On July 16, Tillman waited until dark and struck both the captain and second mate multiple times in the head with a hatchet that he had hidden from the Confederates.

[10] The remaining two Southern shipmen were caged and Tillman assumed captaincy of the Waring, which he successfully navigated back to New York Harbor, reaching it on July 21.

[12] When asked if he had encountered any "difficulty" in mastering the men he had killed, Tillman replied:[13] They struggled a little, but I put them overboard quicker than lightning.

He and Stedding were approached by Phineas T. Barnum to make appearances at his museum; however, audience response was varied, with some denigrating William Tillman as a "villain" and "murderer".

[18] The date and place of his death are unknown; historian Gerald Henig asserts that "no verifiable evidence" exists to account for Tillman's final years.

[20] Booker T. Washington devotes two pages of his 1900 work A New Negro for a New Century to narrating Tillman's recapture of the schooner and praising him for being "as brave as a lion".

[21] Tillman's story was retold in several contemporaneous publications, including The Bugle Blast (1864) and The Rebel Pirate's Fatal Prize (1865).

[21] The Herald described Tillman as "the splendid son of Africa" while predicting that his name "will now become historic as the enacter of as great a piece of daring and heroism as perhaps the world ever saw.