“The great and blessed event, which we have this day met to celebrate, is striking proof that the 

God of heaven and earth is the same, yesterday, and to-day, and forever. Yes, my brethren, the 

nations from which most of us have descended, and the country in which some of us were born, 

have been visited by the tender mercy of the Common Father of the human race.”

—Absalom Jones (Thanksgiving Sermon — January 1, 1808)

The Oglethorpe Club on Forsyth Park

The slave trade stood at center stage during the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In particular, the American Revolutionary War had dismantled a large part of the South Carolinian and Georgian economy dependent on slave labor. To rebuild, both states would not agree to an end to the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The Convention’s main compromise on slavery provided a Constitutional guarantee (Article I, Section 9) that the Atlantic Slave Trade would remain open for at least twenty years. The importation of slaves into America was officially ended when President Thomas Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves into law effective January 1, 1808 — the final vote tally was 113 in its favor to 5 against.

New Year’s Day thus became an annual National Jubilee in Black society, celebrated beginning with the Thanksgiving Sermon preached by Absalom Jones, rector of the African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

Of course, while Jefferson was busy signing that law, he was also being attentively served in the White House by slaves he’d brought with him to Washington D.C. from his Monticello plantation in Virginia. 

And neither did the law ending the importation of slaves end the expansion of the evil practice of slavery in America, as seven states later added to the Union after that ban allowed for slavery to be practiced.

American history records a group of pro-slavery Southerners called the Fire-Eaters who sought to revive the Atlantic slave trade and ultimately urged secession from the Union. For years, most Americans, including most Southerners, laughed off the Fire-Eaters as a bunch of rabble-rousing misfits.

One of those radical misfits was named Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar from Savannah. Lamar wasn’t just an ideologue who believed, as did John C. Calhoun, that slavery was a positive good. No. Lamar was a man of action and took it upon himself to revive the illegal practice of importing slaves from Africa.

The importation of slaves into The United States had been illegal under Federal Law for fifty years when Charles Lamar purchased the pleasure-schooner The Wanderer in 1858 and sailed it to the Congo in Africa. He purchased about 500 enslaved people to smuggle into Georgia on nearby Jekyll Island.

The truth was that The Wanderer’s illegal mission was no secret. Its purpose was so well known that when it set off from the Charles Town harbor to Africa it received an official cannon salute.

Back in Savannah, Lamar was arrested. The movement in the South to reopen the African Slave Trade and to nullify Federal Law was about to be tested in Federal Court. Civil War was on everyone’s lips.

This en Plein air painting is of a home located at 450 Bull Street in Savannah, a stone’s throw from Forsyth Park. It is now The Oglethorpe Club, a social club organized after the Civil War in 1870. In 1912, the members of the exclusive club purchased this home from the estate of General Henry R. Jackson.

Before the Civil War brought him into the Confederate Army, Henry R. Jackson was the prosecutor assigned by President James Buchanan to enforce the law against importing slaves. We’ll finish this story in my next Postcards from Savannah, after I paint the courthouse in which the celebrated trial was held.