As implemented in the years between 1807 and 1861, U.S. policies toward African recaptives demonstrated the political tensions inherent in an expanding slaveholding republic’s campaign of transatlantic slave trade suppression. The place of the United States in the global second slavery economy depended on a domestic system of enslaved labor and an interstate trade in human property. Outlawing the transatlantic slave trade, as the United States did at the national level in 1807, was not necessarily a blow to those domestic institutions of servitude. In fact, during the years after the Anglo-American transatlantic slave trade abolition laws, both slavery and the U.S. internal slave trade expanded.165 Yet actively suppressing the slave trade and especially “liberating” the captives of illegal slavers proved to be inherently controversial in the United States because these policies exacerbated sectional tensions and interfered with the free flow of capital through legal and illegal commerce. Moreover, the resulting trials of seized ships produced opportunities, such as the Antelope Supreme Court cases, for asserting the slave trade’s fundamental immorality. As Georgia senator John Macpherson Berrien argued in 1825, the Constitution had for twenty years endorsed the slave trade and “its fruits yet lie at the foundation of that compact.”166 Antislavery arguments against the transatlantic trade, Berrien warned the justices, therefore cut at the very origins of the U.S. republic. With the rising campaign to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, issues surrounding slave trade suppression become even more contentious.
Overall, only a few hundred African recaptives of the illegal trade came under federal custody in the 1820s and ‘30s. In the early cases, such as the Antelope, Fenix, and General Páez, the courts did not even agree that the 1819 law applied. Yet the eventual transportation of recaptives from these vessels to Liberia set precedents for later implementation of the removal policy. Though placed by law beyond the reach of the U.S. slave market after 1819, recaptive African children, women, and men found themselves leased and hired to southern planters and detained in southern jails and workhouses. The mark of their long sojourn through the United States could be seen in the elite American surnames by which they were known in Liberian records. None of these early slave trade refugees gave formal testimony in a courtroom, and only the shipmates of the General Páez had even a limited say in their future destination. Although some officials, such as Richard Habersham, dedicated themselves to implementing the removal policy, the experience for African captives was largely one of detention and forced migration, albeit in some rare cases accompanied by hope of eventual repatriation.
Increasingly, as the United States entered the 1850s, the ethnographic framing of Africa and Africans in Anglo-American print culture threatened to blind observers (as well as the extant archive) to recaptive struggles with loss of kin, psychic trauma, and vast dislocation. This oversight resulted not from a silence on the illegal slave trade but from its sensational treatment in the popular press. Indeed, the cultural impact of the illegal slave trade has not yet been sufficiently recognized in present historiography on the antebellum U.S. politics of race and slavery. During the 1850s, popular demand for maritime and travel narratives resulted in both widespread newspaper coverage of illegal slaving and published slaver and navy accounts focusing on African adventures. Slave trade ethnography, constructed out of dual images of the suffering recaptive and the inherently (possibly unredeemable) savage African, made the slave trade into a spectacle and slave trade refugees into objects of exoticism. Thus, when naval escorts directed the Echo into Charleston harbor carrying 306 West Central African recaptives, many white Americans viewed the ship’s arrival with more curiosity and opportunism than compassion. Strands of racial science, proslavery politics, and nineteenth-century popular amusements merged to create a distinctive slave trade spectatorship that generated new forms of commodification from the presence of slave ship recaptives.
2: Proslavery Waters
What I mean is that I lost my family, and I don’t seem to have life, so can I say that I survived? It is by the grace of God that I’m still breathing, how can I say that I survived? I would have survived if one of my children survived, but all of them were killed. I would say I survived if I had something to sustain me.
∼Karoli, Voices of Rwanda Archive, Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, 2014
But the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song.
