Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  Historians have long argued that the rise of African commercial goods deemed “legitimate” developed in symbiosis with a continued slave trade from and within Africa.15 Increasing African exportation of palm oil, peanuts, and ivory frequently relied on slave labor to gather or grow and transport these “legitimate” commodities. The labor requirements of the new palm oil industry in Ouidah, for example, actually stimulated demand for enslaved workers, leading to an expansion of internal slavery in Dahomey.16 In West Central Africa, enslaved captives transported tons of ivory in Ovimbundu caravans trekking from the central highlands to the Angolan coast.17 Nineteenth-century Bobangi traders on the Congo River used their wealth gained from ivory sales to buy slaves and build large lineages of enslaved wives and children.18 Luso-African planters in Angola also utilized slave labor to produce sugar and cotton for overseas markets.19 This entanglement of “legitimate” exports with the slave trade and African systems of slavery contributed to the persistence of the transatlantic slave trade despite international action taken against it.20

  U.S. participation in transatlantic slaving during the entire period of illegality similarly relied on overlapping networks of legal and contraband trade. As recent work by historian Leonardo Marques shows, despite fairly successful curtailment of the incoming slave trade by 1820, U.S. crews, equipment, and ships proved deeply complicit in slave trafficking to Cuba and Brazil.21 High demand for fast clipper ships from Spanish and Portuguese slave trading firms, for example, reinvigorated the U.S. shipbuilding industry, particularly in Baltimore. Of almost 1,700 documented slaving voyages in the 1830s, 63 percent occurred on ships built in the United States. From 1836 to 1850, during the period of heaviest Brazilian contraband trade, U.S. ships and crews played a major role in the illegal slave trade by carrying equipment and trading goods to the African coast for purchase by Spanish and Portuguese slave traders.22 In the last phase of the illegal transatlantic trade following effective Brazilian slave trade abolition in 1851, U.S. port cities like New York and New Orleans served as headquarters for international slave trading firms, who availed themselves of lax customs enforcement and the cover of legitimate commerce to launch slave voyages and launder money.23 Finally, in those same years, the U.S. flag became the standard under which contraband traders could move their human cargo without British intervention. What made these financial and legal machinations possible was the consistent refusal of the United States to sign mutual search rights treaties with Great Britain.

  The British-led international campaign that historians now call slave trade suppression aimed explicitly to cultivate new commercial ties while eradicating the banned traffic in human captives. Even before the landmark 1807 abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade, British antislavery advocates had envisioned increased commerce with Africa made possible by the end of the slave trade and the extraction of new commodities.24 Maritime dominance and colonial wealth gave Britain the resources to extend its empire to the African continent by degrees throughout the nineteenth century. The 1841 Niger Expedition championed by Thomas Fowell Buxton, for example, illustrated the tight ideological and economic connections between slave trade suppression and Europe’s greater access to African agricultural and mineral resources.25 Furthermore, the British naval attack on Lagos in 1851 and subsequent annexation of the West African port city a decade later demonstrated the antislavery rationale for a new era of commodity production and commercial expansion. Historian Kristin Mann succinctly captures the imperialist ethos of the Lagos occupation: “Foreign commerce, it was felt, would bring not only material progress but also moral uplift. In West Africa, the final campaign to end the slave trade and the drive for commercial expansion were intimately related and mutually compatible.”26

