Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  Not until 1819 did Congress shift the legal status of recaptives further along the spectrum from property to persons by placing slave trade refugees under federal jurisdiction and prohibiting further sale. Passed in the midst of an emerging crisis over Missouri’s slave or free status, the 1819 act empowered the president to deport recaptives and authorized an agent to oversee resettlement outside U.S. borders.7 Significantly, supporters of the newly founded American Colonization Society (ACS) provided leadership in shepherding the measure through Congress, thereby creating both rationale and means for the creation of a Liberian colony in West Africa in the early 1820s.8 From Liberia’s inception onward, the policy of recaptive removal and the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade became intertwined with the emigration of free and manumitted African Americans to West Africa. Throughout the antebellum period, political tensions regarding state-national authority, commodity-person status, and Liberian colonization persisted in slave trade suppression debates. However, the 1819 law represented a genuine turning point in terms of establishing the principle of federal custody and extraterritorial removal for slave ship survivors.

  Yet, legal statutes illuminate only part of mid-nineteenth-century recaptive history. In terms of legal intent, some have argued that the 1819 removal law constituted a milestone in the U.S. government’s willingness “to spend money to help Africans gain their liberty.”9 Federal slave trade legislation, however, made no mention of recaptives’ “liberty,” nor did it describe the seizure of an illegal slave ship as an act of emancipation. Legal history thus tells only a partial story about the nature of recaptive existence following release from the holds of slave ships. To some extent, recaptives across the Atlantic World shared conditions of dispossession, displacement, and uncertainty, yet the policies of the capturing nation influenced specific experiences related to middle passage trauma, labor policies, and further displacement. In the case of the United States, temporary federal camps, the removal mandate, and apprenticeship to African American emigrant households in Liberia shaped a particular version of recaptivity. By examining the passage of African recaptives from four illegal slavers through U.S. custody, the following chapters contribute a North American case study to an expanding literature on recaptured/liberated Africans throughout the Atlantic World. Furthermore, putting recaptives at the center of the story amplifies the social and cultural dimensions of U.S. slave trade suppression.

  Although overlooked in historical narratives of antebellum sectionalism confined to domestic politics, transnational slave smuggling and naval suppression exerted a significant impact on nineteenth-century U.S. public debates and popular culture. In the decades after slave trade abolition, U.S. naval efforts to intercept illegal slavers failed to stem the participation of American sailors, slave ships, and financiers in the trafficking of African captives to Brazil and Cuba. Accounts of suspicious vessels seized by U.S. warships appeared regularly in the American press. Tensions over British interception of American ships ignited diplomatic protests over rights of search and U.S. sovereignty.10 American newspapers across the political spectrum avidly followed the trials of slave ship crews and captains in major seaport cities. Two bestsellers of the 1850s were, in fact, memoirs written by a U.S. Africa Squadron commander and a notorious retired transatlantic slave smuggler.11 Broad public familiarity with slave trade enforcement enabled Frederick Douglass to condemn the American institution of chattel slavery as a “system of piracy,” a clear invocation of U.S. piracy statutes that defined maritime human trafficking as a capital crime.12 Once we recognize the extensive public impact of the slave trade and its suppression, we are able to see antebellum slavery debates more accurately within an Atlantic political geography.

  The patterns of wind and current that brought the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota within range of the U.S. Navy also drew recaptives into an evolving Euro-American debate on the racial destiny of Africans and their descendants. The representation of African recaptives in American newspapers and magazines illustrated the influence of both racial science and African exploration literature on U.S. slavery debates. Recaptives arriving in southern ports such as Charleston, South Carolina, encountered an American public that could perceive them only through the caricatures of slave or savage. Let them stay in the hands of benevolent American planters, argued one South Carolina editorialist, where recaptive Africans could have “all the liberty they could use.”13 Racialization through ethnography, proslavery rhetoric, and colonizationist discourses impaired the American public’s ability to grasp the nature of recaptive struggles for physical and social survival. Furthermore, recaptive debates in U.S. newspapers employed a hardening racial ideology in arguments about black labor, global commerce, and African colonization. Consequently, the history of recaptives in the United States provides an instructive example of early U.S. imperialism decades in advance of its traditionally narrated late nineteenth-century rise.14