∼Melodians, “Rivers of Babylon,” 1970
The gulf between slave trade survival and slave trade ethnology became evident soon after Echo shipmates arrived at Fort Sumter at the port of Charleston, South Carolina. For eight weeks, hundreds of West Central African captives had been packed in a low-ceilinged slave deck, on a treacherous passage that killed almost a third of their number. Disembarking from the Echo in a much-weakened state, recaptives came face to face with a delegation of Lowcountry slaveholding elite. The group of planters, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, according to the Charleston Mercury, “were much gratified at the spectacle represented by these savages, who appeared in fine spirits, and entertained their visitors with a display of their abilities in dancing and singing.”1 No one on that morning of 31 August 1858 recorded what the dancers thought about the party of white onlookers. It is a silence that further deepens the significance of South Carolina slaveholders’ assumption that the ragged group of slave ship survivors performed for them alone. The encounter and its subsequent depiction in Charleston’s proslavery newspaper reveal the power of the ethnographic gaze to transform a social crisis into an exotic spectacle.
The Mercury’s account of this event, however one-sided, calls attention to a critical question raised by historians of transatlantic slaving, namely, how did enslaved Africans make meaning of the crisis in which they found themselves?2 The first section of this chapter contributes to the larger historical question of Atlantic enslaved perspectives by treating the experience of recaptivity as an extension of saltwater enslavement. Despite barriers of language, physical depletion, and fear, Echo shipmates, like other recaptives around the Atlantic Basin, sought to understand what the interruption of the slaving voyage meant for their collective survival and possible future. By listening to recaptive testimony from elsewhere in Atlantic slave trade suppression and reading the Echo evidence against its grain, it is possible to ask what the three-week detention of slave ship survivors at Fort Sumter meant within a longer experience of terrifying and unpredictable dislocation. Such a vantage point broadens the history of U.S. slave trade suppression from one primarily concerned with naval maneuvers, legal decisions, and political conflict to a social history that illuminates African shipmates’ forced migrations in the era of second slavery.3
At the same time, white Charlestonians’ racialized expectations of black civil incapacity and permanent dependence sharply curtailed the ability of recaptives to order their fractured worlds.4 The second half of this chapter examines how proslavery ethnography created a “potential imaginary museum” of recaptive representations in two overlapping arenas.5 First, Charleston’s place in the South as a seat of scientific and medical inquiry encouraged the application of ethnology and polygenesis as frames of proslavery knowledge that cemented the racialization of Echo shipmates. The Echo case illustrates how advocates of transatlantic slave trade revival utilized pre-Darwinian racial taxonomy to portray slave ship refugees as a permanently subordinated group. Second, as the political controversy over the Echo crew and African recaptives grew, proslavery propaganda spilled into public exhibition of the Echo shipmates. Steamboat operators capitalized on the presence of recaptive Africans at Fort Sumter by advertising novel opportunities for white entertainment and racial voyeurism. Both elite politics and popular spectatorship limited the chances of Echo shipmates for surviving their ordeal. Their use as pawns in a political battle waged by proslavery imperialists against federal authorities ultimately heightened the difficulty of their struggle by intensifying their isolation in the fort
and hurrying their removal to Liberia in a weakened state.
