The Rest I Will Kill by Brian McGinty

Author:Brian McGinty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2016-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

PASSING JUDGMENT

The Waring was not the only merchant ship that found itself embroiled in the dispute raging between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia. Other vessels, many still powered by sail but more and more propelled by new and powerful steam engines, were attempting to continue their voyages across the Atlantic, southward into the Caribbean, or along the coast of South America, hoping to avoid potentially catastrophic contact with the privateers and blockading vessels now prowling the seas.

Early in June the Confederate privateer Savannah had been hauled into New York, brought before the U.S. District Court there, and judicially condemned as a war prize.1 There was no real question that the Savannah was a Confederate privateer and, as such, subject to confiscation in U.S. courts. The real issue revealed itself when thirteen members of the Savannah’s crew were brought into New York aboard a separate U.S. Navy ship and put on trial in the U.S. Circuit Court. The charge lodged against them was piracy.2

Piracy was a serious criminal offense—proscribed by congressional enactments dating as far back as 1790, and punishable by death.3 But were the Southerners who sailed aboard the Savannah and successfully captured two Northern merchant ships before their raids were halted by Yankee intervention really pirates? Were they common robbers who prowled the oceans preying on private ships? Or were they the duly authorized representatives of a sovereign nation—the Confederate States of America—and, as such, warriors in a legitimate struggle for national independence? These were the questions the jury assembled in the circuit court in New York was called on to decide in a trial that began on Wednesday, October 23, 1861.

Under the circuit-riding system that then prevailed in the federal courts, the circuit court was presided over by two judges: Samuel Nelson, a New York–based associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and William Davis Shipman of Connecticut, still on temporary assignment as a district judge in New York.4

One day before the trial of the Savannah crew began in New York, a similar trial opened in the U.S. Circuit Court in Philadelphia, where William Wallace Smith, a former harbor pilot from Savannah, Georgia, was also charged with the capital crime of piracy. Smith had been one of the original privateers aboard the Jeff Davis when it left Charleston on June 28.5 On July 6, the day before the Davis captured the Waring, it seized the Yankee schooner Enchantress off Nantucket and installed Smith as prize captain. Smith promptly turned the Enchantress south toward Charleston, where it would be condemned and sold as a war prize. Left aboard the captured schooner, however, was a twenty-five-year-old steward and cook named Jacob Garrick. Born in the Danish West Indies,* Garrick, like Tillman, was a free black man with an aversion to being sold into slavery. When he heard Smith say that he would “fetch fifteen hundred dollars when we get him into Charleston,” he was understandably distressed.6 Only two weeks later, however, a U.S. gunboat named the Albatross encountered the Enchantress off Cape Hatteras and approached it to inquire about its status.

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