The best known of such accounts was Andrew H. Foote’s widely reviewed 1854 volume, Africa and the American Flag. Commander of the U.S. naval brig Perry during an 1850–51 tour of duty, Foote aimed primarily to strengthen support for the U.S. Africa Squadron in a period when states’ rights and proslavery advocates sought to remove Article 8 of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. He also wrote the volume in general support of Liberian colonization and the defense of U.S. sovereignty at sea.119 The combination of Foote’s own travels along the western coast of Africa with excerpted missionary and exploration accounts appealed to readers as much for the “novelty” of its material on African “manners and customs” as for its analysis of the slave trade.120 In this sense, Africa and the American Flag functioned as a work of slave trade ethnography and shared certain similarities with accounts by slave traders.
Even more than naval officers, the outlaw figure of the nineteenth-century slaver piqued public curiosity, eliciting both admiration and disgust. Slaver accounts in the 1850s emerged from a genre of “sea literature” that included stories of pirates, sailors, and castaways.121 The most widely read and reviewed of the slaver narratives was Theodor Canot’s Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver (1854), edited by Brantz Mayer. Born in Tuscany, Italy, in 1804, Theophilus Conneau shipped aboard his first slaver from Havana in his early twenties, eventually emerging as a well-known slave trader on the Upper Guinea under the name Theodor Canot.122 During the 1840s, Canot came under increasing pressure to transition to legal commerce. U.S. courts eventually condemned and destroyed his slaving vessels.123 By 1853, Maryland colonizationist leader Robert Hall introduced Canot to writer Brantz Mayer, and the two men began their literary collaboration.124 Mayer, whose expansionist views had been shaped by diplomatic service during the U.S.–Mexico War, saw Canot’s story as a golden opportunity to explore the question of Liberian colonization.125 The edited version of Canot’s memoir appeared in 1854 to laudable reviews and frequent excerpting by literary, religious, and political periodicals.126
Considered together, both naval and slaver texts illustrated the twisting racial logic by which encampments of slave trade refugees could be represented as venues of white imperial benevolence and ethnological exhibit. Both made use of literary conventions of sentience and suffering developed in the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement. Olaudah Equiano, for example, exemplified this strategic appeal to empathy when he wrote in 1789, “Such a tendency has the slave-trade to debauch men’s minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity!”127 Foote’s and Canot’s publications clearly draw upon the conventions of middle passage horrors. Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, these phrases threatened to become stock tropes, liable to manipulation. Enlightenment treatments of the “noble savage” shifted to the “savage savage,” and gothic elements began to appear alongside appeals to sentiment in slave trade literature.128 Thus both Foote and Canot, while using the respectable discourse of ethnographic inquiry, indulged in exotic tales of human sacrifice and barbarous violence.
FIGURE 1.1 Egyptian iconography, palm trees, and tropical animals on the title page of Captain Canot portrayed this slave-trading memoir as an exotic African adventure. Brantz Mayer, Captain Canot or Twenty Years of an African Slaver (New York: Appleton, 1854). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
In Africa and the American Flag, Foote gave lengthy descriptions of the suffering of African children, women, and men whose illegal trafficking the USS Perry aimed to suppress. During Foote’s assignment, however, the Africa Squadron failed to seize even a single slaver loaded with captives. Nevertheless, Foote and his publisher understood that the narrative would lack emotional impact without descriptions of the slave trade’s human victims. Africa and the American Flag found its abject images in the heartrending story of the failed British interception of the Veloz in the 1830s and in naval accounts of the Pons capture in 1845. Both excerpts focused particularly on the suffering of children increasingly trafficked in the nineteenth century. Borrowing from British reports, for example, Foote excerpted Robert Walsh’s account of hundreds of “poor suffering creatures” packed so tightly below the Veloz’s deck that they could not even move. “There were found some children next to the sides of the ship, in the places most remote from air and light,” recounted a witness. “The little creatures seemed indifferent as to life or death; and when they were carried on deck, many of them could not stand.”129 Similar descriptions on the Pons from Captain Charles Bell warned readers that “none but an eye witness can form a conception of the horrors these poor creatures must endure in their transit across the ocean.” The pathos of the Pons recaptives appeared most starkly in Foote’s account, excerpted from a Liberian newspaper, of a dying young boy being tended by two brothers “of the same tribe.”130
Perhaps more surprising was how the slaver Canot also invoked the horrors engineered by his own trade. Contracted to manage a voyage between the Rio Pongo and Havana, Canot described loading the small slaver Areostatico with 108 boys and girls fifteen years or younger. As he stowed his captives aboard, Canot wrote, “I confess I could not imagine how this little army was to be packed or draw breath in a hold but twenty-two inches high!” Eventually, as Canot related, young people were forced to spoon into each other, “like sardines in a can” throughout the weeks-long passage to Cuba.131 Canot flipped the tropes of middle passage horror, however, by charging abolition, not illegal traffickers, with responsibility. Whenever possible, he claimed, he employed “systematic order, purity, and neatness” to “preserve the cargo.”132 Nonetheless, Canot insisted that the criminalization of the trade added to the suffering of its captives by encouraging haste, secrecy, and crowding. Moreover, Canot used his purported ethnographic expertise to assert that the chaining of African captives to the rough slave deck represented only a “slight inconvenience” to people used to lying on hard mats and dirt floors.133 Other published slaver narratives indulged the gothic body horror of the middle passage to a greater degree than Canot, but they, too, held legal abolition of the trade responsible for increasing human suffering of African captives.134
