Shhhh….dirty little secret the liberals don't want you do know about: the reason this ship was a smuggling effort was because of Thomas Jefferson, their new evil because he owned slaves. He's the one who pushed for and signed into law the banning of transporting new slaves.
By the way, he pushed for abolition in his home state of Virginia before he pushed for abolition in our new country. And he tried to free all the slaves he inherited but the then state law forbade it (because citizenship of slaves had to be approved by the court, and because they had a law banning the freeing of slaves by anyone who had debt, which he had much of after the Brits punished him financially for being a "traitor").
In studies about the slavery issue I found that North Carolina and Virginia tried to address the situation and the abolishment of slavery and were thwarted in their efforts by members of the states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey because the abolishment of slavery would be detrimental to the shipping interests of those states.