A Shadow on the Household by Bryan Prince

Author:Bryan Prince [Prince, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-361-4
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2010-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Cornelia Williams blossomed in freedom, eventually marrying a Civil War veteran. Together they raised a large family of their own, as seen in this photograph from the late 1880s. (courtesy Stanford University)

In an ironic postscript to the story, by the time of Cornelia’s redemption, John Maffitt had received a commission by the U.S. Navy to capture “slavers” – ships that illegally continued to import Africans into the Americas despite the prohibition on the trade by Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, and the United States. Conditions in which these newly enslaved people existed in the “Middle Passage” defied description. Maffitt was quite successful at interfering with this barbaric practice, capturing four slavers in a single year.21 In the same year that Cornelia was restored to her mother, Maffitt was singled out by then U.S. President James Buchanan in his second annual Message to the Nation for capturing the slaver Echo near the coast of Cuba with 306 Africans on board. A U.S. government agent described the slaves’ experience on board the Echo and the period immediately after they were liberated:

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