The Wanderer

Model of Wanderer

The Antelope (see last week’s entry) was not the only slave ship to make her mark in the nation and Savannah. As you know the United States banned the importation of slaves in 1808. But this did not stop the efforts to smuggle slaves in. The Wanderer was one such ship. It was built in 1857 and outfitted for a long voyage. It was constructed under the New York Yacht Club banner. The rumors of the ship being used for slaving did not prevent it from passing an inspection by the government clearing it to set sea.
Colonel John D. Johnson, the builder of the yacht, was a New Orleans sugar baron. He commissioned a luxury sailing vessel for his personal use. The Wanderer was considered a marvel. It was able to achieve high speeds with a streamlined design allowing it to sail at twenty knots per hour. It would be anybody’s pride and joy.
But strangely enough Johnson sold the Wanderer in 1858 before owning it a full year. A Charlestonian William C. Corrie bought it from him. This is where a Savannahian played the devil. Charles A. L. Lamar of Savannah proposed that together, Corrie and he retrofit the Wanderer and convert it into a slave ship. Lamar was of a good Savannah family with a Supreme Court Justice, the second president of the Republic of Texas,  and U.S. treasury secretary in his lineage. He was bred right.
After a trip to Africa to purchase slaves the Wanderer returned to the United States. They had between 500 and 600 Africans aboard when they started but when they finally reached shore they had only 409 Africans. At least eighty Africans died in route. The slavers worried that they may be caught smuggling slaves into the country landed at the remote Jekyll Island on November 28, 1858. The Island was apparently not remote enough as word soon got out that a strange ship with Africans aboard had landed off the coast of Georgia.
The rumors ran rampant as the slaves were sold off. At last evidence revealed that the crew of the Wanderer had presented counterfeit documentation to the authorities. This would lead to Lamar and Corrie to be tried in federal court in Savannah in May 1860. Lamar was found not guilty by a local jury. It is hard to believe that his family name did not play a pivotal role in his acquittal, especially when he reminded witnesses that he could make life miserable for anyone who testified against him.
It should also be noted that the US prosecutor was Henry R. Jackson who became a major general in the Confederate States Army. Jackson was a published poet and a prominent lawyer in Savannah. After the Civil War he was named as minister to Mexico from 1885 to 1886. He also was a railroad executive, banker, and president of the Georgia Historical Society (1875 – 1898). Jackson died in Savannah, Georgia, and was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery.
As for Lamar he served in the Confederate States Army as a Colonel on the staff of General Howell Cobb. He was shot and killed in the last battle of the Civil War at Columbus, Georgia. True to the Lost Cause he died while attempting to lead a charge against Union troops, seven days after Appomattox. The Savannah Morning News wrote that he was "the last man who fell in organized struggle for Southern independence." He is interred at Laurel Grove.
The Wanderer incident incensed many northerners and contributed to the increasingly strained and deteriorating relationship between the North and the South. “If they fail to hang the men,” wrote the New York Times of the South, “if their officials are so lax, or their juries so perjured, as to permit this trade to be carried on with impunity, in face of all our laws against it — they will suffer all the consequences of an actual complicity in the proceeding itself… . the entire population of the North will wage upon [the South] a relentless war of extermination.” It also has a unique place in American history as many believe it was the last American slave ship.
On the south of Jekyll Island stands a monument to the African survivors of the Wanderer. It consists of three 12-foot (3.7 m) steel sails and several historical storyboards. On November 25, 2008 a dedication of the memorial was held, attended by 500 participants, including descendants of the original Wanderer slaves.
 
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Jekyll Island Monument