Ron Soodalter - Excerpt - Hanging Captain Gordon

The Slave Next Door

As a student of history, I’d always assumed – as do most Americans – that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. It was only after writing most of a book on the ante-bellum slave trade that I stumbled on an account of slavery – in present-day America! My first response, a common one, as it turns out, was denial: “No way. Slavery has had no place here since the time of Lincoln.”

Only after extensive research did I discover that slavery has always existed on this continent, from the days of its European discovery right up to the present day. Christopher Columbus enslaved the Taino Indians, setting a precedent that was followed by every European power to claim land in the New World. Slavery became the social and economic order. After the Civil War, and for decades right up to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, planters practiced a form of debt bondage known as peonage, binding workers and their families to the land in an unending cycle of slavery. For over sixty years, our own government has enabled worker abuse and slavery through the mismanagement of its “guest worker” program. And now, with the global population more than tripled since World War II, and with national borders collapsing around the world, people - in their desperate quest for a way to survive – have become easy targets for human traffickers. And once again, America is a prime destination. People go into debt to come here for the chance to earn a living, and perhaps to support or bring over their families, but instead of opportunity, they find slavery.

This is the kind of knowledge you can’t “unlearn”; the only question is, what do you do with it once you have it? As a writer, I determined that the most effective path for me was to write a book, to make available to the reader what it took me considerable time and digging to acquire. For this task, I worked with Free the Slaves president Kevin Bales, who has deservedly earned the reputation as the world’s foremost expert on global slavery. Focusing specifically on our own country proved to be a daunting task for us both, but one which eventually gave us a complete picture of all aspects of slavery in today’s America. The Slave Next Door is part tell-all, part how-to-fix-it, and part stories of actual slavery. And it lays out a plan for Americans – for you and me – to take an active part in the fight against slavery. We tend to think of ourselves as the country where slavery has no place; it will take a lot of work and dedication to make it so.

Hanging Captain Gordon

As an undergraduate majoring in American History in the mid-1960's, I was allowed to take a graduate course entitled, "Lincoln Day by Day." One week we were researching the pressures placed on Lincoln when he was president, and on the outline was a simple two-word reference, "Gordon Case." I attempted to research the story, but found that practically nothing had been written about it at the time; consequently, I spent countless hours in front of microfilm readers, deciphering the newspapers and journals of the period, until I had put together a reliable chronology of the events relating to Captain Nathaniel Gordon and his unique fate. I was captured by the drama of the story: a young Yankee sea captain with a beautiful wife and son, caught in the machinery of a government determined to hang him as a slaver. Intending eventually to write the Gordon story, I copied every relevant frame of microfilm Boston University's Mugar Melorial Library offered. Unfortunately, by the time I retrieved my scrolls (and they had indeed scrolled with the passage of time), the copies had faded to white; my source material had literally disappeared. Discouraged, I shelved the project.

It is only with the perspective of age and experience that I can look back and understand that this was a blessing. As a callow, white, middle-class New England youth of 19, I had nothing to bring to the story. I was more concerned with what I considered the tragedy of Nathaniel Gordon himself than with the far greater tragedy that allowed men like Gordon to prosper for decades on the countless bodies of captured Africans, even while the laws of the land prescribed death for their crime. In time, it became clear to me that Gordon's story is a very small part of the story of the American slave trade of the 19th century, and of our government's stunning and continuous failure to stop it.

I never dreamed that Gordon would haunt me for almost 40 years. During that time, various articles were written for history journals, college papers were presented on the subject, and books on Lincoln, the Civil War, and the slave trade devoted anywhere from a sentence to a page or two to Captain Gordon. These studies and references ranged from the scholarly to the juvenile, and reflected varying degrees of historical accuracy. During those four decades, I pursued graduate degrees in Education and American Folk Culture, taught history for a time, worked as a museum curator, and collected the traditional ballads of the United States, Scotland and Ireland. When I finally sat down to write the Gordon story, it was with the accumulated information - and perspective - gleaned and gathered through these various pursuits. I'd like to think there are touches of all of them in this book.