Jeff Forret is Professor of History at Lamar University, Texas. He won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) and has authored Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (2006), among other works.

'In Williams' Gang, Jeff Forret takes a journey through some of the dark and often convoluted paths traveled by domestic slave traders and their human merchandise. Taking time along the way to introduce readers to some of the elaborate financial and legal infrastructures that governed and facilitated the domestic slave trade, Forret tells a once infamous but largely forgotten story about the Washington, DC slave trader William H. Williams and the enslaved Virginia convicts he imported illegally to Louisiana. Built on an impressive mountain of archival research and relayed with vivid prose, it is a story Williams himself surely wished would never have been one to tell at all.' Joshua D. Rothman, University of Alabama

• Introduction: the slave depot of Washington, DC; 1. An ambush; 2. The Yellow House; 3. Sale and transportation; 4. Mobile to New Orleans; 5. Legal troubles; 6. The Millington Bank; 7. State v. Williams; 8. Slave trading in 'hard times'; 9. Politics of the slave pen; 10. Brothers; 11. The Louisiana State Penitentiary; 12. Closure; 13. Perseverance; 14. Violet; Epilogue: the legal legacy of the domestic slave trade.

Jeff Forret is Professor of History at Lamar University, Texas. He won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) and has authored Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (2006), among other works.

'In Williams' Gang, Jeff Forret takes a journey through some of the dark and often convoluted paths traveled by domestic slave traders and their human merchandise. Taking time along the way to introduce readers to some of the elaborate financial and legal infrastructures that governed and facilitated the domestic slave trade, Forret tells a once infamous but largely forgotten story about the Washington, DC slave trader William H. Williams and the enslaved Virginia convicts he imported illegally to Louisiana. Built on an impressive mountain of archival research and relayed with vivid prose, it is a story Williams himself surely wished would never have been one to tell at all.' Joshua D. Rothman, University of Alabama

• Introduction: the slave depot of Washington, DC; 1. An ambush; 2. The Yellow House; 3. Sale and transportation; 4. Mobile to New Orleans; 5. Legal troubles; 6. The Millington Bank; 7. State v. Williams; 8. Slave trading in 'hard times'; 9. Politics of the slave pen; 10. Brothers; 11. The Louisiana State Penitentiary; 12. Closure; 13. Perseverance; 14. Violet; Epilogue: the legal legacy of the domestic slave trade.

Jeff Forret is Professor of History at Lamar University, Texas. He won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) and has authored Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (2006), among other works.

'In Williams' Gang, Jeff Forret takes a journey through some of the dark and often convoluted paths traveled by domestic slave traders and their human merchandise. Taking time along the way to introduce readers to some of the elaborate financial and legal infrastructures that governed and facilitated the domestic slave trade, Forret tells a once infamous but largely forgotten story about the Washington, DC slave trader William H. Williams and the enslaved Virginia convicts he imported illegally to Louisiana. Built on an impressive mountain of archival research and relayed with vivid prose, it is a story Williams himself surely wished would never have been one to tell at all.' Joshua D. Rothman, University of Alabama

• Introduction: the slave depot of Washington, DC; 1. An ambush; 2. The Yellow House; 3. Sale and transportation; 4. Mobile to New Orleans; 5. Legal troubles; 6. The Millington Bank; 7. State v. Williams; 8. Slave trading in 'hard times'; 9. Politics of the slave pen; 10. Brothers; 11. The Louisiana State Penitentiary; 12. Closure; 13. Perseverance; 14. Violet; Epilogue: the legal legacy of the domestic slave trade.