Canot placed the heaviest responsibility for the slave trade, however, on what he perceived to be an inherent racial trait of African depravity. For example, Canot explained his African business partners’ resistance to “legitimate” trade as an inability to suppress slaving as a “natural appetite or function.”135 Further illustrating this “appetite” (while overlooking his role in stimulating it), Canot recounted an upriver slaving voyage in which the mere glimpse of European trading goods incited local inhabitants to sell kin and neighbors. “Every man cudgelled his brain,” exclaimed Canot, “for an excuse to kidnap his neighbor, so as to share my commerce.”136 Although Canot conceded that contemporary slavery in Africa had been heavily shaped by white “avarice and temptation,” he nevertheless portrayed slavery as an African “national institution” that reflected “indigenous barbarity.”137 The claims of slavery as Africa’s original creation were hardly new, but in the context of the mid-nineteenth century they now served to justify both colonization through slave trade suppression and reopening the transatlantic trade.138 In a passage often quoted by slave trade revivalists, Canot asserted, “Africans have been bondsmen every where: and the oldest monuments bear their images linked with menial toils and absolute servitude.” Cementing his argument that slavery was a natural condition of African life, he claimed that “five-sixths of the population is in chains.”139 The North American Review confirmed American mainstream receptivity to this idea when a reviewer of Captain Canot remarked, “We might as soon expect the leopard to change his skin, as the Ethiopian to wipe out the foul spot of servitude.”140
Notably, the naval memoir Africa and the American Flag ascribed a similar set of uncivil attributes uniquely marking Africa as “the great slave-land of the world.”141 Like many Western writers, Foote viewed African systems of slavery as manifestations of ancient cruelty and perceived
civilization deficit, rather than as institutions with their own history and politics.142 Drawing an implicit line between his civilized readers and his literary “natives,” Foote professed his inability to understand “the eagerness to share in cruelty which glows in a negro’s bosom.”143 In a blanket summary of this widespread assumption, Foote declared, “Africa is guilty of the slavery under which she suffered; for her people made it, as well as suffered it.”144 Foote’s generalizations about African slave-making as an ethnographic fact revealed the shifting terrain of antislavery rhetoric in the era of the illegal transatlantic slave trade. In the eighteenth century, abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano could invert racial hierarchies to condemn the atrocities of the savage slaveholder.145 By the 1850s, with the transatlantic slave trade technically outlawed in Europe and the Americas, the antislavery naval officer seemed to be returning responsibility to the African continent.
Foote’s ruminations on African civic incapacity reflected a sentiment commonly expressed by Africa Squadron personnel, which had serious implications for how slave trade recaptives would be viewed and treated. For example, after a tour of Monrovia, Liberia, in 1858, ordinary seaman Henry Eason, serving on the USS Marion, confided in his journal that “free negroes” would be much better off remaining as American slaves “then to live as they do here, continually fighting & quarrelling among themselves.”146 Thomas Aloysius Dornin, commander of the USS San Jacinto and USS Constellation, echoed sailor Eason’s sentiments when Dornin’s ship picked up a pair of African canoe men stranded without paddles at sea. The seamen feared for their safety on unfamiliar shores and so urged Dornin to land them near their home coast. Dornin commented on their request in his journal, “Such is the happy accord existing among this Free & Happy Race out here in their own country.”147 Typical for their linkage of blackness and continental Africa with social disorder, both Eason’s and Dornin’s remarks reveal racial assumptions shared among white naval personnel holding otherwise differing views on U.S. slavery.
Together, naval and slaver accounts of the 1850s formed a body of slave trade ethnography that argued the need for global white rescue. As we have seen, both Foote and Canot wrote accounts that contrasted the horrors of the middle passage against the horrors of the mythic Dark Continent. A Boston Post reviewer described the moral confusion induced by reading Captain Canot when he exclaimed that the volume’s “descriptions of negro manners, religion and social life, are absolutely horrible.” Weighing perceived African customs against the travesty of the slave trade, the Boston reviewer admitted, “At one moment he [the reader] would be thankful to see all Africa packed off in slave ships—yea, anything to terminate the dreadful abominations of its people.”148 Only the trope of white rescue could resolve such painful tensions. Both naval and slaver narratives engaged in fantasies of gallant intervention—not just through naval interception of slave ships but also by redeeming human sacrifice victims or, in Canot’s case, cleverly rescuing an enslaved Fullah “princess.”149 Slave trade ethnography as a genre suggested the need for rescue that extended beyond the seizure of enslaved captives from illegal slavers to the cultural and moral redemption of Africans perceived as naturally inferior.
