❝ // I think I would personally prefer to let this man live in confinement and let him meditate on his deeds, yet in the name of justice and the majesty of law, there ought to be one case, at least one specific instance, of a professional slave-trader, a Northern white man, given the exact penalty of death because of the incalculable number of deaths he and his kind inflicted upon black men amid the horror of the sea-voyage from Africa.
— Abraham Lincoln
Writing about his refusal to commute the execution of slave-trader Nathaniel Gordon
Read more about Nathaniel Gordon, the first and last man executed for slave trade in the United States.
Image from Library of Congress Catalog