Recaptivity as Social Crisis
On the morning of 21 August 1858, just hours from being smuggled into Cuba’s thriving plantation economy, the enslaved captives of the Echo suddenly became “recaptured Africans” by the authority of the U.S. government. In doing so, they passed from the hands of an international ring of human traffickers into the custody of a slaveholding republic. After Brazil’s illegal traffic finally ended, a network of illegal slavers forcibly shipped almost 200,000 more African captives to Cuba before the arrival of the last documented voyage in 1866.6 The Echo’s slaving voyage had begun in March 1858, when New Orleans customs officials cleared the ship under Rhode Island sea captain Edward Townsend, ostensibly bound for the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. Equipment such as wood decking and large cookers hidden in the brig’s hold revealed the voyage’s true purpose. Even the name of the ship was a ruse, for Townsend had painted over the ship’s true name of Putnam and rechristened the slaver as the Echo. Built in Baltimore and collectively financed by U.S., Spanish, and Portuguese businessmen in New York, New Orleans, and Havana, the vessel symbolized the wider criminal conspiracy that abducted thousands of young African captives across the Atlantic.7 Had the Echo slavers been successful, their human cargo would have joined nearly 15,400 other predominantly young enslaved Africans smuggled into Cuba in 1858 alone.8
Placing shipmates of the Echo within these 1850s routes of transatlantic enslavement illuminates the social crisis of recaptivity as part of a more extended experience of global dislocation.9 The crisis of Echo recaptives in U.S. custody began months and even years before their forced passage to the Americas, as slavers tore young people from familiar institutions of collective identity, lineage, and kinship.10 For example, Kongo children grew up within densely intersecting social networks of clans, houses, and lineages, where nkazi, or the descent group heads, spoke for those under their authority.11 Enslavement ruptured these connections and imposed a terrible condition of kinlessness. Therefore, as historian Joseph Miller argues, survival beyond the barest existence “meant constant rebuilding of new connections out of the succession of transitory circumstances through which most found themselves propelled, a recurrently thwarted effort to find places of their own, to belong, somehow, somewhere.”12 If we are to truly understand the social experience of recaptivity, the moment of slave ship “rescue” must be considered as inaugurating yet another period in which captive men, women, and children sought to gain a foothold in their shattered world through reestablishing social connections. Yet, circumstances of physical debility, spiritual and social alienation, and forced mobility shadowed recaptives long after disembarking a slave ship. Echo shipmates at Fort Sumter entered this new social crisis with bodies depleted by slave ship confinement in a hostile proslavery environment, surrounded by white authorities who proved unable to conceptualize either the past losses or the current struggles of the recaptives.
From the perspective of enslaved captives, the seizure of the Echo marked another phase in a series of forced transitions that had wrenched recaptives from their place within extended kinship affiliations in West Central African societies. Thomas Rainey, the Portuguese-speaking U.S. agent who accompanied Echo recaptives to Liberia, reported among the surviving shipmates a majority of “Congos, some Kabendas, some Miquombas, many from the interior tribes of the provinces of Loanda and Loango.”13 These generalized ethnonyms and the recaptives’ embarkation point near the Congo River pointed to a common region of origin for many young captives sold to Cuba in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, 60.6 percent of all enslaved captives arriving in Cuba between 1841 and 1865 embarked from the coastal region of West Central Africa.14 More specifically, slave traders as well as agents for so-called African apprentices gravitated northward to the unregulated regions of Cabinda and the Congo River estuary, in response to intensified British patrols near the Portuguese colonial ports of Luanda and Benguela.15 Seaman Henry Eason, assigned to the U.S. Africa Squadron in 1858, observed one such barracoon at Loango, where for $40 per head a French trader kept “600 young negroes, of both sexes, who were to be sold for slaves, to any vessel who chose to come for them.”16 Echo slavers used the terms “Congo” and “Miquombas” to designate people of the Lower Congo region and “Kabendas” for captives drawn from the coastal region surrounding Cabinda Bay.17 Rainey’s report thus identifies many of the Echo shipmates as Kikongo (or related dialect) speakers from societies along the banks of the lower Congo River, from northern Angolan regions, or from the Loango province surrounding Cabinda. Many of these captives would have been conveyed to the coast through networks of traders who acted as middlemen supplying foreign traders at the coast.18
Each man, woman, and child loaded onto the Echo had become enslaved through various mechanisms of pawnship, debt, judicial sentence, or abduction that ensnared their societies’ most vulnerable members. Increasingly after 1830, the massive extension of European commerce and credit into the Central African interior increased debt and put pressure on older political traditions.19 Within societies where individual identity derived primarily from descent groups, the “doctrine of collective responsibility” meant that less powerful dependents of a family lineage sometimes paid the price when an elder was sentenced or fined.20 Dependents in large corporate lineages, pawned as collateral for an elder’s debt or in substitution for a legal penalty, sometimes experienced sale to coastal slave traders before their relatives could redeem them.21 For example, Nanga, a young Angolan recaptive interviewed in Sierra Leone, recalled how his family pawned him to recover his maternal uncle who had received a sentence of enslavement as punishment for adultery. Before his mother could redeem him as she intended, he was sold to Portuguese slave traders in Luanda.22 Still other young people arrived at the Cabinda barracoons with recent memories of sudden abduction, raids, and the deaths of other family members.23 Sale to foreign slavers tore young people from networks of kinship and dependence that structured their place in society and cast them into a disorienting and isolated journey. In other words, slave trade commodification generated an existential crisis that could not easily be healed.
