Williams' Gang

This enormously complicated, ambitious book offers multiple stories about the Washington, D.C., slave trader, William H. Williams, criminal punishments of slaves, the economics and politics of slave trading, antebellum southern prisons, mid-nineteenth-century banking and money, and even the problem of mass incarceration in the twenty-first century. The book revolves around Williams's purchase of slave convicts from Virginia whose capital punishments had been commuted to transportation out of the United States. This practice was financially advantageous to the state, benefited the enslaved persons who were not hanged, and allowed for a small measure of mercy or justice within the confines of Virginia's very harsh slave code and its utterly unfair and unjust trials of slaves. One of Jeff Forret's many contributions is his discussion of petitions from whites imploring the governor to commute death sentences to transportation for slaves who had assaulted whites, stolen property, and even been convicted (in one

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