Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  By lifting their voices and moving their bodies together, former captives of the Echo reconfigured their space of confinement at Fort Sumter, even in the shadow of death and the middle passage. Becoming “united” in song would not have been an easy process, however, for the same adult leaders organizing the rhythms of recaptive life at the fort existed in the memories of most Echo shipmates as workers in the Cabinda barracoons. They had cooked for and fed the captives at Cabinda, but they may also have guarded, branded, and beat them. Thus, the recaptive shipmates’ community encompassed conflict and cooperation, animosity and trust. Alongside these complicated human dynamics, however, new possibilities for social identity emerged. No longer segregated by age or gender at Fort Sumter and with more room to move than in the cramped slave deck, “Congos,” “Kabendas,” and “Miquombas” congregated in smaller groups comprised of those with whom they could best communicate. In the basic element of song and dance, however, they also began to cement the larger collective identity of recaptive shipmates that they would take with them back across the Atlantic to Liberia.

  From Cabinda to Charleston, the bare materials that youth and adults would use to reclaim social identity were their own bodies in combination with memories of past experience. African bodies, however, also became the object of public attention as news of the arrival of “wild Africans” spread. The Mercury observed that, in addition to stirring up intense “speculation” on the repercussions of the Echo’s capture for states’ rights politics, “much curiosity is also excited, and many are anxious for an opportunity to observe the African in his native state.”86 As recaptives struggled daily to assert legible meaning over their alienating journey, their bodies were subjected to ethnographic scrutiny by white slaveholders who sought to claim them as both savages and slaves.

  Slave Trade Recaptives as Ethnographic Subjects

  In ordering his prize crew to Charleston harbor, Lieutenant John Maffitt virtually ensured that both the Echo and its recaptives would ignite public controversy.87 While only a vocal minority of white Charlestonians urged the reopening of the transatlantic slave trade, a much larger contingent embraced strong states’ rights opposition to any federal intervention in slaveholder property rights. The prospect of a slaving crew prosecuted by U.S. district attorney James Conner and of Echo shipmates held in custody of a U.S. marshal at a federal fort ignited strong states’ rights protest in the city’s newspapers and courts. Furthermore, with the spike in cotton and slave prices and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the slave trade revival movement had gathered steam.88 In 1856, South Carolina governor James H. Adams supported the revivalist position in a speech to the state legislature, prompting the establishment of house and senate committees to study the question.89 In the year before the Echo’s seizure, both committee reports (including a positive house report) were published, and the issue energized the 1858 state elections.90 Almost as if the heated debate had conjured up both a slave ship and 300 recaptives for their own benefit, slave trade revivalists greeted the arrival of the Echo shipmates as an opportunity to confront “Federal usurpation.”91

  Historian Manisha Sinha has skillfully charted the significance of the trial of the Echo’s crew for South Carolina’s counterrevolutionary proslavery movement. The successful defense of Echo crewmembers gave slave trade revivalists—led by newspaper editor Leonidas Spratt—a public platform for repudiating the constitutionality of the 1820 piracy law. Furthermore, the eventual acquittal of the Echo crew paved the way for U.S. district judge Andrew Magrath to nullify the 1820 piracy law one year later in the case of the Wanderer captain William Corrie.92 Echoing some of Spratt’s arguments in the Echo trial, Magrath depicted the transatlantic trade as a regulated “business” rather than as a theft of African captives’ liberty.93 As Sinha argues, Magrath’s judicial decision boldly extended slaveowners’ extraterritorial rights in human property beyond national boundaries “to span the high seas and even the continent of Africa.”94 Leading slave trade advocates attempted to apply this logic to the case of the Echo not only by setting slavers free from federal law but by rejecting federal custody of the Echo’s African survivors.

