praises of the Confederacy. He almost gets captured on the high seas several times as he is on the Gulf of Mexico doing these blockade running voyages. And there are naval records in record group 56 at the National Archives that recount some of the blockading chases where they go after Appleton Oaksmith. I'll say here, I couldn't have written this book without the National Archives. I think I said this a minute ago. I consulted I think six different branches of the National Archives to be able to piece together this story. Now, Appleton Oaksmith is in Cuba and he's doing these blockading voyages between Galveston and Havana. And meanwhile, while he's doing this, the federal government still wants to get him back. And so they're trying to come up with a way to do it. And the problem is there's no extradition treaty between the United States and Spain. So they can't just go to the Spanish government and say, we want you to arrest Oaksmith and send him back. But something fortuitous happens for the federal government. A Cuban slave trader named Jose Augustus Arguellis escapes from Havana or from Cuba and makes his way to Manhattan in 1864. And so now in the summer of 1864, you have a situation where an American convicted slave trader is hiding out in Cuba and a Cuban slave trader is hiding out in Manhattan. And so the Spanish minister in Washington DC and Secretary of State William Seward get together and they come up with a plan. You kidnap our guy, we'll kidnap your guy and we'll swap. They may not have an extradition treaty, but that's okay. This is how we're going to get it done. And so they agree to do that. And so Robert Murray, the U.S. Marshal in New York City finds Arguellis, arrests him, sends him back to Cuba, and Arguellis gets 19 years at hard labor for his crime of slave trading. The Cuban police are not quite as on the ball as the U.S. Marshal was. They go to the home of Sidney Oaksmith, Ableton's brother. And they get there sometime between 11pm and midnight, one night in late spring or summer or early fall 1864. And they surround the house. There's about 12 or 13 of them. And three of them go into the house and they go through the house until they get into a bedroom where they find a man asleep, and they wake him up. And the man says, who are you? And they essentially say, we're not going to tell you, but we're arresting you, you're coming with us. And the man says that he is very ill and that the doctors have ordered him to stay in bed. And the police say, doesn't matter. We don't care what the doctor said, you're coming with us. And the man pleads with them and they are unrelenting, you've got to get out of bed and come with us. And so they force this very sick man out of bed and they bring him to the front of the house and then they take him outside. And they then begin to wonder if they've got the right man. And they're there threatening him, but then they go in and they ask a servant, do you have a photograph of Ableton Oaksmith? And the servant goes into another room and gets a photograph of Ableton Oaksmith and brings it to the Cuban police. And they look at it and they realize they've got the wrong guy. They had arrested Ableton's brother Sidney, who really was sick. And somehow they had missed Ableton. We don't know how, but somehow Ableton had gotten word that the Cuban police were going to come and arrest him. And so he escaped from Havana. Now they then let Sidney go back to bed. They let him go. This moment made, again, international news. It's getting reported throughout the United States and other places in the newspapers that the federal government had tried to do this sort of illegal kidnapping scheme with the Spanish government in order to capture Ableton Oaksmith. And it actually led to a great deal of consternation in Lincoln's cabinet. William Seward saw what he was doing as perfectly justifiable. Slave trading is one of the most heinous crimes that human beings have ever been involved in and could ever be involved in. And so from Seward's perspective, you needed to do what you needed to do to stop slave trading. Lincoln's more conservative cabinet members were less sure about that. Lincoln's Attorney General was a man named Edward Bates. He was a conservative former Whig Republican from Missouri. And he said he wrote about this in his diary and he speculated he said that Seward was led to this hazardous measure, a hazardous measure of trying to be involved in an international kidnapping scheme. Bates said by Seward's belief that it would be a capital hit to win the extreme or the favor of the extreme anti-slavery men. In other words, from the conservative Bates' perspective, Seward was just trying to become popular with the abolitionists by doing this sort of kidnapping scheme. Gideon Wells, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy wrote in his diary, he said constitutional limitations to Seward are unnecessary restraints. In other words, the Constitution didn't guide Seward in what he wanted to do. And Wells went on to say, could the abduction by any possibility be popular? Mr. Seward would do it if it would emerge to his credit. In other words, again, Wells and Bates both believe that Seward is just in this to make a name for himself. Now, Seward did not take this criticism sitting down and he responded this way. He said a nation is never bound to furnish asylum to dangerous criminals who are offenders against the human race. In other words, slave traders, they don't get the sort of protection that other accused criminals might get. And Seward said this was a mere act of comedy between nations. These were two nations who had these offenders against human rights who