  Interception of suspicious ships at sea rather than coastal raids, however, remained the dominant European strategy of slave trade suppression. From 1815 forward, Britain used its rising maritime dominance to pursue a “treaty network” organized around the strategies of mutual rights of search, mixed-commission courts, and joint naval cruising, supplemented by slave trade abolition treaties with African rulers.27 After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, Britain urged the United States, as it had other European nations, to join multilateral treaties allowing mutual rights of search of suspicious vessels at sea. In 1815 and 1817, Portugal and Spain, respectively, signed treaties to ban the transatlantic slave trade north of the equator. Britain’s continued pursuit of suppression through international treaties in the 1820s and ‘30s established the British navy’s right to board suspicious vessels flying the flag of Spain and newly independent Brazil in 1826. In the wake of the 1833 British Slavery Abolition Act, antislavery members of Parliament pursued “equipment articles” that defined certain items of cargo, such as extra water or surplus rations, as evidence of illegal intent and legitimate grounds for seizure of a suspect ship, even in the absence of enslaved captives.28 Mixed-commission courts set up in Havana and Sierra Leone addressed complex international maritime disputes created by the seizure of suspected slavers. By 1839, the powerful British Royal Navy had also asserted its right to board ships flying the Portuguese flag in the southern hemisphere as well.29 Finally, British officials used military force, naval blockades, and diplomacy to secure a series of agreements with slave trading polities, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, to end the slave trade and encourage alternative forms of commerce.30

  Until Abraham Lincoln’s administration, however, the United States refused to grant right-of-search privileges or sign bilateral treaties sought by Britain.31 The financial interests of intransigent U.S. slave traders had a hand in early resistance to negotiations with Britain. For example, in 1819, an amendment removing mutual search rights from an Anglo-American treaty came from Senator James DeWolf, brother to George DeWolf, an active slave trader in the Rhode Island merchant family.32 Moreover, with recent memories of the 1812 war fought against British infringements on U.S. ships, many Americans agreed with John Quincy Adams’s feelings that granting rights of search to Britain would be “making slaves of ourselves.”33 Naval commander Andrew Hull Foote likewise defended the principle that “the deck of an American vessel under its flag, is the territory of the United States, and no other authority but that of the United States must ever be allowed to exercise jurisdiction over it.”34 In 1842, the U.S. government took a small step toward international cooperation with Britain when it signed the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, whose section 8 established a joint cruising agreement for British vessels and U.S. Africa Squadron ships with a minimum force each of eighty guns.35

  In the shadow of British maritime power, U.S. businessmen also sought to forge their own legal trade relations with West African merchants. The volume of U.S. maritime trade to West Africa grew over the course of the nineteenth century, although often entangled with the banned traffic in human captives.36 During the 1850s, Congress entertained requests to subsidize West African inland explorations intended to lead toward the expansion of U.S. business firms supported by a line of steamers carrying U.S. mail. The support of Boston merchant William Sturgis, Southern Baptist missionary Thomas Jefferson Bowen, naval commander William Lynch, and American Colonization Society (ACS) secretary Ralph Gurley for a U.S.-sponsored expedition illustrated the convergence of U.S. military, church, and business interests in West Africa during the mid-nineteenth century.37 Indeed, Africa Squadron officers from 1842 through 1859 received instructions from the secretary of the navy that actually placed slave trade suppression second to the primary assignment of protecting “the right of our citizens engaged in lawful commerce.”38 Specifically, naval military instructions sought to shield U.S. merchant ships from being boarded by British antislavery patrols. Overall, U.S. responses to multilateral treaties demonstrate how free trade ideals and concerns of national sovereignty served as obstacles to an effective international effort to end the slave trade.39

  By midcentury it was a matter of common knowledge amo
ng critics that the U.S. refusal to sign mutual search treaties created a wide loophole for slavers working the international contraband trade. As vessels bearing first the Spanish and then the Portuguese flag became subject to British search and seizure, slave ships increasingly displayed the U.S. flag to ward off British boarding parties.40 Frederick Douglass denounced the situation in 1858 when he charged that the “stealers of men... have only to run up the stars and stripes, when pursued by an honest man-of-war, to be safe from pursuit.”41 The hypocrisy of the situation grated hard on former Africa Squadron officer Robert Wilson Shufeldt, who struggled to reconcile his view of the United States as a virtuous republic with the clearance of clandestine slavers from American harbors: “She sails out of port some bright morning with the American flag, that beautiful emblem of liberty to the oppressed—flaunting to the breeze—& speeds on a mission—the horrors & cruelties of which my pen can not describe.”42 Of course, American warships could seize slave ships flying the U.S. flag, but the tiny Africa Squadron could not operate effectively along hundreds of miles of African coastline.43 From the USS Yorktown, naval surgeon John Fox articulated the frustration of many Africa Squadron personnel longing for a prize capture when he wrote to his wife, Elizabeth, “We are perfectly useless here so far as the slave trade is concerned.”44 A New York Times correspondent, observing the operation of slavers near the mouth of the Congo River in 1860, compared the successful interception of an illegal slave ship by an American cruiser to “an angel’s visit—a thing of many fews and far betweens.”45

