Book Review of Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-running, and the Slave Trade

By Jonathan W. White
Reviewed by Lee Duckworth, HRNM Docent

Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade Running, and the Slave Trade highlights the saga of a family through three decades of the nineteenth century. Jonathan W. White’s Shipwrecked is a biography of Appleton Oaksmith and, to a lesser extent, his mother Elizabeth. The author chronicles Appleton’s entire life, including a two-year sea voyage in the early 1850s to the West Coast of North and South America, Brazil, and Africa. During this period, Oaksmith worked his way from seaman to ship master. Throughout their lives, Appleton and his mother had access to high-level government officials and easily mingled with the well-to-do. Both of them had a knack for being in the right spot at just the right time and they benefited from their connections with the country’s elite. Despite a couple of bankruptcies, Oaksmith managed to maintain a life of danger and intrigue. His mother—an equally complicated figure—followed the same pattern, becoming a literary luminary and an advocate for women’s rights.

The centerpiece of Shipwrecked involves the story of Oaksmith’s possible involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. In December 1861, Union authorities arrested him, first for disloyalty, and then for fitting out a whaler as a slave-trading ship. In September 1862, in daring fashion, he escaped Boston’s Charles Street Jail and set sail for Havana, where he became a blockade runner for the Confederacy. After that, he fled to England, while his mother—who steadfastly maintained her son’s innocence—sought out political avenues to exonerate him. Twenty years later, President Ulysses S. Grant issued him a pardon.

Appleton Oaksmith (Bonnie and Stanley Oaksmith III)

White provides insight into the U.S. government of the 1860s, exploring the means that President Abraham Lincoln employed to bring slave traders to justice, often bypassing international and federal law. Additionally, the author’s research of the Oaksmith family is thorough, though it could be argued that the author’s excessive details concerning minor family members add little to the overall narrative. If it was White’s goal to use the story of Lincoln and the Oaksmith family to paint the political and cultural landscape of America in the era from 1850-1880, then Shipwrecked succeeds in those areas.

Shipwrecked is not without its problems. Oaksmith may have been involved in the slave trade during the 1850s, but the book says little about the horrors of the practice. The book is filled with photographs and some drawings of minor characters, but it contains no drawings of a slave ship or the horrific living conditions. Additionally, the majority of the book focuses on Oaksmith’s efforts to clear his name and prove his innocence. The author paints a picture of Oaksmith as a clever and shrewd renegade, but never answers the question as to his guilt or innocence as a slave trader.

Was he trader (or perhaps a traitor) or a victim of Lincoln’s injustice? You’ll have to read the book to make that judgment.