As an undergraduate majoring in American History in the mid-1960's, I was allowed to take a graduate course entitled, "Lincoln Day by Day." One week we were researching the pressures placed on Lincoln when he was president, and on the outline was a simple two-word reference, "Gordon Case." I attempted to research the story, but found that practically nothing had been written about it at the time; consequently, I spent countless hours in front of microfilm readers, deciphering the newspapers and journals of the period, until I had put together a reliable chronology of the events relating to Captain Nathaniel Gordon and his unique fate. I was captured by the drama of the story: a young Yankee sea captain with a beautiful wife and son, caught in the machinery of a government determined to hang him as a slaver. Intending eventually to write the Gordon story, I copied every relevant frame of microfilm Boston University's Mugar Melorial Library offered. Unfortunately, by the time I retrieved my scrolls (and they had indeed scrolled with the passage of time), the copies had faded to white; my source material had literally disappeared. Discouraged, I shelved the project.

It is only with the perspective of age and experience that I can look back and understand that this was a blessing. As a callow, white, middle-class New England youth of 19, I had nothing to bring to the story. I was more concerned with what I considered the tragedy of Nathaniel Gordon himself than with the far greater tragedy that allowed men like Gordon to prosper for decades on the countless bodies of captured Africans, even while the laws of the land prescribed death for their crime. In time, it became clear to me that Gordon's story is a very small part of the story of the American slave trade of the 19th century, and of our government's stunning and continuous failure to stop it.

I never dreamed that Gordon would haunt me for almost 40 years. During that time, various articles were written for history journals, college papers were presented on the subject, and books on Lincoln, the Civil War, and the slave trade devoted anywhere from a sentence to a page or two to Captain Gordon. These studies and references ranged from the scholarly to the juvenile, and reflected varying degrees of historical accuracy. During those four decades, I pursued graduate degrees in Education and American Folk Culture, taught history for a time, worked as a museum curator, and collected the traditional ballads of the United States, Scotland and Ireland. When I finally sat down to write the Gordon story, it was with the accumulated information - and perspective - gleaned and gathered through these various pursuits. I'd like to think there are touches of all of them in this book.