  Surrounded on all sides by proslavery demagogues, federal guards, and curious sightseers, traumatized shipmates sought to survive their displacement along Atlantic routes of forced migration by pursuing the tentative repair of their fractured worlds. The approach I have taken to recuperate a history of recaptivity as lived experience has necessarily been shaped by the limitations of existing sources. On one hand, government officials and local eyewitnesses obsessively documented recaptives of the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota as bodies to be fed, buried, counted, guarded, controlled, and transported.15 Obviously slanted toward bureaucratic concerns, the records of naval officers, U.S. marshals, and other government agents provide detailed information on mortality rates, legal proceedings, and local arrangements for sheltering recaptives. Records of the ACS as well as the daily journals and correspondence of appointed federal agents offer glimpses of daily conditions on Liberian-bound ships and the survival strategies of slave trade refugees recrossing the Atlantic. Still, the archive of evidence on U.S. slave trade suppression is marked by a virtual erasure of first-person testimony from these specific recaptive adults and youth. The absence of any reliable first-person evidence threatens to silence key aspects of the social experience of recaptives, such as individual memories of homeland, social affiliations, spiritual practice, and intellectual frameworks for understanding such extended journeys. Compared to detailed linguistic and ethnographic evidence (however distorted or misunderstood) kept by officials in Havana, Freetown, St. Helena, and Rio de Janeiro, U.S. records on recaptives in Charleston and Key West lack all but the most generic observations on appearance and language.16 As a result, we can be fairly sure of the places from which the Bogota or Wildfire, for example, left the African coast but less certain about particular recaptives’ origins and routes into Atlantic enslavement. As I discuss below, superficial and caricatured treatment of ethnicity in U.S. slave trade suppression sources poses significant obstacles for accessing the frames of reference through which African men, women, and children interpreted their experiences of enslavement and recaptivity.

  Faced with archives that reflect the historical devaluation of enslaved African lives, historians must make decisions about how to use partial and fragmentary evidence. In this book, I situate existing primary evidence within a rich and growing body of scholarship on saltwater slavery (enslavement on the sea) and liberated African studies that offers insight into the question of what it meant to be a recaptured African in the last decade of the transatlantic slave trade.17 Through this lens, the outlines, if not the fine grain, of recaptive experiences become visible by careful contextualization. First, and fundamentally, recaptivity must be understood as a phase of forced migration, geographically and conceptually linked to Atlantic routes of enslavement. The term “serial displacement,” elaborated by historians of the Atlantic slave trade, reminds us that the time spent by recaptured Africans in U.S. custody was just one phase of dislocation within an extended process of upheaval, terror, and physical deprivation. Each recaptive seized by U.S. naval patrols had
already traveled thousands of miles, some having passed through a succession of owners, traders, and brokers in West and West Central Africa before embarking on transatlantic slave ships.18 Depending on age, gender, and conditions of capture, most recaptives had also experienced the breaking and remaking of their social worlds many times over, in shifting familial, labor, and commercial contexts.19 Within this framework, recaptive camps and government removal ships can be understood as “transit zones,” temporary detention spaces through which refugees of the slave trade passed after already enduring many stages of enslavement. Borrowed from twentieth-century research on the movements of refugees and displaced persons, the term “transit zone” emphasizes transience, insecurity, alienation, and potential for further trauma.20 Whereas federal law treated recaptives as a population in the process of exiting the slave trade, the question of where that exit led remained unanswered within the immediate environs of the transit zone.

