Avenging His Cruelty: The Story of Nathaniel Gordon the Only American to be Executed for the Crime of Slave Trading on the High Seas

 Under a sweltering equatorial sun, shackled around the neck and chained one to another at the ankles, on August 7, 1860 over 900 enslaved Africans were forced aboard the slave ship Erie docked near the mouth of the Congo River in west Africa.

The imprisoned human cargo that had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, mostly children and young women, were led onto the ship at gunpoint and under the watchful eye of a thirty-four year old American slave trader originally from Portland, Maine (quite a distance from what would become the Confederate States of America) named Nathaniel Gordon.

Writing for Scribner’s Magazine over forty years later in 1900 when mentioning the infamous slave trader Nathaniel Gordon in his scholarly article entitled, “The Slave Trade in America” historian John R. Spears would say of Gordon’s cargo aboard the Erie that, “Only 172 were men and 182 were women…Gordon preferred to carry children because they could not rise up to avenge his cruelties.”

And life during the passage across the Atlantic for the men, women and mostly children on Nathaniel Gordon’s slave ship was the floating definition of cruelty towards humanity itself.  It was said, under oath, that during the voyage of the Erie from the coast of west Africa to Cuba, where the slave trade was still legal in 1860 and where Gordon hoped to sell his cargo, that he personally, “Had thrown twenty-nine souls overboard to lighten the load of his ship and outrun Royal Navy gunboats that patrolled off the coast of Africa in search of slave traders.”

Nathaniel Gordon

The Erie was nothing less than a floating dungeon of human misery.  Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular news magazines in America during the Civil War Era wrote in early 1862 of the slave ship Erie that, “It was so crowded on the main deck that one could scarcely put his foot down without slipping on people…the stench from the hold was fearful and the filth and the dirt upon their persons was indescribable.”

Nathaniel Gordon was no stranger to cruelty, horror or inhumanity.  By the time he set sail from west Africa for Cuba with 900 hapless souls aboard his vessel he was an experienced slave trader with over fifteen years of selling human cargo under his belt.

Thankfully though, for humanity’s sake, the Erie, would be the last slave ship that Nathaniel Gordon would ever command.  He would be brought to trial for his crimes aboard that floating ship of horror and Nathaniel Gordon would become, during the height of the Civil War, the only American to ever be executed for the crime of slave trading.

Slave trading, and not slavery itself, but the act of transporting one enslaved human being across the ocean and selling them into slavery in the United States had by 1860 been illegal for over four decades under the Piracy Law of 1819.  The Piracy Law of 1819 was a Federal Statute that had made it a Federal Crime (punishable by death) in the United States of America to rob another ship on the high seas, or as amended in 1820, to participate in the African slave trade.

Cross Section of a Typical Slave Ship

Despite the fact that slave trading was by 1820 illegal in America and could, theoretically at least, have by 1860 had its practitioners ending their days swaying from the end of a noose, this did not stop generations of slave traders like Nathaniel Gordon from attempting to make a buck by smuggling enslaved human cargo into the American south through back channel entrances such as Brazil and Cuba.  This was  due to the fact that all forms of slavery and slave trading were still perfectly legal practices in all parts of the Spanish Empire and there was still a lucrative and hungry market for enslaved human beings from Africa in the American South on the eve of the American Civil War. 

In fact, Nathaniel Gordon, it could be said, was born into the cruel life that he led.  Born in Portland, Maine to a seafaring family, Gordon’s father had also been a slave trader all of his life.  When Nathaniel was only twelve years old his father was arrested for slave trading under the Piracy Law of 1819 and he was sentenced to death as well.

However, though it is not known exactly how or why, the death sentence of Nathaniel Gordon’s father was quickly commuted, nonetheless, it appears as if the elder Gordon spent no longer than a week behind bars.  Though slave trading was technically illegal, and technically punishable by death, most Americans in the years before 1860 who were caught in the act of slave trading, as had been Nathaniel’s father, were simply let go with a slap on the wrist because of southern pro-slavery sympathies that existed at all levels of American government during the first half of the nineteenth century.

As soon as he was old enough Nathaniel Gordon learned the sailors trade, became a ship owner just like his father, and went to sea to continue the family business--slave trading.

Right away, when he was still in his mid-twenties, Nathaniel Gordon ran afoul of the Piracy Law of 1819.  In 1848, when Gordon was only twenty-two years old, his boat the Juliet was stopped and seized by the United States Navy on suspicion of slave trading.  However, after the U.S. Navy personnel boarded and searched his ship; no charges were ever pressed against Gordon at that time and he was allowed to go on his way because no concrete evidence that any slave trading was actually being conducted at that time was found.

More than likely, though, at that time in 1848 the young and wily Nathaniel Gordon had been able to bribe a few Naval officers who held pro-slavery sympathies and simply left alone to go about his evil business.  