were in their respective nations and as an act of comedy or good working together, we are going to trade them. And Seward's response was this was perfectly justifiable. Lincoln didn't say anything about this until after his reelection. This became a campaign issue in 1864. The Democrats tried to hit Lincoln for being acting illegally here. The radicals who broke away from the Republican Party in 1864 led by John C. Fremont. They tried to hit Lincoln for this. Lincoln stayed silent on it until after the election. And finally, after the presidential election, Lincoln said this, he said for myself, I have no doubt of the power and duty of the executive under the law of nations to exclude enemies of the human race from an asylum in the United States. In other words, if you're a slave trader, you are an enemy of the human race, you don't get the same kind of protections that other criminals might get. Well, Appleton Oaksmith stayed on the lam until 1872. He actually, I'm just going to very briefly touch on what happened the rest of his life and then we have some time for questions and if you have time, if you want to put it drop a question in the chat box, I would I would love to take them after after the talk. Appleton Oaksmith escaped from Cuba. He made it up to Canada. And one thing I didn't mention I've got a lot on in the book I mentioned his wife earlier how she tried to help him get out of out of jail by writing to Lincoln pleading on his behalf. Well, they had a very tumultuous marriage and a very unhappy marriage they'd known each other for 10 days before getting married, and Appleton decided he wanted to divorce her, but he didn't tell her. Instead, he used the state of Indiana, Indiana and the 1850s and 60s had very lax divorce laws and you could essentially get a mail order divorce. Newspapers in New York City during the Civil War would advertise lawyers saying, if you want if you need a quick and easy divorce, hire us will get you a divorce from Indiana. And so somehow Appleton hired a lawyer got a divorce from Indiana, even though he'd never lived there. He left Havana went to Canada, and he married his cousin. He then took his new wife and kids to London and summoned his ex-wife who doesn't yet know she's his ex-wife to come to London. She believes she's coming to London to be reunited with her husband. And instead he confronts her with divorce papers and says I'm remarried sign these if you don't you'll never see your kids again. She feels completely stuck and does this. Meanwhile, Appleton's mother is still pleading with the federal government to pardon her son. And so by 1865 Lincoln is assassinated and Andrew Johnson becomes president. And in 1866 and 67 she begins pleading with the Johnson administration she at one point goes to Andrew Johnson meets with him at the White House pleads with him to pardon Appleton Oaksmith. And Andrew Johnson is on the verge of pardoning Oaksmith. When the ex-wife finds out I saw the finds out and she rushes to the White House meets with Andrew Johnson says my ex-husband is a scoundrel don't pardon him. And Andrew Johnson listens to her and refuses to pardon Oaksmith and it's incredible irony. That Andrew Johnson the president who pardoned every ex-confederate refuses to pardon Appleton Oaksmith. Oaksmith remains in exile until 1872 when he finally gets Ulysses S. Grant to issue a pardon. There's a very long case file at the National Archives in College Park where letter after letter after letter comes in and they persuade Grant that Oaksmith was innocent. And so Grant issues the pardon. In 1872 Appleton Oaksmith moves to North Carolina kind of on a whim. And he becomes involved in local politics and gets elected to the state legislature. And in one of these really interesting twists in history that I don't fully know how to explain. He gets elected in a southern state and ex-confederate state as a pro-black civil rights anti-clan candidate. And he actually advocates for black civil and political rights in the state legislature not full black equality but for black political rights and for civil rights. And it's a pretty remarkable transformation to see him going from being pro-slavery in the 1850s and 1860s to being convicted of outfitting ships for the slave trade to becoming a pro-confederate blockade runner and then to becoming a pro-black civil rights politician. His life continues to be full of turmoil. I call the book shipwrecked because at least a dozen people drown in the book. It's really a tragic story. But it's also a really remarkable story that touches on so many really important moments in the Civil War era and in the broader 19th century. You know, he lives through the gold rush. He's involved in these international schemes in the 1850s. His life touches the Civil War and touches this issue of how the Lincoln administration goes about destroying the slave trade during the Civil War. Most Civil War scholars are familiar with Nathaniel Gordon. They know that story. They know that Lincoln was willing to execute a slave trader to show how seriously he was willing to go to destroy the slave trade. But they don't know that Lincoln would stretch the law using habeas corpus to arrest a potential slave trader. Get him convicted and then go to the lengths of an international kidnapping scheme in violation of international law to try to make sure that Appleton Oaksmith would get back in prison. William Seward said this during the war. He said, we are a powerful nation and it is simply a point of duty to apply our power to bring this evil, the evil of the slave trade to an end. And my hope is that the story of Appleton Oaksmith will give readers a sense of just how