Independence Day, 1861. The schooner S. J. Waring sets sail from
New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days
later, it limps back into New York's frenzied harbor with the
ship's black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. While the story
of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of
captivity and survival on the high seas, it has, almost
unbelievably, been lost to history. Now reclaiming Tillman as the
real American hero he was, historian Brian McGinty dramatically
returns readers to that riotous, explosive summer of 1861, when the
country was tearing apart at the seams and the Union army was in
near shambles following a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of
Bull Run. Desperate for good news, the North was soon riveted by
reports of an incident that occurred a few hundred miles off the
coast of New York, where the Waring had been overtaken by a
marauding crew of Confederate privateers. While the white sailors
became chummy with their Southern captors, free black man William
Tillman was perfectly aware of the fate that awaited him in the
ruthless, slave-filled ports south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Stealthily biding his time until a moonlit night nine days after
the capture, Tillman single-handedly killed three officers of the
privateer crew, then took the wheel and pointed it home. Yet, with
no experience as a navigator, only one other helper, and a war-torn
Atlantic seaboard to contend with, his struggle had just begun. It
took five perilous days at sea-all thrillingly recounted
here-before the Waring returned to New York Harbor, where the story
of Tillman's shipboard courage became such a tabloid sensation that
he was not only put on the bill of Barnum's American Museum but
also proclaimed to be the "first hero" of the Civil War. As McGinty
evocatively shows, however, in the horrors of the war then
engulfing the nation, memories of his heroism-even of his
identity-were all but lost to history. As such, The Rest I Will
Kill becomes a thrilling and historically significant work, as well
as an extraordinary journey that recounts how a free black man was
able to defy efforts to make him a slave and become an unlikely
glimmer of hope for a disheartened Union army in the war-battered
North.
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