Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  Due to the slow pace of U.S. slave trade intervention, however, the primary migrants to Liberia over the course of the mid-nineteenth century came from the United States. Between 1820 and 1850, the ACS and the separate Maryland Colonization Society sent almost 7,000 free and manumitted black American emigrants to Liberia.72 Although Liberia declared its independence as a black republic in 1847, the settler population remained closely tied to the ACS, which continued to post agents, send emigrant ships, and recruit support for colonization in the United States. Larger numbers of formerly enslaved emigrants arrived in Liberia during the 1850s, often with fewer resources than free African American emigrants who came from the northern states. The Liberian outpost, designed as an asylum for recaptive Africans, thus emerged as a colonial society with its own order of class and caste.73

  The cases of the Antelope, Fenix, and General Páez represent early precedents for later recaptive removals to Liberia. As the following discussion demonstrates, African men, women, and children seized by the United States from suspect ships continued to be treated as latent property and exploitable laborers. Historian Rebecca Scott notes that even people of color with clear free status in one part of the Atlantic World were vulnerable to having others “find property in their persons” once they traveled to another location.74 The liminal status of recaptives held in the expanding slaveholding republic of the United States proved at least as vulnerable. The removal mandate ostensibly protected recaptives from reenslavement in southern states, yet district courts often struggled with the question of whether Africans seized on particular ships qualified for federally funded removal and colonization under the 1819 statute.

  The well-known case of the Antelope illuminates the difficulties of applying and implementing the removal mandate. Registered to a Spanish owner in Cuba but under the control of a privateer crew commissioned by South American revolutionary forces, the Antelope became embroiled in a maritime legal dispute with Spanish and Portuguese claimants over the disposition of African captives.75 On 29 June 1820, the revenue cutter Dallas seized the Antelope on the northeast coast of Florida with 280 enslaved Africans embarked from Cabinda, a slaving port just north of the Congo River. By late July, U.S. marshal John Morel took custody of 258 Africans (an unaccounted-for reduction from the original number), whom he corralled in hastily built sheds at Savannah’s racetrack. While a seven-year legal battle wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, district court judge William Davies ordered 51 of the most “prime” captives to labor on the city fortifications. Marshal Morel brought more than 100 young captives to his own plantation and hired out most of the rest to Savannah elites, including doctors, judges, and a toll road contractor. By the end of 1820, almost 50 had died and at least 1 young man had fled or been kidnapped.76 Having already endured captivity in West Central Africa, pirate ship attacks, and the middle passage, the Antelope shipmates now lived under conditions that differed little from those of other enslaved Africans in Georgia.

  Treated as virtual property even before the trial, young captives from the Antelope experienced further threat of enslavement in a May 1821 Sixth Circuit Court decision. Despite U.S. attorney Richard Habersham’s continued attempts to argue for the free status of all Antelope captives, Judge William Johnson ordered the division of 204 Antelope survivors into three groups: Spanish property, Portuguese property, and 16 men and boys designated as recaptives subject to U.S. removal law.77 Underscoring the commodification implicit in the judicial ruling, officials used a lottery to select the small group of African shipmates released from the Portuguese and Spanish claims.78 Yet their ordeal was far from over. Not until March 1827 did the Supreme Court make its final decision, leaving 39 recaptives enslaved with the Spanish and releasing the remaining 131 survivors to American authorities for removal.79

  The group of former Antelope shipmates, now including a second generation of infants and children, sailed to Liberia on the ACS ship Norfolk in July 1827, to become some of the first inhabitants of the recaptive town known as New Georgia.80 Among the Norfolk travelers, at least three families of Antelope women and children left behind husbands and fathers, designated as Spanish property but eventually enslaved in Georgia.81 In the ACS rosters, twenty-three of the migrants bore Habersham’s last name, a sign of their sojourn in the wilderness of the American legal system. Indicative as well of their travails as Atlantic captives, not to mention the high mortality endemic to Liberian emigrant society, only 23 percent of the original Antelope shipmates remained alive in New Georgia by 1844.82

