Lamar organized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these was the Wanderer, a fast yacht that took on a cargo of five hundred Africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee agitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action