Many of the Echo’s captives had not been drawn from deep in the “interior,” as some American newspapers speculated, but from port towns and coastal regions where residents became increasingly vulnerable to transatlantic enslavement in the nineteenth century.24 Even when legally protected from enslavement by the colonial law of “original freedom,” as historian Mariana Candido has shown, Angolan subjects of local rulers could be seized, branded, and swiftly loaded onto a slaver’s vessel.25 Although Cabinda Bay lay north of Portuguese territory, coastal people there proved similarly susceptible to enslavement. Three men among the Echo recaptives had worked for local slavers before being caught up along with the captives they tended in the barracoons.26 These men most likely numbered among the Echo’s “Kabendas,” since Cabinda maritime and shore workers did much of the labor that kept human captives and legal trade flowing through that port at midcentury.27 Although individuals enslaved from the coast may not have had to endure the grueling overland travel experienced by captives from the interior, they were nevertheless suddenly severed from their familial, social, and political identities.
Crammed into waiting pens known as barracoons near Cabinda, men, women, and children turned to their fellow captives, even those who were strangers to them, in a desperate bid for information.28 Recent studies of western Africa’s integration into the Atlantic economy make clear that new social affiliations emerged among diverse groups of captives brought together through the paths of enslavement in African coastal regions.29 Especially in the lower Congo River region, the similarity of related “Bantu” languages (a term coined by Europeans in the same period as the Echo’s embarkation) and a shared cosmology facilitated rapport among captives of different regions.30 Here in the midst of social isolation, despair, and uncertainty, enslaved captives began to b
uild the communal networks through which they might comprehend their ordeal. Death and departure, however, constantly undercut the fragile connections established in the coastal barracoons.
Furthermore, the prevalence of children and youth among captives forced onto slave ships along the West Central African coast critically shaped shipmates’ social relations and resources for survival. The Echo was no exception, for once the shipmates surfaced in the U.S. historical record as recaptives, observers described them as “all young,” “majority boys,” and comprised mostly of male youth “apparently from eight to sixteen years of age.”31 An increasingly sophisticated accounting of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade clearly indicates a “child-dominated” traffic from West Central Africa primarily to Cuba in the years of the Echo’s capture. Even when allowing for historical differences in how a child was defined, it is clear that the proportion of captive youth in the transatlantic slave trade climbed upward during the nineteenth century.32 West Central African ports embarked an estimated 53 percent of captives under age fifteen, with male youth predominating.33 Why this was so has yet to be fully understood. Historians generally agree that the retention of enslaved females for agricultural production and to expand the wealth and lineages of powerful men within Africa contributed to gender ratios skewed toward males in the transatlantic trade.34 Yet the rising proportion of children in the late transatlantic slave trade poses many still-unanswered questions. This increasing percentage of enslaved children occurred during a transitional period in West Central African history that enlarged the wealth of European merchants as well as certain elite African elders at the expense of vulnerable dependents, primarily boys and young men, but also young women as well. Scholars point to both international slaver demand and internal African influences on the age and gender of captives sold into the transatlantic trade. Arguments include the demands of international slavers for “malleable” young captives with a maximum “workable life span,” the depletion of adult males from African regions heavily impacted by slaving, pricing incentives in both American and Africans markets, the reliance of African systems of slavery on women’s productive and reproductive labor, and competition for adult men from internal African slave markets.35
Recaptured Africans Page 7
