In late January 1862, a strange fleet of ships sank en masse off Charleston Harbor. One of these, a barque named Margaret Scott, was completing an ironic circle of fate. A former whaler seized as a slave ship, the barque was part of an effort to stop Confederate blockade runners — like the convicted pirate Appleton Oaksmith, the very man who first set Scott on its fateful course to the bottom of the Charleston ship channel.
The ships that sank 160 years ago were dubbed the “Great Stone Fleet.” A collection of former whaling ships purchased by the U.S. government, they were assembled by the navy for a peculiar duty: to be filled with a cargo of stone, sailed south and then sunk at the entrance of South Carolina’s major port. The plan was to make two of Charleston’s three main channels unnavigable, funneling blockade runners toward the U.S. naval squadron on blockade duty.
The 46 ships were sunk in two groups — one in December 1861 in the main channel and a second group in January 1862 in Mafitt’s channel to the northeast, off Sullivan’s island. Each vessel, depending on its capacity, it had been loaded with between 190 and 550 tons of stone. Holes had been bored in each hull and then stoppered with large plugs. Once the ships were anchored in position, men were sent aboard with axes and sledgehammers. These wrecking crews first chopped away the ship’s rigging. An account from the January 11, 1862 Harpers Weekly details the destruction: “The braces and shrouds on the weather side were cut by the sharp axes of the whalemen, and the tall masts, swaying for an instant, fell together with a loud crash, the sticks snapping like brittle pipe-stems close to the deck, and striking the water like an avalanche, beating it into a foam and throwing the spray high into the air.”
After the masts fell, a select group clambered belowdecks with the heavy hammers to knock the plugs free and allow the waters of the Atlantic to firehose through the bore holes.
Margaret Scott was one of 20 vessels sunk off Sullivan’s Island. Like most of the stone fleet, Margaret Scott was once a whaler. The vessel was named after one of the innocent women executed in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1692 witch trial hysteria. For the owners of Margaret Scott, the whaling business had fallen on hard times, with many small whaling enterprises closing down and idling ships in whaling ports like New Bedford.
To a small group of maritime criminals, these vessels, which could be purchased at depressed prices, were an opportunity. These former whalers were snatched up for a vile game of bait and switch. Still outfitted with whaling gear, although mostly played out from long use, these ships maintained the pretense of whaling, but in fact their new masters used them as slave ships.
Though the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States and Britain by laws in 1807 and 1820, and by 1831 in the Spanish colonies and Brazil, illegal shipments of enslaved Africans continued.
In New York City and in small harbors on Long Island like Oyster Bay and Greenport, slave ships were outfitted in the late 1850s and up to the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. The buyer of Margaret Scott was a shady operator named Appleton Oaksmith. The proprietor of a small ship brokerage firm, Oaksmith had purchased other vessels for the slave trade. As in his previous dealings, Oaksmith was careful to use former whaling captains Ambrose Landre and Samuel P. Skinner as intermediaries to obscure his involvement in purchasing Margaret Scott. Oaksmith paid $2,400 for the vessel, a good deal less than the going rate.
With the assistance of Landre and Skinner — the latter named as the titular owner of the barque to maintain the ruse — Oaksmith outfitted Margaret Smith for the ship’s horrifying new role. In these former whalers, bulkheads in the hold were rebuilt to better contain the loading of humans rather than barrels of whale oil. Extra water tanks were also added. Whale ships with tryworks for boiling down whale blubber for oil were repurposed to cook food for the hundreds of slaves.
Customs officers and port officials noted the changes made to these former whale ships and suspected that they were being outfitted as slave ships. In the 1850s, however, during the administration of President Buchanan, enforcement was lax. There were few Federal funds for going after these suspected criminals and the fake whalers often sailed without any hindrance. Sometimes these ships would maintain the charade of whaling by going to whaling grounds off West Africa and even taking a whale. The crews were hired as whalers and were generally well paid. Margaret Scott crewman were promised $500 for the voyage by Oaksmith, Landre and Skinner. These sailors were regularly not told the truth of the voyage before departure. When they were informed, often in African waters, they usually acquiesced. Hard-pressed sailors were unlikely to forfeit the wages offered. According to “Slavers in Disguise: American Whaling and the African Slave Trade 1845-1862” by Kevin S. Reilly, published in The American Neptunemagazine, Oaksmith reportedly told Landre, “…it would not do for anyone, officers or men, to know the ship was going to the coast of Africa. Mr. Oaksmith said everything would be made right when we came there to the coast. They [the crew] would all come into it, they always did.”
Things changed after the 1860 election and the arrival of the Lincoln administration. After the southern states seceded and their members of Congress were no longer on hand to block antislavery legislation, funds were appropriated to suppress these slave ships. Some port officials were ready for the change. And they had Oaksmith in their sights. As quoted by Reilly, one port inspector wrote to his superior: “I know Appley, Oaksmith, Israel Peck, and Captain Isaac M. Cas[e] very well. I know their views with regard to secession and slavery, especially the African slave trade…. [T]hey are a damnable set, the whole of them.”
Before Margaret Scott could sail, though, the federal marshall in New Bedford swooped in and seized the vessel. He also arrested Oaksmith, Landre and Skinner as pirates under the 1820 law that made participation in the slave trade an act of piracy. Tried in Massachusetts District court in 1862, Skinner was prosecuted by antislavery district attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (who as a young man had written Two Years Before the Mast, a famous account of his time as a seaman aboard the merchant brig Pilgrim). Skinner was convicted, receiving a five-year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine. It was the first time an American ship captain had been convicted as pirate for planning and preparing a slaving voyage.
Similarly tried and found guilty, Oaksmith pulled off an escape from the Suffolk County jail before he was sentenced for his eight-count conviction. It’s not hard to imagine the shady criminal’s escape was augmented by some well-placed bribes. He fled to the south and used his maritime knowledge to become a blockade runner for the Confederacy.
After Margaret Scott’s seizure in New Bedford, the whaler turned slave ship was added to the other whalers of the great stone fleet and sent to the bottom off Charleston. A poetic end to the story of the whaling barque would have blockade runner Appleton Oaksmith fleeing Union ships before getting snagged by the very ship that earned his conviction as a pirate. History doesn’t give us this satisfaction, however. Oaksmith ceased his blockade running and bought a plantation in New Bern, North Carolina. Ever the criminal operator, after the war he obtained an audience with President Grant at the White House and finagled a presidential pardon for his slaving conviction.
Margaret Scott’s final voyage to make a bar to blockade runners wasn’t ultimately a success. Within a year the tides and currents broke up and scattered the stone fleet wrecks, and the bottom sands shifted to create new channels. By 1863, however, the Union Navy was well into its wartime expansion and many new ships were available for the blockading squadrons off southern ports.
Sources:
Magune, Frank; “The Great Stone Fleet,” pgs. 106 – 113; Yankees Under Sail, Yankee Inc. 1968
Harper’s Weekly, pg 31, January 11, 1862.
Reilly, Kevin S.; “Slavers in Disguise: American Whaling and the African Slave Trade 1845-1862,” pgs. 177 – 189; The American Neptune, 1993
Marques, Leonardo; “The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of US Participation 1831 – 1856,” pgs. 659 – 684; Journal of Latin American Studies vol. 47, 2015
The Great Depression could be described in many ways and one of those is surely dystopian. In the prairie states, for example, drought added to the economic woes in a great ecological disaster called The Dust Bowl. Many farmers were forced to abandon their land and move somewhere else, a few famously to California (see Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for a look at that immigration situation).
