The E. A. Rawlins was an American barque of the 1850s that some suspected was used in the transatlantic slave trade, which by then had been illegal under the United States law for 50 years.
[1] Rufus W. Clark in his 1860 tract The African Slave-Trade wrote: The bark E. A. Rawlins was seized in the bay of St. Joseph, where she had taken upon herself the new name of Rosa Lee.
There was abundant evidence to believe that she had been to Africa, taken on board her living freight, subjected the victims to all the horrors of the 'middle passage,' and landed them at Cuba and on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
"[2]It was strongly suspected that Charles Lamar, who had been involved in illegal human trafficking in the Wanderer case, was running multiple ships of similar purpose and that some part (or all) of the human cargo of Lamar's ships had been intended for the "Cotton States" of America.
[3] Former governor of South Carolina D. C. Heyward, writing in the 1920s, argued that in addition to the Wanderer, Lamar had most likely imported slaves from Africa to the United States on the E. A. Rawlins and Richard Cobden.