  Initial efforts to gain legal possession of the Echo recaptives soon faltered. Days after the slave ship’s appearance, slave trade advocates unsuccessfully sought to gain custody of Echo recaptives under the terms of South Carolina’s Negro Seamen’s Act.95 Next, Spratt and fellow attorney F. D. Richardson attempted, on the pretense of seeking to serve as the recaptives’ counsel, to use a writ of habeas corpus to “liberate” Echo shipmates from federal control.96 District Attorney Conner rejected both of these legal maneuvers, but southern citizens continued to seek a slaveholders’ alternative to Liberian removal. The Courier republished the arguments of the Richmond Whig, regretting that recaptives “are to be sent back into their native barbarism” and recommending they be allowed to stay in Charleston, where they “would have good masters, and plenty of good food and clothing; and would be made useful to themselves and to the world.”97 From St. Bartholomew’s Parish, planter J. Fraser Mathewes voiced his willingness “to take under my charge as apprentices fifty of the cargo,” removing them from their “disagreeable” circumstances to “enjoy all the comforts of a plantation life.”98 Despite rumors and threats, however, no one proved ready to force the issue, and Echo recaptives remained at Fort Sumter, beyond the reach of state laws and white planters.99

  Even so, federal authority could not prevent another sort of “recapture,” that of Echo shipmates within a popularized discourse of proslavery ethnology. Noting the distances that usually prevented white Americans from “seeing the native African in his native condition,” the Courier urged Charlestonians to make use of the “opportunity to extend and apply our ethnological information.” With a sideways dig at the federal custodial role, the editorial called for a “committee of savans sufficiently versed in the ethnology and ethnography of Africa and the African tribes, to give us a report on the varieties now confined in the U.S. hotel.”100 Such attempts at the ethnological interrogation of recaptives occurred outside the realms of law and formal politics, yet they nevertheless reveal how popular discourses of race shaped the political culture of slave trade suppression. Historians’ primary focus on the Echo trials and state nullification of the federal piracy statute, while valuable in its own right, has overshadowed the significance of the illegal slave trade’s broader cultural impact.101 The Courier’s call for “ethnological information” deeply implicated the science of race in debates over the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade. Slave trade suppression thus became one of the many sites for “making race” in 1850s America, one that situated the meaning of race not in a national framework but in terms of U.S. international relations to the Atlantic World and particularly to Africa.102 As the Courier suggests, white Charlestonians sought direct access to recaptives in a manner scripted by contemporary missionary and African exploration accounts. In short, Charleston’s short-lived obsession with Echo shipmates as ethnological evidence demonstrates how proslavery imperialism advanced its claims not only with constitutional and economic arguments but also by exhibiting the very bodies of African recaptives whom revivalists sought to possess.

  Of course, these shipmates were not the first to be put on display. Marcus Rediker has clearly demonstrated that Amistad shipmates, on trial for their freedom after a slave ship revolt in 1839, also experienced display for political and entertainment purposes. In jail, they were subjected to phrenological readings, caricatured in engravings, sketched, and painted.103 Once the shipmates were freed by the courts, their 1841 fundraising tour of northeastern venues prompted one self-styled “Native African” editorialist to disparage the exhibitions of Bible-reading “Mendi” as demeaning “puppet shows.” Speaking on behalf of the Amistad Africans, the anonymous critic held that Amistad shipmates recoiled from being displayed to curious onlookers like “a giraffe of their native plains.”104 Even so, the northeastern reformers
’ presumption that Africans were even capable of acquiring and performing Christian “civilization” sharply distinguished the Amistad case from the proslavery and polygenist assumptions made about recaptives almost two decades later.105

  By the 1850s, the popularization of ethnology in the late antebellum United States offered slave trade revivalists additional scientific justifications for racial inequality. Formally articulated as a field of research by the Philadelphia physician and naturalist Samuel George Morton, American ethnology was neither southern nor necessarily proslavery in its inception. Instead, Morton built on the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and other eighteenth-century naturalists to develop measurements of physical difference (cranial measurements, for example) that could be used to create hierarchies of civilization and scientific classification.106 Morton’s 1839 Crania Americana quite typically placed white or “Caucasian” men at the top of the ladder of humanity, with the “highest intellectual endowments,” and “Ethiopians” (sub-Saharan Africans) at the bottom.107 American ethnologists used these observations to develop the theory of polygenesis, an idea already present in European scientific thought, which attributed differences of morality, intelligence, and physiology to multiple human origins. Predictably, polygeny’s challenge to the biblical narrative of unitary human creation provoked ongoing opposition by the nation’s clergy.108 However, as the contemporary writer Louisa McCord phrased it, ethnological researchers increasingly rejected the “literal and cramped interpretation of Genesis.”109 For example, the Mobile physician Josiah C. Nott collaborated in 1854 with Egyptologist George Gliddon to publish Types of Mankind, which argued for the “multiplicity of species in the human genus.”110 Not only did the volume sell widely, but Nott’s authorship also signaled the important role of southern physicians in popularizing ethnological arguments for proslavery purposes.111