Within both slaver and naval narratives, themes of white rescue and African depravity overshadowed the historical facts of the nineteenth-century slave trade, chief among them the predominance of children. As future chapters discuss in depth, most recaptives taken into U.S. custody came from regions where young males under the age of fifteen comprised up to half the captives sold to foreign traders. Yet, the presence of children in slaver and naval narratives remained elusive, flitting in and out of view. When Canot or Foote drew upon abolitionist middle passage discourses, as in the examples above of the Areostatico or the Veloz, the suffering of boys and girls vividly underscored the brutal packing of illegal slavers. When it came to the portions of their narratives that emphasized Africa as the original “slave-land,” however, those same children were harder to find. Rather, the narrative of racialized civic incapacity and dependence on white colonial oversight overshadowed considerations of youth and vulnerability based on age.150 Because both Foote and Canot were advertised and reviewed most notably for the novelty of their African ethnographic description, the overriding impression imparted by the narratives was one of all Africans as figuratively childlike in their dependence.151 As cultural resources that shaped American views of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade, both slaver and naval narratives therefore diminished the significance of actual children among the recaptives who entered U.S. ports.
Reviews and other contemporary references suggest that American readers drew two different versions of rescue from Foote and Canot, which recirculated in solutions offered for African recaptives detained in the United States. On one hand, Africa and the American Flag used the claim about Africa’s original sin of slavery to argue for the urgent regeneration of “the African” specifically through the colonizationist experiment of Liberian self-governance.152 Foote gave measured support to Liberia’s historical mission “to vivify [Africa] with liberty and self-government.”153 Like many supporters of Liberia, he believed stronger slave trade suppression would usher in a new age of African commerce and civilization. Yet Foote took the long view on black self-determination. He argued, for instance, that “much kind watchfulness” would be required to prevent independent Liberian citizens from “sinking back to become mere Africans.”154 In this way, Foote’s narrative situated slave trade recaptives within an antislavery history of African uplift that nevertheless maintained powerful racialized constraints.
From Foote’s nationalist perspective, the mission of slave trade suppression proved entirely consistent with—and, indeed, necessary for—American commercial ambition. “The reduction, or annihilation of the slave-trade, is opening the whole of these vast regions to science and legal commerce,” Africa and the American Flag pronounced. “Let America take her right share in them.”155 Foote’s promise of expanding markets resonated with his readers. A Philadelphia reviewer, for example, praised the admiral’s memoir for its enlightening discussion of the “fruitful field of commerce” opening in Africa in which “first comers will be first served.”156 The ACS similarly attached the promise of profits to its civilization mission. “Africa has great commercial resources,” argued the African Repository, further adding, “The teachers of her civilization will be richly rewarded.”157 Foote’s volume thus clearly anticipated the aspects of “the colonizing structure” summarized by scholar V. Y. Mudimbe: “the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective.”158 Recaptives, upon arrival in Liberia, would be placed precisely within this colonizing structure.
In contrast to the colonizationist agenda, advocates of proslavery empire argued for the reopening of the transatlantic slave trade itself as a mode of rescue. Deep South commercial conventions debated and publicized the issue, while lawmakers in Mississippi and Louisiana debated plans to import African laborers thinly disguised as “apprentices.”159 Fueled by “the global reach of the cotton economy,” as Walter Johnson argues, proslavery imperialists defended a theory of expanding slaveocracy that challenged the idea of emancipation as a sign of human progress.160 As one might expect, slave trade revivalists derided both Liberian colonization and the slave trade laws as exercises in “false philanthropy” and abuses of U.S. federal power.161 Frequently invoking the leopard and its proverbial spots, proslavery advocates adamantly opposed the transport of slave trade refugees to Liberia and sought to reclaim recaptives from federal power. Virginian Edmund Ruffin, for example, used Foote’s discussion of the Pons recaptives in Liberia to argue that apprenticeship to black emigrants constituted the worst form of bondage, that is, the “‘apprenticeship’ of savage negroes” to a “negro master.”162 Revivalists in southern hot spots like Charleston targeted recaptives as useful pawns in the political battle against fed
eral intervention in both the slave trade and domestic slavery.
Analyzed together, slaver narratives and naval memoirs shed light on how the cultural manifestations of the illegal slave trade shaped U.S. antebellum debates on race and slavery in the Atlantic World.163 In truth, slave trade literature had little immediate relevance for recaptive youth and adults as they struggled to survive the aftermath of the middle passage. Yet the works of slave trade ethnography produced by slaver and naval authors alike mattered because they painted a portrait for American readers about who slave ship recaptives were and where they belonged within a global racial hierarchy. With the arrival of actual recaptives on the slavers Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota, newspapers across the country posed the presence of slave trade survivors as a problem for the white nation to solve. The varying answers to that question offered an Atlantic World antecedent to Frederick Douglass’s 1863 warning that emancipation by “law and the sword” could only go so far against “pride of race” and “prejudice of color.”164
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