  A large number of slave ship recaptives in the 1850s proved particularly vulnerable due to their young age. Although definitions of childhood and children varied across societies, demographic research clearly indicates the increase in enslaved young people embarked on transatlantic slavers in the nineteenth century. The proportion of children younger than fifteen years sold to foreign traders from all regions of Africa rose over time, from 22.7 percent in the eighteenth century to 46.1 percent between 1810 and 1867. Even more to the point, captives embarked near the mouth of the Congo River, including those enslaved on the Echo, Wildfire, and William, came from regions where the proportion of children under fifteen surpassed 50 percent in the same decades.21 By necessity, any study of nineteenth-century recaptives from the West Central African region must confront the particular crisis of these slave trade “orphans,” primarily male youth. How might the young age of recaptives have defined their vulnerability and, perhaps, their ability to adapt to protracted displacement?22 Furthermore, how might the expectations of recaptive groups containing a larger numbers of adults, such as the shipmates of the Ouidah-embarked Bogota in 1860, have been shaped by their arrival in the Key West camp already inhabited by large numbers of younger West Central African recaptives? Asking such questions, informed by pathbreaking arguments on African children in slavery and diaspora, illuminates the possible social experience of recaptive communities, even when the perspective of individual recaptives has been lost.23

  Shipmates who shared and survived the experience of saltwater slavery forged powerful social bonds with one another.24 In his study of 1821 Yoruba survivors of the Emilia, Walter Hawthorne argues that “social death was followed by ‘social reincarnation,’” growing out of ties between shipmates. Enslaved Africans arriving throughout the Americas used specific terms to acknowledge the deep significance of connections forged with those who shared their ocean terrors: malungo in Brazil, sippi and máti in Surinam, malongue in Trinidad, and batiment in Haiti.25 Shipmate bonds proved equally powerful for recaptive Africans, many of whom had more control over maintaining their shipmate connections than did enslaved Africans in the Americas.26 The people at the center of this study made a second Atlantic crossing in company with shipmates who had already shared a common first middle passage. A critical reading of the daily ship journals of white government agents reveals recaptive shipmates’ assertion of sociability, aesthetic creativity, and survival strategies on the voyage to Liberia. Moreover, the deep alienation of a few who were separated from their original shipmates and placed with a different group of recaptives traveling to Liberia underscores the continuing power of shipmate relations throughout the period of recaptivity.

  Finally, the official reports and receipts left by U.S. and ACS agents in Liberia suggest how, throughout successive forced migrations, recaptives underwent a complex process of “ethnogenesis” that transformed shipmate relations and common regions of origin into broader networks and identifications. As many Africanist scholars have emphasized, enslaved people did not think of themselves as “Africans” or their homelands as “Africa.”27 These terms, though used in historical writing today, were generated by centuries of interaction between the diverse people and polities of the Atlantic Basin. Like enslaved communities in the Americas, recaptives were also forced by circumstances to construct new collective identities and communities. David Northrup has written, for example, of the heightened awareness of being “African” that developed among liberated Africans in Sierra Leone.28 The present study, focused on immediate aftermath, does not address the long-term development and impact of “Congoes” in Liberia. In fact, much of that history remains to be written. However, Recaptured Africans does examine the initial period of apprenticeship, which reveals the continued subordination of recaptive children and adults to Liberian colonial interests. Ongoing struggles for collective belonging allowed some recaptives to build networks of family, church, and neighborhood despite limited political and economic rights.