  Legal disputes also produced long detention periods and further journeying for 82 African captives seized near Haiti by the USS Grampus aboard the schooner Fenix on 5 June 1830.83 Like the Antelope, the Fenix was also registered to a Spanish owner. Because the Grampus intervened after the Fenix’s alleged act of “piratical aggression” on the U.S. brig Kremlin, District Attorney John Slidell brought suit against the ship for violation of an 1819 piracy statute rather than the 1819 slave trade law. Attorney General John Macpherson Berrien, who had been involved with the Antelope trials as well, argued that a Spanish ship “manned and navigated by Spaniards” could not be prosecuted under the 1819 slave trade act and thus U.S. officials could not avail themselves of the removal provision to transport the Fenix recaptives to Liberia. Meanwhile, recaptives languished on the ship as it sailed from Key West to Pensacola. The surviving shipmates were finally allowed to leave the crowded schooner six weeks after naval seizure, and U.S. marshal John Nicholson placed them with nearby slaveowners, where they were expected to labor in return for provision.84

  Once again, lawyers argued over which statutes applied because the Fenix had been seized as a pirate ship, not as a slaver. The Spanish owner of the vessel attempted, unsuccessfully in this case, to make a claim on the ship’s African captives. Alfred Hennen, a noted New Orleans jurist and past vice president of the Louisiana Colonization Society, filed a motion of habeas corpus for the African shipmates, on the grounds that they were “free men.”85 On 30 July, Samuel H. Harper of the U.S. Eastern District Court of Louisiana issued an ex parte decision rejecting Hennen’s writ. Harper first argued that “foreign negroes, however introduced,” must “in all cases either be sent home, or in some way be excluded from the United States.”86 Citing Louisiana’s own laws excluding new arrivals of free people of color, Harper asserted that “slavery would be a blessing” in comparison with allowing recaptives to remain in the country, subject to hostile black codes. Second, he noted that ongoing court proceedings also required the detention of the “African negroes.” Ultimately, in a March 1831 decision, Justice Harper rejected the Spanish claim and turned the remaining 62 recaptives over to federal authorities for removal “beyond the limits of the United States.” Congress then appropriated $6,000 for the navy’s transport of Fenix survivors to Liberia.87 Four more years passed, however, before only 37 of 82 original shipmates of the Fenix sailed on the ACS ship Louisiana for Monrovia, where they also received lands in New Georgia. How many had perished in New Orleans and how many remained behind in slavery is not clear.88

  Removal rarely held out hope for repatriation of African captives to their specific homelands, as the cases of the Antelope and Fenix attest. One exceptional instance, however, occurred in August 1822, when the schooner General Páez arrived in Baltimore carrying fourteen Africans recently seized from a slave ship by privateer Captain John Chase.89 Although Chase claimed the men as legitimate crew members, Baltimore abolitionists and colonization society members attempted to gain custody of the Africans by charging Chase with violating U.S. slave trade laws.90 Over more than a year of legal maneuvering, the West African men and boys were held first in the city’s poorhouse and later in a Baltimore jail.91 In the spring of 1823, the U.S. district court judge ruled that federal slave trade laws did not apply to a privateering vessel such as General Páez, and thus Africans found aboard the ship could not be considered recaptives under the 1819 law.92 Yet the Monroe administration, under increas
ing pressure from the British and seeking to craft a response consistent with the newly issued doctrine of hemispheric influence, still faced the question of the stranded Africans’ future. Furthermore, with Liberian colonization now considered more viable, ACS agents such as Eli Ayers hoped to garner government support by engineering an African return.

