THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN and the UNFORGETTABLE STORY of HOW a FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED to BECOME a SLAVE (audiobook) by Brian McGinty

 











Read by Sean Crisden.
Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes.
Unabridged.

At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederacy authorized ships to be privateers. Privateers are basically pirates with the explicit backing of a government. The idea was to authorize as many ships as possible to attack Union shipping as part of the Confederate war effort. 

William Tillman (c. 1834-?)
One of the early victims of these attacks was the S.J. Waring, a ship out of New York City bound for South America. On July 4, 1861 the ship was attacked, captured, and most of the crew was taken off the Waring to the privateer ship but they did leave a few people behind, including the ship's cook - a free black man named William Tillman. 

The privateers made it very clear that they were going to sell Tillman in the slave market in Charleston and Tillman was not going to let that happen...

Unfortunately, there just isn't a lot of information about William Tillman - either before this event or after he became an early celebrity of the war. The author expanded the book with a look at slavery in Delaware. It was literally the smallest of the slave states at the beginning of the Civil War and it had the weakest attachment to the slave-owning culture. That is not to say that it was easy for free blacks or the slaves, but it does explain why Delaware never really considered joining the Confederacy.

He also looked at privateering during the war, the attitudes toward slavery in New York City and other events that took place early in the Civil War. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN and the UNFORGETTABLE STORY of HOW a FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED to BECOME a SLAVE by Brian McGinty.



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