the Lincoln administration used that expansive power. And that we get it through a very incredible and tragic story of a family that probably would be prominent today if they hadn't been involved in the slave trading but had been lost for 160 years because of what they did. So with that, I'll close and if we've got a few minutes for questions if anyone is interested in asking questions and I'll fill a buster for a second while to see if any questions come in none have appeared yet. The research for this book. What took me to a lot of different places. Part of it was done through digitized sources so I mentioned how my student Daniel found Appleton through digitized sources and I was able to fill in a lot of gaps in Appleton's life through newspapers.com or redex or other newspaper databases. But then I also was very fortunate because Appleton's parents were both prominent writers, they have large collections of papers that have survived. So Appleton's mother has papers at the University of Virginia, because UVA collects the papers of prominent writers, and she also has papers at the New York Public Library because she was in New York, and they collect papers there. Appleton, because he went on to be a state legislator, has papers at Duke University and Duke East Carolina and the University of North Carolina. So there are large collections of papers there that I was able to access. And then the National Archives was integral. Appleton got involved in court cases all over the place and there are a lot of these cases that come up in the book. And so I was looking at records in Record Group 21 at the National Archives in Boston and the National Archives in New York City, and I think the National Archives in San Francisco had a court case or two that he was involved in. The pardon files are in College Park, the disloyalty files are at College Park. There are military records related to his family and census records that are at the main branch in Washington DC. I even found some records at the National Archives in Atlanta, even though he never went there. And it's really, it's an extraordinary thing that the National Archives does for scholars like me to preserve these records and make them available. So a question came in, what type of evidence was provided to show that he was outfitting the ships for the trade? That's a great question. The whaling voyages in the 19th century generally took about three years, and a ship would leave usually from New England, they might go out in New Bedford or Nantucket, and they would go out for three years and they would take on board a lot of supplies that you would need. Other supplies would be food and especially good water. You would need a lot of water because you'd be out to sea for a very long time before you might go to a stopping point at the Azores or in Europe or in South America to re-provision your ship. So you'd need water and good quality water and good quality food. So those are two things that you would need for a whaling voyage. The other things you would need for whaling voyages are certain tools. So things like spears and harpoons and giant hooks for peeling back the whale skin to be able to get at the blubber, and then you would need giant cauldrons and things for boiling the blubber to turn it into the whale oil. And there were all sorts of tools that you needed for that sort of really disgusting kind of work. And so when they would look on the vessels to try to search for evidence of slave trading, they would look at, do they have the tools? Do they have the tools you need for cutting up the whale and boiling the blubber? Do they have a lot of high quality water and high quality food, or do they not? So Lincoln in May of 1861 put the Interior Department in charge of destroying the slave trade. From the very beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln says, I'm going to make sure my administration sets its hand firmly on destroying the slave trade. And so he had the Interior Department doing that. And Robert Murray, the Marshal in New York, had all of the other East Coast Marshals come to Manhattan, and Murray took them down to the docks and showed them some slaving vessels that he had captured. And he showed them, you know, here's the kind of evidence we look for, what kind of food, what kind of water, what kind of tools do they have? And then those Marshals went back to their own respective districts along the East Coast and continued that work of looking for evidence of slave trading. So when they go to trial, Appleton makes the case, I wasn't going on a slaving voyage. We weren't planning to go for a three-year voyage. We were just planning to go for a short voyage, capture some whales, and then bring the oil back to Long Island to the Fish Oil Factory. And so his argument was, that's why I didn't have as much water as you would expect and as much food as you would expect. The federal government said, well, we think the water is not as of good quality. We think the food is not as of good quality. It's not what you would have fed to white sailors. We think that the water and the food were actually intended for Africans who were going to be kidnapped and brought over to the United States. In a sense, we can never know with certainty what he was doing because in a way he was captured too soon. Like he was captured before he actually did it, whereas Nathaniel Gordon was captured red-handed. And so Appleton claimed his innocence his whole life. Richard Henry Dana claimed that Oaksmouth was guilty for the rest of his life. When the Grant administration and the Johnson administration were considering pardon, Dana is writing to them saying, I think he's