The Uncas left Alexandria for New Orleans for the first time on Oct. 30, 1833, carrying 92 enslaved people. For the next three years, the ship plied the Atlantic on behalf of Franklin & Armfield, making 13 round-trip voyages between Alexandria and New Orleans. On those voyages, it carried roughly 1,500 enslaved people away from their homes and families in the upper South, and it sometimes returned from the lower South with sugar, cotton, tobacco, and other items that merchants had arranged to be brought back on their behalf.
The Uncas helped advance the dominance of Franklin & Armfield in the domestic slave trade. It also helped make personal fortunes for John Armfield and Isaac Franklin, who sold it in the fall of 1836 only because they decided to retire from slave trading. But the new owner intended no such thing, and in his possession the commercial activities of the Uncas crossed the divide from the immoral into the illegal.
The divide was a porous one anyway. The new owner of the Uncas was a man named William H. Williams, a slave trader who worked out of a notorious slave jail in the District of Columbia known as the Yellow House, located half a mile from the Capitol along what is today the south side of the National Mall.
For a while, as historian Jeff Forret details in his book Williams’ Gang, Williams used the Uncas much as Franklin & Armfield had. Between the fall of 1836 and the summer of 1840, Williams repeatedly sent the Uncas from Baltimore and Alexandria, mostly to New Orleans, trafficking enslaved people he planned to sell or whom he was shipping on behalf of other traders. Looking to make extra money during an economic depression that began in 1837, Williams also dispatched the Uncas on more far-flung voyages, sometimes sending it into the Caribbean to bring merchant goods back to the United States.
But in the fall of 1840, leaning into his greed and perhaps into some desperation, Williams broke the law. The state of Virginia provided that enslaved people convicted of capital crimes might be reprieved on the condition that they be sent outside of the United States for sale. Williams decided to bring convict slaves to the lower South instead, even though many states, fearful about prospective future offenses, banned importing enslaved people convicted of crimes for purposes of sale. Williams had a co-conspirator purchase 27 enslaved people out of the state penitentiary at Richmond, mixed most of them in with 42 other captives he was keeping in the Yellow House, and sent them together on the Uncas to Mobile, Alabama, hoping that when they arrived, no one would be the wiser.