| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader. By Ron Soodalter. (New York: Atria, 2006. xvi, 318 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-7432-6727-3.)
In February 1862, Nathaniel Gordon of Portland, Maine, became the only American ever executed for the crime of slave trading. In the first book-length study of this important case, Ron Soodalter looks at the reasons why Gordon was executed. By 1862, African slave trading had been a capital crime in the United States for over forty years. Despite flagrant violations, however, an ineffective legal system meant that enforcement of that law had been virtually nonexistent. Even Gordon, at first, did not take the charges against him seriously, never believing that he would be found guilty, much less executed.	1
The question at the heart of this story, therefore, is, why was Gordon the only person to meet this fate? The answer, according to Soodalter, centers on unlucky timing. In its attempt to hold the Union together, the new Abraham Lincoln administration needed to show its determination to enforce the laws relating to slavery. Gordon was simply their scapegoat. Federal prosecutors did not seek the hanging of other slavers, and the Gordon case did not end the participation of Americans in the African slave trade. Subsequently, as Soodalter notes, the impact of Gordon's death was "perceptual rather than practical" (p. 242).	. . .

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