SAIL Black History Month Series: William Tillman
Author:
Feb 12, 2021
William Tillman was a Civil War hero from Milford, Delaware. Records are unclear, but he was born approximately 1834 to free Black parents. Free Black families weren’t the norm for Delaware at the time and as a teenager, he and his family moved to Rhode Island. Soon after, Tillman began working as a sailor.
At 27, he was employed as the steward on the S.J.
Waring, a 300-ton schooner owned by Jonas Smith & Co. They shipped from New York on the fourth of July with the intended destination of Buenos Aires. Three days into the voyage, however, the