  Only in the late 1850s, when the illegal transatlantic trade flowed primarily to Cuba, did the United States augment its abolition enforcement efforts. In 1859, navy secretary Isaac Toucey almost doubled the size of the Africa Squadron by establishing a force of eight vessels, including four smaller steamships capable of moving well in shallow coastal waters.46 Democratic president James Buchanan also ordered ships from the U.S. Home Squadron to cruise along Cuba’s northern coast. In so doing, the Buchanan administration sought to defuse Whig and Republican outcries over several developments: slave trade revivalism lodged in the southern wing of the Democratic Party, United States filibustering in Cuba and Central America, and the recent successful landing of the slaver Wanderer in Georgia. Furthermore, Buchanan used the Home Squadron deployments to counter British diplomatic pressure on the American government to curb the participation of U.S. ships and citizens in the illegal traffic to Cuba.47 By the summer of 1860, the naval steamers Crusader, Wyandotte, Mohawk, and Water Witch alternated patrols to maintain a presence along the Cuban coast, while resupplying at Key West and Pensacola.48

  As a result, naval patrols seized ten suspected slavers carrying almost three-quarters of all recaptured Africans ever to enter U.S. custody.49 Four of these vessels carried the recaptive shipmates at the center of this study: numerous young West Central Africans on the Echo, Wildfire, and William and an older group mostly comprised of Yoruba-speaking war captives on the Bogota. The arrival of all of these recaptives on U.S. soil forced federal officials to enact a removal policy whose precedent had been in place since the 1820s but seldom utilized.

  Implementing Recaptive Removal Policy, 1819–1845

  Although there is a lively historiographic debate evaluating U.S. slave trade suppression, remarkably little sustained attention is given to the treatment of African recaptives in U.S. hands.50 In part, this is due to the small size of the population in question. All of the world’s naval patrols together managed to divert only 6 percent of illegally trafficked Africans. Of these, only a tiny fraction (roughly 3 percent of all African captives intercepted) came under U.S. control.51 Despite their small numbers, however, recaptives represented a significant political legal category, whose midway position between enslavement and free status sparked congressional debate and state-federal tensions.52 Furthermore, the sudden arrival of so many traumatized people presenting urgent human needs posed significant logistical challenges to government officials operating without an established concept of refugees or displaced persons.53 Indeed, the continued tendency of U.S. officials to see recaptives much like the domestically enslaved—as potential property and exploitable labor—often pushed humanitarian concerns to the side. African recaptives newly removed from slave ships consequently experienced further displacement and separation, often-lethal living conditions, and even reenslavement.

  In the years immediately following the 1807 Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, U.S. law treated recaptive status as virtually indistinguishable from that of chattel slavery. During early national legislative debates, states’ rights Jeffersonians resisted both the concession to federal power and the potential for adding to the free black population represented by slave trade regulation statutes. As a result, the abolition law came at the cost of provisions that would leave the disposition of recaptive Africans to state and territorial legislatures, which in most cases meant the auctioning of recaptives to southern planters for the benefit of state treasuries and the expanding plantation economy.54 In the words of one of the provision’s congressional opponents: “We punish the criminal, and then step into his place, and complete the crime.”55 State and territorial laws across the South established their own instructions concerning the sale of recaptive Africans and the distribution of resulting funds.56 The absence of federal records for this period, however, makes it difficult to determine how states and territories applied the law to actual recaptives.57 In some protracted court cases, it appears that local officials and their planter associates quietly took possession of Africans awaiting disposition.58

