401

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 1029

sion they "tarried all night in the mount." During the forty days and nights that Moses
spent on Mount Sinai, receiving the laws of God, the people of Israel chided and
murmured against Moses and reverted to distrust. Gen. 31:54; Exod. 19:19-20.

462.36-37 we were the cause of the war] In his "Address on Colonization to a
Deputation of Negroes" on 14 August 1862, Lincoln stated: "but for your race among
us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for
you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and
the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence." Lincoln, Collected
Works, 5:372.

463.3 General Fremont] John Charles Fremont.

463.4 commander of the Army of the Potomac] General George B. McClellan.

463.28 loved Caesar less than Rome] Douglass paraphrases Julius Caesar, sc. 9,
lines 1408-09.

464.6-7 slavery abolished in the District of Columbia] Lincoln signed the bill
abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia on 16 April 1862. Hinks and
McKivigan, Antislavery and Abolition, 2:737-39.

464.8-9 slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer] The son of a
respected seagoing family from Maine, Captain Nathaniel P. Gordon (?- 1862) was the
first and only person to he executed under U.S. law for participation in the slave trade.
In 1848 he commanded the Juliet, a ship suspected of carrying slaves, but inspectors
could not find sufficient evidence for conviction. Little more is known of Gordon until
1860, when he and two mates, William Warren and David Hall, were brought to trial
in New York on 18 June after the capture of his ship, the Erie, on a slave run. Gordon
was prosecuted under the act of 10 May 1820, which declared the slave trade to be
piracy and decreed death to anyone working or traveling on an American ship engaged
in the transportation or trade of prospective slaves. Although Gordon maintained that
he had sold the Erie to Spaniards on the Congo River and had been on board merely
as a passenger, the testimony of four crewmen against him enabled the prosecution to
dispose of this and other alibis, and on 30 November he was sentenced to death by
hanging. Gordon appealed to Lincoln, with much public support, for commutation of
the sentence to life in prison. Lincoln, however, granted only a stay of execution of two
weeks so that Gordon could prepare himself for death. Gordon was hanged at the
Tombs, a New York City prison, on 21 February 1862. The Erie's mates were con-
victed of misdemeanors, with jail sentences of eight to ten months and fines under
$500. On 20 May, three months after Gordon's execution, the Lincoln administration
and the British government negotiated a treaty for the suppression of the slave trade.
Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law: 1837-1862 (Berkeley,
1963), 25, 88-90, 199-202; Lincoln, Collected Works, 5:128-29; Carl Sifakis,
Encyclopedia of American Crime, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York, 2001), 1:289.

464.16 slavery forever impossible in the United States] The Emancipation
Proclamation.

464.23-24 word of deliverance which we have heard read to-day] Douglass