  As illegal slavers flocked to Cabinda barracoons in the 1850s, Charleston’s learned men expanded their interest in racial science. The Lowcountry region with a historical black majority produced a preeminent circle of naturalists deeply involved in ethnological debates.112 Charleston also featured the South’s leading natural history museum, the College of Charleston, and the Medical College of Charleston. In 1850, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recognized Charleston’s scientific reputation by holding its annual meeting in the city. Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, in attendance at the 1850 AAAS meeting, took the opportunity to travel to Robert W. Gibbes’s plantations near Columbia, South Carolina, for a closer view of Gibbes’s enslaved laborers. More specifically, Gibbes had promised Agassiz access to the bodies of African-born individuals and their children. “The writer,” Agassiz later wrote in a scientific article on plural origins, “has examined closely many native Africans belonging to different tribes, and has learned readily to distinguish their nations.”113 Following his upcountry visit, Agassiz commissioned a now infamous set of daguerreotypes with intentions of documenting perceived African racial typologies, including “Guinea,” “Mandingo,” and “Congo.”114 Seven enslaved men and women stripped naked in a Columbia daguerreotypist’s studio foreshadowed the future ethnological interest of South Carolinians in West Central African slave ship refugees.

  In practical terms, however, Charleston’s proslavery apologists showed most interest in using ethnology to refute the colonizationist vision of African “civilization, commerce, and Christianity.” For example, the Courier suggested that local gentlemen could examine Echo recaptives in order “to test the Arcadian reports of Livingstone, and Bowen, and Wilson.” In doing so, the editors issued a specific challenge to prominent missionary-explorers who employed ethnographic discourse to argue that certain “types” of Africans were constitutionally more amenable to the Western civilizing mission than others. At the forefront of these, Southern Baptist missionary Thomas Jefferson Bowen published Central Africa: Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa in Charleston just a year before the Echo’s seizure. Bowen had worked and traveled in Yorubaland but fell short of his goal to establish missions in the Sokoto Caliphate (Bowen’s “Central Africa”). Based on his own ethnological distinctions among African groups, Bowen believed that the “interior tribes” were “more civilized, and are superior as to race” in comparison with coastal societies.115 Bowen explicitly refuted slave trade revivalists’ argument that all “negroes” were biologically destined for enslavement. Instead, he passionately asserted an alternative redemption of Africa through Christian conversion and the commercialization of interior groups he deemed “far in advance of the Guinea negroes.”116 Interestingly, Bowen cited David Livingstone’s writings on southern Africa as verifying his case for slave trade suppression and colonization of interior regions of western Africa. In the later years of his life, Bowen actively lobbied for U.S. congressional funding of an American expedition on the Niger River and even worked with free black emigrationists to advance black American colonization near Abeokuta.117 Though firmly invested in a vision of global white dominance, he nevertheless refuted the revivalists’ assertions about slavery as black racial destiny, and he opposed the idea of the slave trade as a mode of rescue from an unredeemable continent. Charleston’s outspoken revivalists took up the gauntlet, seeking to depict Bowen as “a very bad reasoner” whose “optics present Africa to him couleur de rose.”118

  All this cultural freight accompanied the expedition of federal officials and Lowcountry elite to Fort Sumter on 31 August 1858, the day after hundreds of young Echo shipmates had been installed there. Although U.S. marshal Daniel Hamilton had initially chartered the steamer to take much-needed provisions to the fort, the names of other powerful white men, published in the Mercury the next day, suggested a range of expectations and motives. Lutheran minister, naturalist, and AAAS member John Bachman had written extensively on the question of human origins. His 1850 publication, The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race, and his published refutations of Nott, Gliddon, and Agassiz set forth staunchly monogenist, but also proslavery, views.119 Thomas L. Ogier, physician to the Echo recaptives and past president of the Medical Society of South Carolina, also accompanied the party, as did cotton planter J. Fraser Mathewes, who had volunteered to take fifty recaptives as “apprentices.”120 Regardless of the particular questions each had in mind, all had determined to see the Echo shipmates for themselves.