guilty. You should not pardon this man. So they debated this for the next 10 years, and it actually even was involved in politics. There was a federal prosecutor in the case who wound up running for lieutenant governor of New York and then governor of New York in the 1870s. And this issue of was Appleton guilty or not? And was this prosecutor potentially in on it? That had an effect in two major elections in New York City. Another question was what part of North Carolina did he represent? He was right on the coast near Beaufort and Moorhead City. So when Appleton came back to the United States, he landed his ship in North Carolina near Moorhead City and he was walking down the street one day and he saw a land auction going on. And just on a whim, he threw in an obscenely low bid, I mean, an absurd amount for a plot of land thinking, I'll help the auctioneer and it won't really matter and all just, you know, doesn't matter. So he put in this really low bid and he went on his way and the next day he was somewhere in town and someone came up to him and said, you won the land, you need to go pay. And he was shocked that he had won this property. But he won it. So he went and paid and he wound up staying there for the rest of his life other than when he went on voyages to other parts of the country or the world on for his business, but he wound up settling in the coast of North Carolina near Moorhead City. And he got elected, he got involved in the local community and then in politics elected to the state legislature. In the book I actually have a photograph of the North Carolina State House of Representatives from 1874 and it shows scores of men standing outside of the state capital and Raleigh and there's Appleton standing right next to or one man away from several black men who were also representatives in the state legislature and he only served one term, but he was fairly prominent. He was at least vocal and his speeches and things show up in the local newspapers. And I'll say one other thing about that in the mid to late 1870s he actually traveled to New York City and spoke at an anti slavery convention or meeting. It was anti slavery in an international sense because slavery still existed in Cuba and Brazil. And so he spoke at the Cooper Union in New York City which is where Lincoln gave his very famous speech in 1860, and he shared the stage with a very famous black minister named Henry Highland Garnett. And it's again just a really extraordinary moment that that Appleton goes from who he was to sharing a stage with Henry Highland Garnett in the anti slavery cause as a, as a North Carolinian after the Civil War. Another question came in. Was it common for prominent people to be able to meet directly with presidents at that time. The answer is absolutely yes. And I'll give a plug for another book I wrote. A couple years ago I wrote a book called a house built by slaves African American visitors to the Lincoln White House. And this book tells the story of the hundreds of African Americans who met with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In the 19th century, presidents held office hours in the same way that college professors do. And I mean it's foreign to us to think about it like this, but it was very common back then where couple days a week Abraham Lincoln would have dedicated office hours and anyone who wanted to go to the White House and wait in line, and they would, you know, go up the stairs to what is now the Lincoln bedroom but at the time was Lincoln's office. And when it was their turn they could just go in and talk to the president about whatever they wanted. And a lot of times, you know, if you've seen the Spielberg Lincoln movie you see this captured in a scene that's really beautifully done where in the Spielberg movie a family comes in and they say you know we've got this bridge and we're not being treated right with it we want you to help. People would come to Lincoln and say I've got this personal issue. I've got nowhere left to turn will you as the president please help me. And sometimes they would come to talk about politics. Oftentimes it would be about patronage. Mr Lincoln, I gave a speech in this small town in the middle of nowhere and that speech was so important that it got you elected president will you make me the postmaster of my town I mean things like that. So while Lincoln is waging the war he has hundreds of people weekly who come in and try to talk to him. And for the first year of the war only white Americans do that. But beginning as early as April of 1862 African Americans begin going to the White House to meet with Abraham Lincoln as well. And during the Civil War, that becomes very common for him to meet with African Americans. And so yes, when when I saw the Oak Smith and Elizabeth Oak Smith meet with Andrew Johnson. It was not at all uncommon for people to go to meet with the president, especially if it had to do with a pardon. It was and I mentioned that earlier to where Nathaniel Gordon's wife and mother go to the White House to try to meet with Lincoln. Ordinary Americans could go into the White House, shake the president's hand. You didn't need an appointment you might have to wait a long time. And at New Year's receptions, anyone who wanted to could go and meet with the president and first lady and shake their hands as well. A very different way of thinking about the executive mansion and meeting the president than we have today. Well, we are out of time. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you found this interesting in that shipwrecked or a house put by slaves catches your interest and I look forward to speaking with you again. Thank you.