Scott here with another episode of the History on public podcast.

Appleton Oak Smith was a Civil War era sea captain who was something of a 19th century

force gump. He was there for the most important moments of the time, the California Gold Rush, Cuba Liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. But in his life we also see the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln administration went to destroy the illegal transatlantic slave trade, which had been outlawed decades earlier, but was still going on effectively through piracy.

The reason Oak Smith was targeted is that he spent years working as an outlaw mariner for the Confederacy

and lived in the murky underworld of New York City where Federal Marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan

in search of evidence of slave trading.

It all started when during the Civil War, Oak Smith bought a whaling boat at a time when the industry

was in terminal decline because people were now using oil-based products for lighting instead of

whale oil, and they thought that he was

secretly outfitting a slave ship. Federal authorities had him arrested and

convicted but in 1862 he escaped from jail and became a Confederate blockade

runner in Havana.

The Lincoln administration tried to have him kidnapped in violation of international law,

but the attempt was foiled, and he escaped to England where he spent the next decade there in exile.

He received a presidential pardon from Ulysses S. Grant, at which point he moves

in North Carolina and became an inside clan politician. We see multitudes in the life of

Oak Smith and how complicated the Civil War era really was.

To look at his fascinating life,

were joined by Jonathan White, author of the book Shipwrecked,

a true Civil War story of mutinies, jailbreaks, blockade running,

and the slave trade.

Hope you enjoy this discussion. break, blockade running, and the slave trade.

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