  Taken together, the reconstruction of social bonds in the midst of death and displacement demonstrates a powerful repudiation of the threat of “social death” imposed by the transatlantic market in human commodities. Vincent Brown incisively challenges historians to understand social death not as a fixed condition but as a “productive peril” that generated a politics of struggle among the enslaved.29 Brown’s argument about slavery and “political life” revisits Orlando Patterson’s classic definition of slavery as social death, defined by an institutionalized set of social relations that constitute “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”30 Recent studies by Atlantic historians including James Sweet, Walter Hawthorne, and John Edwin Mason reject the idea of social death as a permanent condition, instead placing emphasis on the creation of cultural, religious, and political affiliations that foster social “reincarnation” or “resurrection.”31 In these pages, I argue that the critical work of slave trade refugees in the first days and months of recaptivity entailed just such a work of reconstruction. However, as this story shows, those struggling for a life beyond survival in the aftermath of the middle passage repeatedly confronted grim realities of death and loss. From the elemental effort to remain alive in federal camps to the politics of space and resources that developed aboard recaptive ships, and finally to collective efforts to escape apprenticeship or form new families in Liberia, both adults and children re-created fragile social groupings that defied the social annihilation imposed by slave traders and would-be rescuers.

  In contrast to the partial and fragmented archive on recaptive social experience, evidence for the racial representation of recaptive Africans while under U.S. federal jurisdiction fills the historical record. Proslavery southern nationalists, colonizationists, and abolitionists generated a noisy public debate over U.S. slave trade suppression policies and took an interest in the 1858 and 1860 arrivals of recaptured Africans. Newspaper reports and visual images of recaptives in the illustrated weeklies depicted slave trade refugees as racially exotic subjects. Congressional subsidies passed to fund the removal of recaptive shipmates exacerbated the long-running debate among African American activists, slave trade revivalists, and abolitionist circles over U.S. support for Liberian colonization. Black activists already involved in protest over the illegal transatlantic trade to Cuba asserted the humanity and rights of young recaptives. Finally, ACS officials and the U.S. agent for recaptured Africans in Liberia generated copious records on the transition of recaptives into Liberian apprenticeships. To understand the dual nature of recaptivity as both social experience and racial representation requires reading many of these sources against their grain.

  As the first large group of recaptives to arrive in the United States for several decades, the 1858 shipmates of the Echo sailed directly into the sights of slave trade revivalists eager to capitalize on their presence. Accounts of court proceedings, such as those against the Echo crew in South Carolina in 1859, as well as newspaper editorials, speeches, and pamphlets reflect the intense politiciza
tion of slave trade refugees and convey the arguments of transatlantic slave trade advocates. Charleston lawyer and newspaper editor Leonidas Spratt, for example, identified the same contradiction between foreign slave trade suppression and domestic slavery that Frederick Douglass condemned in his 1858 speech.32 In Spratt’s designs, however, Douglass’s monstrous twins became the dual progenitors of southern wealth and political power. Unlike his more moderate southern colleagues who accepted the transatlantic slave trade prohibition, Spratt and his fellow thinkers condemned the federal slave trade ban for casting a shadow of moral doubt on American slaveholding. “Slavery itself must be wrong,” he declared in mock outrage, “when the ships and seamen of our country are kept upon the seas to preclude the means to its formation. By no dexterity can we dodge the logical accuracy of this conclusion.”33 The assertion was purely rhetorical, of course, for Spratt ardently embraced the proslavery position; following his own logic, he sounded the reactionary call to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, eviscerate slave trade suppression laws, and thereby ensure slavery’s future.

  Yet, Charleston’s slave trade revivalists made clear, the true context for the debate over the fate of slave trade refugees was the wider arena of global abolition. Radical proslavery spokesmen thus used recaptives to fight not only a sectional battle for states’ rights but also a hemispheric one against Atlantic emancipation. Following the massive 1791 St. Domingue slave uprising that led to Haitian independence, southern U.S. planters began to build a defensive case against the threat of abolition. The expansion of cotton cultivation across the Deep South in the early nineteenth century gave planters a strong economic stake in proslavery arguments.34 After British colonial emancipation, the introduction of an apprenticeship system in the West Indies in 1834, and the milestone of full legal emancipation in 1838, proslavery advocates in the United States operated in continuous backlash against British abolitionism.35 Gradual emancipation in newly independent Latin American countries, such as Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela, and the abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean by 1848 only served to deepen the U.S. proslavery defense.36