Sesquicentennialmanac: Civil War History for Feb. 20 – 26, 1862 - New York Civil War History

New York City’s Hall of Justice was a beast of a dungeon. Styled on an Egyptian mausoleum, it was called “the Tombs” by unfortunate prisoners confined to its dank cells. It had been poorly built on a filled-in pond, and moisture, mold and disease permeated its sagging foundations.

It was here in the pre-dawn hours of February 20, 1862 that Nathaniel Gordon prepared to die. Having written letters to his family – including one to his infant son to be opened when he was old enough to understand – the 28-year-old sea captain from Portland, Maine smoked one last cigar.

When guards looked in on Gordon an hour later they found him convulsing on the floor of his cell. After a quick inspection, the prison physician determined the cigar had been laced with strychnine. They pumped the prisoner’s stomach and administered copious amounts of brandy.

As the sun came up Gordon drifted in and out of consciousness. When awake, he begged the doctor to let him die. Shortly before noon U.S. Marshal Robert Murray read aloud the death sentence. Then Reverend Mr. Camp entered the cell and the condemned man prayed for God’s mercy.

At 12:10 pm Simeon Draper, chairman of the city’s Department of Public Charities and Corrections, announced it was time to proceed. Gordon, propped up by Marshal Deputies on either side, was led out of the Tombs death row cell block and across the infamous “Bridge of Sighs” overlooking the yard and gallows scaffold.

The yard was filled with New York City policemen and a company of Marines, their bayonets fixed. To the left of the scaffold was a viewing stand for jurists and attending physicians. Directly in front of the gallows sat members of the press.

To the right was the execution box, containing a system of weights that would drop when released, yanking the noose tight around Gordon’s neck. The executioner released the weights by chopping a rope suspending them with an axe. If all went well it would kill him quick and clean.

Though a picket fence had been erected to keep the curious public at bay, every window, balcony and rooftop around the Tombs bulged with onlookers.

Offered an opportunity to speak, the condemned man rambled about a reprieve he had been promised by the district attorney. He then began to faint, at which point Murray motioned to move on. A black hood was placed over his head, followed by a noose.

Gordon waivered on the scaffold for several seconds before the executioner’s axe released the weights. The rope pulled taut and abruptly hoisted him into the air, his body twitching several times before falling still.

America’s last slave trader was dead.

150 years ago this week North and South alike were gripped with patriotic fervor for the birth of George Washington, whom both sides co-opted as their hero.

In his namesake city public offices closed and the streets echoed with celebratory salvos fired from defensive batteries surrounding the Capital. Washington’s famous farewell address was read aloud in the Capitol to both houses of Congress, visiting diplomats and a host of generals and naval commanders.

Conspicuously absent was Abraham Lincoln. Two days earlier the President’s third son Willie died after a bout of typhoid fever. The sudden death devastated the First Family down to eight-year-old Tad, who had been closest to his older brother.

In Richmond, Va. a torrential downpour produced a sea of black umbrellas in Capitol Square, where President Jefferson Davis delivered his second inaugural address beneath a bronze statue of Washington astride a horse.

The Confederate president had been inaugurated one year earlier in Montgomery, Ala. following a provisional election. This ceremony in the South’s capital city would further cement his position and legitimize the fledgling government.

“The tyranny of an unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of despotism, has denied us both the right and the remedy. Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty. At the darkest hour of our struggle the Provisional gives place to the Permanent Government.”

In his address Davis drew another correlation between his new nation and Washington’s, claiming 13 states for the Confederacy. At that moment the truth was much less perfect. Confederate forces had been driven for the most part from Kentucky and Missouri. The Southern cause was about to suffer another loss in the West.

With the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson earlier in the month, little stood between the massing Union force and the Tennessee capital of Nashville.

On February 23 Gen. Albert Sydney Johnston withdrew the Confederacy’s Western army from the city. Union Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell quickly moved in the following day. It was the first Southern capital to fall in the Civil War.

Even further west Southern troops fought and won a little-known battle outside the adobe walls of Fort Craig, near Valverde in New Mexico Territory. A force of nearly 2,500 Texans under Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley – innovator of the tent and stove that bear his name – struck at an outpost of Federal regulars and volunteers commanded by Col. Edward Canby.

The two leaders had been comrades in the Utah and Wyoming Territories prior to the war. Both found themselves woefully neglected and undersupplied by their respective governments. Neither was a particularly adept field commander.

Sibley’s hope was to resupply at the Federal fort before pushing north into the Colorado Territory. Canby knew the fort’s walls, designed to repel arrows, would be no match against cannon fire. He arrayed his men near a ford on the Rio Grande When Sibley arrived.

For several days the Confederate general attempted to lure Canby across the river, but the Federal commander bided his time. Pickets skirmished in the desert scrubbrush throughout the week leading up to the decisive battle.

In one peculiar instance Union scouts reportedly strapped explosives to two mules and released them near the Rebel camp. But the faithful mules turned around and walked back toward the fort, exploding with no loss of life except their own.

On February 21 the two forces fought a pitched battle, eventually committing all their troops into the conflict. Armed with shotguns and pistols, the Texan troopers charged the Union center in three successive waves, capturing six cannon and sending both regular soldiers and volunteers scurrying for the fort.

Though the Battle of Valverde was a tactical win for Sibley but came at a heavy price: 230 killed, or nine percent of his army. The Union force suffered a 17 percent casualty rate, including about 200 deserters who fled the battlefield. It turned out to be the largest engagement of the war to take place in the Western Territories.

Sibley failed to take the fort but proceeded into Colorado without the much-needed supplies, where the wintery weather would exact a heavier toll on his troops.

The story of Nathaniel Gordon’s execution began on August 8, 1860 where the Congo River empties into the Atlantic on Africa’s west coast. Gordon’s ship, the Erie, set a northward course under an American flag, her hull laden with 897 Africans bound for slavery.

A shot across the bow from the Mohican, part of the U.S. African Slave Trade Patrol, ended Gordon’s run. The Erie’s crew claimed they had been misled as to the intended cargo and forced to complete the voyage at gunpoint.

Villified in Northern newspapers, Gordon was tried and convicted of being engaged in the slave trade under the Piracy Law of 1820. He was scheduled to hang February 7, 1862. His lawyers attempted to halt his hanging by arguing the city prison was an illegal venue for a Federal execution. The appeal was rejected.

In handing down the sentence Federal District Judge William Davis Shipman had this advice for the slave trader:

“As you are soon to pass into the presence of that God of the black man as well as the white man, who is no respecter of persons, do not indulge for a moment the thought that He hears with indifference the cry of the humblest of His children. Do not imagine that because others shared in the guilt of this enterprise, yours is thereby diminished; but remember the awful admonition of your Bible, ‘Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished.’

Turn your thoughts toward Him, who alone can pardon, and who is not deaf to the supplications of those who seek His mercy.”

Gordon received a stay of execution on February 4 from President Lincoln, expressly for the sole purpose of giving the condemned man time to prepare. Last minute appeals delicately acknowledging the President’s tragic loss went unanswered.

For four days after Willie’s death no correspondences left the White House.

Notable events 150 years ago this week:

Thursday, Feb. 20