While Abraham Lincoln had a well-deserved reputation as a soft touch during the Civil War, readily finding excuses to offer mercy to Union soldiers who had fallen asleep or abandoned their posts, he also approved the hanging of the only slave trader ever to be executed by the United States. Captain Nathaniel Gordon was a repeat offender, caught with nearly 900 enslaved men, women, and children crammed into the tiny space below decks off the coast of Congo. But Gordon wasn’t particularly worried. For the first 40+ years of the law that made international slave trading illegal and punishable by death, no man was ever executed. Why now? And why by Lincoln?
Lincoln’s personal secretary, John Hay, once said that he was “amused at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would justify him in saving the life” of a condemned man despite a War Department policy to use executions as a deterrent to other soldiers considering going absent without leave. Others also noted that Lincoln always leaned toward mercy. Even in his legal career, he called on lawyers to “discourage litigation” as “there will still be business enough.”
But while he often had a soft spot for minor offenses, he could be hard as stone in cases of brutality against women and breaking the law ending international slave trading. According to Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, Lincoln was “prompt to punish…outrages upon women” and other abuses. He could allow for mistakes, but not wanton cruelty.
Nathaniel Gordon had been captured in the act of transporting Africans to become slaves in August of 1860, months before Lincoln’s election as president. Of the 897 captives taken, 563 were children, which he preferred because they were unlikely to rise up to free themselves. His first trial ended in a split jury, the result of bribery, but in the second trial in September 1861 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Still, Gordon and his supporters expected that he would be given clemency, just as every slave trader before them had received. Indeed, there were hundreds of prominent politicians and merchants writing Lincoln on Gordon’s behalf.
On February 4, 1862, when the execution was nearing, Lincoln wrote a letter that caught many off-guard. Lincoln acknowledged the pressure put on him:
And whereas, a large number of respectable citizens have earnestly besought me to commute the said sentence of the said Nathaniel Gordon to a term of imprisonment for life, which application I have felt it to be my duty to refuse;
Anticipating that Gordon expected a much different outcome and thus had not fully prepared himself mentally for execution, Lincoln gave Gordon not a commutation, but a pause:
Now, therefore, be it known, that I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, have granted and do hereby grant unto him, the said Nathaniel Gordon, a respite of the above recited sentence, until Friday the twenty-first day of February, A.D. 1862, between the hours of twelve o’clock at noon and three o’clock in the afternoon of the said day, when the said sentence shall be executed.
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 alone to the mercy of the common God and Father of all men.
Gordon was executed on the revised date.
Yes, Lincoln tended toward mercy. But he also understood that some crimes rose above the norm. They were crimes against humanity and required strong, definitive punishment as deterrent to similar choices by other actors. A common denominator was the cruelty, which Lincoln could not abide.
Nathaniel Gordon was the first slave trader to be executed. He was also the last. As the Civil War shifted toward ultimate United States victory over Confederate insurrectionists, Lincoln’s support would lead to the 13th Amendment banning slavery everywhere in the United States, now and forever. The work of reaching full equality would remain, as racist forces would continue – and still continue – to deny constitutional freedom and equality to large segments of Americans. Clearly, if he were alive today, Lincoln would be a force for freedom, for equality, and even more adamantly against insurrection and treason.
[I highly recommend a book by Ron Soodalter called Hanging Captain Gordon.]
[Photo from WikiMedia Commons]
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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