  What happened next illuminates the conditions necessary for a process even remotely approximating repatriation and the reasons for most recaptives’ permanent exile. In early 1823, Richard Wilkinson, an Anglo-Baga trader from the Rio Pongo trading region, arrived on business in Baltimore. Wilkinson soon agreed to act as interpreter in an interview between ten of the General Páez shipmates, U.S. naval agent James Beatty, ACS advocate and Federalist statesman Robert Goodloe Harper, and U.S. attorney Elias Glenn.93 Although fearful of betrayal at first, each African man or boy responded affirmatively to the offer to sail at government expense to Liberia. One man named Dowrey, for example, explained that he could walk to his home from Cape Mesurado in only three days. Like the rest of his shipmates he strongly favored repatriation, however difficult the voyage: “I wish to go home, I wish to see my father, my wife and children.” Another man named Cubangerie inquired, “Why do you ask this over and over? Do you not know that nothing is so dear as a man’s home?”94 No doubt much was lost in translation and filtered through the American interviewers’ ideal of an African nuclear family.95 Yet the men clearly conveyed the sense that freedom could only be fully realized through restoration of kin. Their answers may also have been strategic, revealing the men’s understanding that their best chance for return depended on articulating their familial claims and their former free status. One young boy for whom Wilkinson could not translate remained in Baltimore, but ten older shipmates left Baltimore in October 1823 on Wilkinson’s ship Fidelity. They disembarked at Cape Mesurado, where ACS leaders reported they were reunited with “friends.”96 To what extent they reunited with the specific family members named in their interviews remains uncertain.

  Overall, in its first decades of implementation, the 1819 law created an alternative to reenslavement for slave trade recaptives, yet it functioned more as a deportation order than a repatriation policy.97 Although U.S. courts ultimately ruled that neither the Antelope, the Fenix, nor the General Páez came under the 1819 slave trade act, officials nonetheless followed a policy of removal (with the exception of the Antelope shipmates designated for Spanish claims). As Judge Samuel H. Harper put it in his Fenix decision, African recaptives would be “kept, supported and removed beyond the limits of the United States.”98 These African voyages to Liberia foreshadowed how recaptive settlement could serve ACS interests in establishing the organization’s colonial footprint. Only the much-celebrated group of Amistad shipmates, freed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1841, followed a path of difficult repatriation similar to that of the General Páez recaptives.99 In both the General Páez and Amistad cases, adequate translators helped recaptives gain a voice in the proceedings. Furthermore, each of these two shipmate groups was smaller and included adult men, compared with the hundreds of destitute youth of the Echo, Wildfire, and William. Finally, in each case a vested interest beyond the recaptives’ repatriation came into play: Wilkinson’s interest in strengthening Baltimore trade networks with Rio Pongo and the ACS’s bid for recognition in the first case and, in the second, the Union Missionary Society’s interest in establishing their West African mission.100

  One other important earlier journey anticipated a final dimension of American recaptive policies in the 1858–62 period. Following the deployment of a small U.S. Africa Squadron, a prize crew from the USS Yorktown boarded the slaver Pons in 1845 and discovered 900 young captives recently embarked from Cabinda. This time there was no question as to the disposition of weakened captives who had received no food in the three days since their voyage began. As naval commander Charles Bell explained, he chose the shortest course by which recaptives could be removed from their terrible imprisonment.101 The prize crew sailed for Monrovia, Liberia, before taking the vessel to Philadelphia for trial.102 Thus recaptives of the Pons endured a shortened middle passage, sailing under U.S. naval supervision for a sixteen-day journey to Liberia. This voyage set the U.S. precedent for transporting recaptives seized near the African coast in later years, while those taken from slavers on the approach to Cuba entered Charleston and Key West under intense public scrutiny and political controversy.

  Slave Trade Ethnography of the 1850s

  In contrast to the earlier slaver cases, the shipmates of the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota entered a late antebellum U.S. society far more likely and able to sensationalize their presence. The development of an Anglo-American Dark Continent mythology of African superstition, ignorance, and savagery has been deeply explored by numerous historical and literary scholars.103 More to the point for the American reception of U.S. recaptives, however, was the impact of popular interest in the illegal slave trade, which created a tension between the iconography of suffering middle passage victims and prevalent racial images of debased, barbaric “Africans.” Several converging print culture trends made possible this juxtaposition of abject suffering and inherent depravity. First, the advent of the penny press and new illustration technologies allowed a much wider dissemination of newspapers, pamphlets, and books to mid-nineteenth-century readers. Second, these readers avidly consumed a fresh round of English-language missionary and exploration accounts of Africa published during the 1840s and ‘50s. David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), for example, was widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic.104 Third, the popularization of a brand of racial science known as the “American school of ethnology” challenged older theories of environmental difference and reinforced concepts of permanent, biological inequality among humans.105 Together with the political turmoil that followed the Compromise of 1850, these converging cultural trends fed a genre of slave trade ethnography that obscured the social crisis of slave ship recaptives.