It wouldn’t be the last time that Nathaniel Gordon faced trouble because of the Piracy Law of 1819.  In fact, over the next ten plus years Gordon made a habit out of picking up slaves in west Africa, depositing them in either Brazil or Cuba and then burning his own ships to hide any evidence that he had ever trafficked in human slaves.

Though both American and British authorities remained suspicious of Nathaniel Gordon whenever he sailed the Atlantic, and although his cruelty and ill-gotten wealth through the slave trade became notorious across the United States and Europe, his luck held throughout the 1850’s and he was never brought into custody for his crimes under the Piracy Law of 1819.

But all of that finally changed in August of 1860.  

After leaving west Africa with his cargo of primarily 900 enslaved children, packed in the airless, dark, filth-ridden hold of the Erie, Gordon made a mad dash across the Atlantic towards Cuba where he intended to sell anyone aboard his ship who happened to survive into bondage in Havana.  

However, less than fifty miles from his destination Nathaniel Gordon and the slave ship Erie were intercepted and captured by the United States Navy gunboat USS Mohican.  During the American Civil War the USS Mohican would see extensive service blockading Confederate ports in the deep south as part of the overall Union naval strategy, but for now, the USS Mohican freed the people enslaved aboard the Erie, and sent them back to the coast of west Africa, to the freed slave colony that had been established by the United States in Liberia.

It should be noted that although those held captive aboard the Erie were technically set free, the government of the United States for its part never bothered to return any of the enslaved captives to their homes or to even consult them as to where they wished to go after having been freed.

Nathaniel Gordon, for his part, was taken into custody aboard the USS Mohican and then extradited to New York City to face a federal trial for the crime of slave trading.

Originally, while Gordon languished in the Tombs, New York City’s notoriously squalid jail, U.S. Attorney James I. Roosevelt ( a relative of two future American Presidents) offered him a deal.  Roosevelt said that if Gordon revealed who the financial backers were behind his slave trading enterprise, then after paying a $2,000 fine and serving a two year prison sentence, Gordon could walk free.

Notorious Tombs Prison NYC ca. 1900

However, having easily evaded trouble for slave trading in the past and confident that he could evade the hangman’s noose once again, Gordon refused Roosevelt’s plea bargain.  He believed the terms of the deal were too harsh and he was confident that if he let his case go to trial before a federal jury then he would be exonerated.

But, with abolitionist sentiment running high on the eve of the American Civil War, Gordon was charged with Piracy on the high seas and slave trading in violation of the Piracy Law of 1819.  He was finally convicted, after a lengthy trial and many appeals on various technicalities on December 7, 1861 and sentenced to die by hanging in New York’s City Prison colloquially known as the Tombs.

His date of execution was set for February 7, 1862.  By this time the American Civil War was nearly a year old and, oddly enough, in a last ditch effort to save his life, the supporters of Nathaniel Gordon appealed to President Abraham Lincoln to commute the slave trader’s death sentence.

In response to Gordon’s appeal for a commutation President Lincoln wrote, “I believe I am kindly enough in nature and can be moved to pity and to pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive…but any man, who for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon.”

Lincoln did grant Nathaniel Gordon a two week stay of execution in order to allow him, “To make the necessary preparations for the awful change which awaits him.”  

Presumably, President Lincoln was referring to the fact that he fully expected Nathaniel Gordon to be eternally damned in the fires of Hell for his heinous crimes.  Gordon’s new date to be hanged was set for February 21, 1862.

And on the day before he was set to die the wily and nefarious Nathaniel Gordon tried once again to escape the justice that he deserved by injecting strychnine, that his wife had smuggled into his cell on her last visit, in a desperate suicide attempt.

Gordon was found that night lying unconscious on the concrete floor of his cell.  Doctors at the prison, in a desperate attempt to keep Gordon alive just so he could be killed later that day, pumped his stomach and gave him brandy and whiskey just to keep him conscious.

He begged the doctors to let him die.  Gordon was reported to have begged, “Please let me die alone and not be humiliated!”

But just as Gordon had shown no sympathy in life to those he sold into bondage, the authorities showed him no sympathy in death, and moved the time of his hanging forward by three hours just to keep him alive long enough so that he could be killed in public.

As he mounted the gallows in the Tombs’ prison courtyard before a large crowd of spectators, Nathaniel Gordon was said to have made a long winded, rambling and nearly incoherent speech.  He may very well have been drunk from the alcohol that the doctor’s had given to him after  they had pumped the strychnine from his stomach.

He said his attorney had misled him.  

He said that he had misunderstood the charges brought against him.  He said the prosecutor had made him believe that his life would be spared.  

He blamed everyone he could and never took any responsibility for what he had done. In the end, he was left silently hanging from the gallows in the cold winter’s air, all alone in a New York City prison courtyard, Nathaniel Gordon, the only American citizen to ever be executed for the crime of slave trading.

A fitting punishment for anyone who has trafficked in such human cruelty and misery…