![]() ![]() On the fateful night of June 28, 1848, Goode was seen attacking his paramour Mary Anne Williams over her involvement with another man by the name of Thomas Harding. By 1848 Goode was a resident of “The Black Sea,” a neighborhood frequented by sailors on leave, immigrants, and African Americans, and notorious as a hotbed of vice and violence. As a very young man Goode served under Andrew Jackson during the Seminole War, and after the war, he served as a ship’s cook. Let’s begin with the sailor, a man by the name of Washington Goode, about whom little is known. ![]() What connects the 1849 execution of an obscure African American sailor with Billy Budd, Sailor, the enigmatic novella written by Herman Melville, one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century? Perhaps a great deal. ![]()
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