The Echo had been captured off the coast of Cuba six days earlier carrying 318 African slaves, survivors of an initial total of around 490 that had begun the voyage on the 187 ton vessel. On August 29, 1858, the slaves, mostly young, were landed at Castle Pinckney, a federal fortress in Charleston Harbor and placed under the jurisdiction of local U.S. Marshal D.H. Hamilton. The crew had already been transported to Boston in the U.S. naval vessel that had made the capture. The Africans would eventually be returned across the Atlantic, as federal law dictated, aboard the warship U.S.S. Niagara. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1859, (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1859), 371. Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 157-162.
Record Data
Type
Legal/Political
Relevance
Personal
In the words of historian Manisha Sinha, the arrival of the Echo and its cargo "rekindled the African slave trade agitation" in the South. (Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 157.)
