An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 9/20/2020
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Meet Cilucangy, later known as Ward Lee, one of the last known slaves to be brought over to the U.S.
Cilucangy grew up in the Congo, in the village of Cowany. He would have been 12 or 13 when he was illegally transported to America and clandestinely sold to plantation owner Sophia Tillman, and renamed Ward Tillman. In 1866, Ward married Rosa Tillman, who was presumably also African. By 1880, Ward and Rosa rejected the surname and instead took the name Lee. They worked as field hands in Meriwether, SC and later moved to Shaws, SC. They had four children; Rosa passed away sometime after 1900. Losing his wife after around 35 years of marriage, Ward became homesick. A handwritten letter survives, in which Lee expressed his longing to return to Africa, but he was never able to return, and he died in 1914.
The story of Cilucangy's capture and transport is worthy of an entry in and of itself. While the U.S. outlawed slave importation in 1807, the practice nevertheless continued up through to the 1850's. The vessel on which Cilucangy and his fellow slaves were transported, the Wanderer, was originally built as a pleasure yacht for a wealthy New Orleans sugar plantation owner, but over the course of its history it was sold and resold, until it ultimately became the property of one Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, who retrofitted the vessel into a slave ship. On October 18, 1858, the vessel departed from Angola with a human cargo of 487. On November 28 it made a surreptitious landfall on Jekyll Island (through a secret arrangement between Lamar and other local officials), off the Georgia coast, and unloaded its surviving cargo of 407 Africans, disbursing them throughout Georgia and South Carolina. The resulting outrage and publicity drew far greater attention to the slaves' life stories than had previously been the norm, and a great many comprehensive biographies survive, many of them meticulously recorded in a 1908 anthropology study by Charles J. Montgomery: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1908.10.4.02a00110
Lamar and three Wanderer crewmembers, including its captain, J. Egbert Farnum, stood trial for piracy but were ultimately --and unsurprisingly-- acquitted. The Wanderer itself, with its dubious notoriety of being one of the last U.S. slave ships, was seized and repurposed as a Union support vessel during the Civil War, ultimately sinking off the coast of Cuba in 1870. Cilucangy's descendants --three great-great-granddaughters-- were among the VIP attendees at a 2008 dedication memorial. The Jekyll Island Museum (now renamed the Mosaic Gallery) has recently reopened with a new exhibit dedicated to the survivors of The Wanderer, and their stories. http://www.jekyllisland.com/history/museum/
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