USS DOLPHIN vs. Echo
21 AUGUST 1858
USS DOLPHIN vs. ECHO
Despite human slavery being a way of life in the antebellum American south, official US policy forbade trafficking in slaves as early as 1807. On 3 March 1819 Congress granted President James Monroe the authority to use the Navy to suppress the slave trade, and a year later the Africa Squadron was formed to patrol the waters off West Africa. But the effort fizzled in three years when attentions turned to combating piracy in the Caribbean. The issue was revived with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with England of 9 August 1842. This treaty pledged both nations to maintain naval squadrons off West Africa to police their own nation’s slave trade. Once again, the effort was greeted by our Navy with un-enthusiasm. The fitting-out of slavers was a profitable business in New York and the slave trade underpinned the southern economy. Enforcement by the Africa Squadron was lax, and soon slavers of all nations learned to fly our national ensign to avoid interdiction.
This is not to say our Navy was completely complacent about the slave trade. On 1 June 1858 LT John Newland Maffitt was given command of our 10-gun brig USS DOLPHIN. Fresh out of refit, the 224-ton, 88-foot sail brig was a veteran of our slave suppression efforts. Maffitt’s orders were to return her to the Caribbean and there seek out and intercept slavers. For nearly three months Maffitt cruised, until sighting a sail running west between Sagua la Grande and Cardenas, Cuba, this day.
Neither ship showed any colors, but this vessel was acting suspiciously–loitering off the coast as if looking for a safe place to land. DOLPHIN approached, ran up false British colors and fired two blank cartridges as a signal to the other to raise her colors. The American flag quickly appeared on the curious ship’s masthead. Still suspicious, Maffitt ran up his true colors and fired one, then another, shot across her bows. When she failed to luff, a third shot through her main topsail forced compliance.
USMC 1st LT Joseph M. Bradford’s boarding party found her to be Echo, unable to produce any papers as to her nationality. Below decks were found 318 Africans, chained like cargo onto makeshift decks only 44″ high. Passed Assistant Surgeon John M. Browne had his hands full as many were near death. Maffitt placed LT Charles C. Carpenter in command of this prize and sent her to Charleston. There the Africans boarded the steam frigate USS NIAGARA, 12, who sailed for Africa on 20 September. Only 199 of the former slaves survived to be repatriated in the new nation of Liberia, a nation that had been founded by the United States expressly for the re-settlement of slaves. News of the action spread nation-wide and propelled Maffitt to prominence.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 26 AUG 23
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
“Capture of a Slave Brig, with over Three Hundred Africans.” New York Times, 30 August 1858. AT: http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1858/08/30/78860493.html, retrieved 2 August 2014.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 2 “C-F”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1977, pp. 284-85.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 5 “N-Q”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1979, p. 81.
Robinson, William Morrison, Jr. The Confederate Privateers. Reprint of 1928 publication, Columbia, SC: Univ of South Carolina Press, 1994, pp. 59-60.
Shingleton, Royce Gordon. High Seas Confederate: The Life and Times of John Newland Maffitt. Athens, GA: Univ of Georgia Press, 1979, pp. 26-27.
Sweetman, Jack. American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3rd ed. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, pp. 35-36, 44.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: As a result of this action Maffitt was given command of the screw-steamer USS CRUSADER, 13, a vessel twice the size of DOLPHIN. But alas, he was to serve only a few more years. At the outbreak of the Civil War Maffitt “went south” to join the Confederate Navy. He distinguished himself in command of the commerce raider CSS FLORIDA, which he sailed to England at war’s end rather than surrender to the Yankees. He returned to the US after amnesty was granted in 1867 but poor health from the lingering effects of yellow fever precluded any further military service.
Echo changed hands several times, eventually ending up as a Confederate privateer JEFFERSON DAVIS. DOLPHIN lay in Norfolk at the start of the war where she was burned by evacuating Union forces in April 1861, to prevent her capture.
The nation of Liberia was indeed founded as a re-settlement location for freed slaves. The name of her capital city, Monrovia, remembers US President James Monroe. Even the Liberian national flag is reminiscent of our own.
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty is perhaps better known for its other unrelated contribution, establishing the definitive border between the US and Canada.
