| | 1 | Author: | Romeyn, Henry | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | 'Little Africa': The Last Slave Cargo Landed in the United States  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Among the passengers of the "Roger B. Taney," Captain Timothy Meaher, plying
between Mobile and Montgomery, Ala. in April, 1858, were a number of Northern
gentlemen returning to their homes after a winter spent in the South. The trip
occupied several days, and as might have been expected, the slavery question was
a fruitful theme of discussion. Captain Meaher, though born in Gardiner, Maine,
had removed, when a mere lad, to the Gulf States, and accumulated quite a
fortune for those days; a large portion of which was in "chattels" employed on
his half dozen steamboats, or on cotton plantations in the interior of the
state, and in lumbering among the pines and cypress lands near the coast. Of
course he was a defender of "the institution," and, in reply to the expressed
belief of one of his passengers that "with the supply by importation from Africa
cut off and any further spread in the Territories denied, the thing was doomed,"
he declared that, despite the stringent measures taken by most of the civilized
powers to crush out the over-sea traffic, it could be still carried on
successfully. In response to the disbelief expressed by his opponent, he offered
to wager any amount of money that he would "import a cargo in less than two
years, and no one be hanged for it." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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