  Elite white sightseers encountering recaptive Africans for the first time especially wanted to see the “Congo tribe.” The general geographic label was realistic, given the Echo’s point of embarkation. Yet, “Congo” as an ethnonym also carried cultural weight as a designation of racial degradation within midcentury U.S. ethnological discourse and popular press. Nott and Gliddon repeatedly referred to the “Congos” in the most derogatory terms as the “purest negro type.”121 Reports of slave trade suppression in American newspapers consistently described recaptives from West Africa to be “much superior to the Congos” in both strength and intellect.122 Beneath these midcentury racial labels lay older ethnic designations that South Carolina planters from earlier centuries had used for large numbers of people forcibly transported from West Central Africa to work the Lowcountry rice plantations of the Carolinas and Georgia. The expectations that “Congos” comprised a docile labor force prevailed in Carolina slave markets in the early eighteenth century, only to be upset by the Stono Rebellion in 1739.123 “Congo” thus resonated with the newer science of human pluralism but also with the older language of the slave market that these Lowcountry elites hoped to revive.

  And so, from the perspective of one unnamed member of the visiting party, we see a group of white men survey the crowd of emaciated recaptives, noting, like Agassiz, what they perceive to be “the difference of tribes.” Of course, visitors to Fort Sumter were not entirely oblivious to the suffering of the Echo’s shipmates. Some noted with pity the signs of emaciation, disease, and impending death. Many whose letters appeared in the Mercury concl
uded that these “horrors” could be amended with a well-regulated and legal slave trade. Yet the white visitors also imagined themselves as figurative explorers of Africa. They gestured with signs to the assembled recaptives and spoke in Portuguese with both the Cabinda “principal negro” and “Frank,” the slave crew translator. “Upon our party asking the sailor to show us the Congo tribe,” wrote the observer, “the negro brought three men, who took their places before us; and I distinctly heard him say ‘Congo.’”124 The moment crystallized the gulf of representation and social experience inherent in the condition of recaptivity. The young men faced their appraisers, having been scrutinized many times in the past by those who had power to shape their futures. The white observers eagerly scanned their bodies, intent upon the arguments they could build from teeth, face, and limbs.

  In naming “Congos” and searching for racial variation, the Charleston observers treated the slave trade as a sort of scientific collection process. Slaving—and by extension the “recapture” of human cargos—drew together “types” of Africans in much closer proximity than could otherwise be found on the African continent. This was exactly the view that German zoologist Hermann Burmeister advanced in his broadly read 1853 publication, The Black Man: The Comparative Anatomy and Psychology of the African Negro, based on the author’s travels in Brazil. As Burmeister argued, Brazil (with its illegal slave trade continuing through 1850) was the best place to study “the African negro” because “the varieties of the African race so mingled together there.”125 The white Charleston visitors engaged in similar acts of ethnographic correlation, attempting to connect the individuals before them with Euro-American writing on different parts of Africa. The author of the previous description of “Congo” recaptives, for instance, noted that since his return from the Fort Sumter excursion, he found himself “somewhat at a loss for references,” since he had access only to works by Bowen, Livingstone, and the German explorer Heinrich Barth, whose geographic focus did not coincide with the Echo recaptives’ homelands. In the end, this observer decided to “leave the ethnological questions to the learned.”126 Nevertheless, his remarks reflect how proslavery South Carolina white elites viewed Echo recaptives as ethnographic specimens that could reinforce their argument for a revived flow of enslaved Africans into the Lowcountry.