On October 9, 1862, David Henry White was kidnapped at sea from the United States merchant ship Tonawanda. The young man was from a free, black family of Lewes, Delaware, and was employed on the Tonawanda by the Cope Line as a passenger cook.
The Confederate merchant raider CSS Alabama, commanded by Captain Raphael Semmes, captured the Tonawanda, kidnapped White, and enslaved him on board the Alabama for the next 600 days. White was killed when the CSS Alabama was hunted down and sunk by the sloop of war USS Kearsarge on June 19, 1864 at the Battle of Cherbourg.
Following the war, Raphael Semmes wrote a popular memoir which described White as a content slave, happy to serve his confederate masters on board the Alabama. The writing of Semmes was influential in the creation of the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy, claiming the cause of the Confederacy was honorable, just, and not centered on the practice of slavery; a concept dismissed by historians as revisionist mythology for over 100 years.
In his book, Kidnapped At Sea, Dr. Andrew Sillen has thoroughly examined the evidence, including Semmes’ own words, to recreate the experience of David Henry White while enslaved on board the Alabama. What was described by Semmes himself shows horrible cruelty and degradation of an illegally enslaved and free citizen of the United States.
Andrew Sillen (B.A. Brooklyn College ’74; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania ’81) is a visiting research scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He has authored or co-authored over 50 academic and popular articles on archaeology and human evolution. Sillen was formerly a Professor of Paleoanthropology and the founding Director of Development at the University of Cape Town and subsequently Vice President of Institutional Advancement at Brooklyn College. He lives in and writes from Brooklyn, New York.
Kidnapped At Sea is available at Greenlight Bookstore, Porchlight Books, Hopkins Press, and Amazon.
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Sources
Sillen, Andrew. Kidnapped at Sea. Hopkins Press. 2024.