However, there were allegations that Gordon had indeed gone to Africa, taken a cargo of slaves, and returned to Brazil, where slavery was still legal at the time.

[4] In late July 1860, Gordon set sail aboard the Erie for the west coast of Africa.

The day after loading, Erie sailed from the Congo River, only to be captured by the USS Mohican within hours.

[9][10] The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, James I. Roosevelt, offered Gordon a $2,000 fine and two-year sentence in exchange for information about his financial backers.

However, Gordon, confident that he wouldn't face any severe consequences, rejected the deal, believing it was not lenient enough.

Smith saw the Gordon case as a chance to become prominent and an opportunity to set an example for all future slave traders.

[11] Gordon's first trial in New York City in June 1861 ended in a mistrial, with the jury voting 7–5 in favor of a conviction, allegedly due to bribes.

[13][14] The prosecution was led by Assistant United States District Attorney George Pierce Andrews.

[15] Gordon received the death sentence mandated under the law, with the execution date set for February 7, 1862.

Let me implore you to seek the spiritual guidance of the ministers of religion; and let your repentance be as humble and thorough as your crime was great.

Do not attempt to hide its enormity from yourself; think of the cruelty and wickedness of seizing nearly a thousand fellow-beings, who never did you harm, and thrusting them beneath the decks of a small ship, beneath a burning tropical sun, to die in of disease or suffocation, or be transported to distant lands, and be consigned, they and their posterity, to a fate far more cruel than death.

'[16] In February 1862, Smith allowed William Warren and David Hall to plead guilty to lesser charges under the Slave Trade Act of 1800.

"[18] On the question of a commutation, Lincoln wrote that "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.

Gordon then begged the doctors assist his suicide, saying he would rather die alone than suffer the humiliation of being publicly executed.