  Despite U.S. historians’ tendency to tell a domestically focused story of 1850s sectional politics, American newspapers in the period regularly covered all aspects of the clandestine transatlantic trade. High-profile trials in New York, Charleston, and Savannah not only popularized knowledge of illegal slaving and maritime law but also romanticized the outlaw figure of the slave trader.106 In 1854, for example, accused slave captain James Smith of the brig Julia Moulton gave a markedly unrepentant and widely reprinted interview from his jail cell in the New York Tombs. Smith, according to the account, spoke “with the freedom and pride of an old soldier relating his battles.”107 These slaver trials, as scholar Jeannine DeLombard argues, crucially shaped discourse on “questions of national sovereignty and U.S. citizenship.” Journalistic coverage of U.S. sailors and captains who toyed with the American flag as disguise and denied their own nationality to avoid prosecution under American laws forced readers to confront the uses and abuses of national citizenship.108

  Furthermore, the covert landing of the Wanderer and the Clotilda in Georgia and Alabama, respectively, proffered the specter of the transatlantic slave trade’s revival not just abroad but in the United States as well. In late November 1858, the Wanderer’s Captain William Corrie smuggled more than 300 West Central African boys across the bar at Jekyll Island. Rumors began to circulate through Lowcountry newspapers of slaveowners purchasing “wild Africans.”109 The trials that followed made headlines but produced no convictions. The case against the Wanderer’s owner Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar and his partners ended in mistrial in Savannah. Just one month after a Charleston jury returned a “Not Guilty” verdict on the Echo crew, U.S. district court judge Andrew Magrath nullified the 1820 federal piracy statute, and Captain Corrie walked free in Charleston.110 In response, a satirical piece in New York’s black-owned Weekly Anglo-African parodied the Democratic Convention of 1860 as a parade of “choice Southern melodies” that included the “‘The Little Wander
er’—a new melody by Lamar.”111 The states’ rights challenge to federal law heightened the visibility of these trials and tied the illegal slave trade to heated sectional politics.

  Inciting more rumors of a revived African slave trade, the schooner Clotilda slipped up the Alabama River in July 1860 with 110 captives purchased at the Dahomean port of Ouidah. Timothy Meaher, the Mobile entrepreneur who funded the clandestine voyage, evaded federal officials and quickly put the smuggled captives to work in his cotton fields.112 A defiant Mobile Register congratulated Meaher, taking a jab at federal recaptive policy for good measure. An editorial reassured readers that the “sons of Afric,” safely stashed in Alabama, were “not likely to undergo what the imported darkies so detest—deportation.” A reprint of the Register’s editorial in a San Francisco newspaper within just a few weeks indicated the national scope of interest in the story.113 Closer to the scene of the crime, the Charleston Daily Courier posted news of the Clotilda within days.114 Defiant acts of slave smuggling evoked cheers, curiosity, and outrage, reflecting the broad spectrum of public opinion and heightened awareness of the illegal transatlantic slave trade.

  Given the controversy surrounding the illegal slave trade at midcentury, it is hardly surprising that memoirs and travel narratives from both naval officers and former slavers found an avid readership. To begin with the naval accounts, the creation of the U.S. Africa Squadron sent a whole cadre of American men into naval service along the western coast of Africa. Many of them shared one memoirist’s belief that “the West Coast of Africa is a fresher field for the scribbling tourist, than most other parts of the world.”115 Throughout the 1840s and ‘50s, private letters, official reports, personal journals, and serialized travel accounts of naval officers circulated news of the slave trade and African travel.116 Accounts of Africa Squadron activity along the western African coastline appeared in the aftermath of U.S. annexation of Mexican territory and in the decade of the Ostend Manifesto’s belligerent claim on Cuba. Within this context of nation-building and expansionism, American naval forces deployed in the name of slave trade suppression constituted an early projection of U.S. power abroad, however weak and limited.117 At the same time, naval narratives functioned for American readers as “cultural resources,” which, as Mary Renda’s study of U.S. Navy marine occupation of Haiti has demonstrated, articulated “new versions of Americanness” and ideas about “the U.S. role in the world.”118