  The shift to a federal removal policy occurred during sensitive U.S. diplomatic discussions with Spain for Florida and Britain’s negotiations on international slave trade suppression treaties. In 1817, U.S. federal troops attacked a thriving hub of privateers and slave smugglers on Amelia Island in East Florida.59 The attack revealed how the illegal slave trade was caught up in early U.S. efforts to establish diplomatic relations with Europe. As historian Eliga Gould has argued, the new American republic sought recognition as a sovereign power according to “the law of nations.”60 Under President James Monroe’s administration, Congress therefore passed several supplementary transatlantic slave trade laws that served as the legal apparatus for U.S. policy up to the Abraham Lincoln administration. An 1820 statute—observed only in the breach—defined American citizens’ participation in the African slave trade as piracy, and therefore a capital crime. Most relevant for recaptives, an 1819 act shifted responsibility for recaptive disposition from state to federal jurisdiction. Section 2 of the 1819 Act in Addition to the Acts Prohibiting the Slave Trade empowered the president to remove all Africans found on illegal slavers “beyond the limits of the United States.” The act also asserted U.S. sovereignty abroad by authorizing naval patrols and the appointment of a U.S. recaptured African agent on the African coast.61 In legal terms, the prohibition against the selling of seized Africans by state governments placed recaptives beyond the commodification of chattel slavery. Notably, it did so without mention of the “liberated” status by which such recaptives would become known in British rhetoric.

  In terms of domestic slavery politics, the 1819 language of removal also reflected contentious debates over race and civic capacity in the antebellum United States.62 As early as the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson had listed historical resentments and natural difference as arguments against measures to “incorporate the blacks into the state.”63 Early national debates over American slavery raised the question of the status of free blacks, who in those very years were building a collective voice for inclusion in U.S. citizenship.64 White fears of political disruption caused by free blacks merged with the heightened white alarm over the possibility of southern slave revolts in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.65 The ACS, founded in 1816 and composed of many leading statesmen of the day, built upon these anxieties to craft a colonizationist agenda for an experimental black settlement in West Africa that would prot
ect the whiteness of citizenship at home. Colonization offered moderate antislavery advocates the opportunity for gradual abolition and a “free soil” colony in West Africa. In turn, moderate southern slaveholders found reassurance in the promised removal of free blacks, whom they had long considered a destabilizing element for the enslaved population.66 Antipathy against civic inclusion of people of color in the United States deepened alongside the shift from environmental theories of difference to biological theories of race applied not only to free African Americans but to Native Americans and Mexicans as well.67 Indeed, it is no coincidence that the movement for Indian removal emerged within a decade of the 1819 African recaptive removal mandate.

  Nor was there any coincidence in the timing of the 1819 act to align with initial U.S. forays into colonization that would eventually result in the ACS settlement of Liberia. The ACS, argues historian Eric Burin, used the question of recaptive disposition as “a new tool with which to pry open the federal coffers.”68 The 1819 bill’s author, Virginia congressman Charles Fenton Mercer, also served as an ACS manager. A small portion of the $100,000 appropriation, included in Mercer’s provisions, would give the ACS the resources it needed to establish a colonial foothold in West Africa.69 Initial attempts by eighty-six African American emigrants to settle at Sherbo Island, just south of the British colony of Freetown, Sierra Leone, failed due to high mortality and political dissent. Late in 1821, ACS agent Eli Ayres and U.S. Navy lieutenant Robert Stockton forced through a treaty with Dei leader King Peter in an infamous scene of pistol diplomacy.70 Black American emigrants and white missionaries struggled with heavy mortality as well as militant resistance from Dei and other indigenous polities they displaced and whose trade they disrupted. By 1823, however, a tiny colony of roughly 150 people lived in the settlement that came to be known as Monrovia.71 American slave trade suppression legislation thus represented a crucial funding stream for the ACS, while the removal policy promised a source of new immigrants for the Liberian project.