Williams’ Gang

Forret, JeffJeff 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.

William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.

Explores a Washington, DC slave trader's legal misadventures associated with transporting convict slaves through New Orleans.

Introduction: the slave depot of Washington, DC; 1. An ambush; 2. The Yellow House; 3. Sale and transportation; 4. Mobile to New Orleans; 5. Legal troubles; 6. The Millington Bank; 7. State v. Williams; 8. Slave trading in 'hard times'; 9. Politics of the slave pen; 10. Brothers; 11. The Louisiana State Penitentiary; 12. Closure; 13. Perseverance; 14. Violet; Epilogue: the legal legacy of the domestic slave trade.