William Tillman

William Tillman faced a brutal choice: slavery or death. He was a 27-year old African-American sailor born a free man in Delaware. He was steward and cook on board the merchant schooner S.J. Waring, about 300 tons, bound for Montevideo, Uruguay with an assorted cargo.

Tillman had been on the crew of the Yankee merchantman the S. J. Waring. On July 6 the 300-ton schooner, manned by a crew of eight under the command of Captain Francis Smith, had left New York bound for Montevideo, Uruguay. Three days into its voyage, the ship was captured by a Confederate privateer, named the Jefferson Davis. The Civil War was less than four months old.

The rebels ransacked the vessel and ordered Captain Smith, to haul down the Stars and Stripes. He was then taken to the privateer. Tillman was told that he, like the ship, was southern property and that he would be sold into bondage when the ship reached its new destination.

The confederates put a five man prize crew on Tillman’s ship and turned her south, toward Charleston. Now, each day at sea beat down on Tillman like a hammer. An overwhelming sense of dread, however, was gradually replaced by iron-willed resolve. Tillman, in concert, with a handful of passengers hatched a bold plan.

Tillman’s duties gave him the run of most of the vessel. The rebels were used to seeing him moving about. Moreover, while cautious around the handful of white crewmen and passengers, the prize crew did not consider Tillman capable of either bravery or treachery; it was to be their undoing. Tillman was key to the recapture of the S.J. Waring. And he struck in the middle of the night.

On the night of July 16, with the captured ship just 50 miles off Charleston and the captors asleep in their bunks, they sprung, “killing the three with a hatchet, and throwing the bodies overboard. It was all finished in five minutes,” Harper’s Weekly reported in an August 3, 1861 article.

In a few bloody minutes, William Tillman had forestalled his descent into slavery and retaken the Waring from the privateers. He now set about returning to New York, offering to unchain the two remaining members of the prize crew if they would help sail the ship and warning them, “If you cut up any antics overboard you go; recollect that I am captain of this ship now.” Hugging the coast, the Waring sailed north “with a fair wind." Bryce Mackinnon one of the passengers that day reported, “On Sunday morning July 21, 1861, at 9 o’clock we got a pilot off Sandy Hook and soon after hired a tug for $60 to tow us up to New York where we arrived at 4 o’clock truly thankful for our great deliverance. Tillman, the negro steward, became the lion of the day, and his history, character and personal appearance were minutely investigated.”

Tillman’s heroic action struck a responsive chord among a Northern population that was reeling from the news of the Union defeat at Bull Run on the same day the Waring arrived in New York. The New-York Tribune wrote, “To this colored man was the nation indebted for the first vindication of its honor on the sea.” Another publication reported that the achievement drew “unstinted praise from all parties, even those who are usually awkward in any other vernacular than derision of the colored man.” At Barnum’s Museum Tillman was the center of an “attractive gaze to daily increasing thousands” and “pictorials vied with each other in portraying his features, and in graphic delineations of the scene on board the brig.” Several months later the federal government awarded Tillman the sum of $6,000 (a hefty sum in those days) as prize-money for the capture of the schooner.

Sources: ‘The Lion of the Day’ by Rick Beard, NY Times (Aug. 2011) and 'A Story of High Seas Heroism' by C.R. Gibbs, Maritime Administration

Photo: Tintype of Mr. Tillman photographed by Abbott of NY was part of the Howard Wolverton Collection of Black American History which was up for auction at the Quinn's Auction House on February 11, 2016 in Falls Church, Virginia.