Williams’ Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts by Jeff Forret (review)

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.