Francisco, another Wildfire shipmate from Luanda, employed language skills to assert his value for new federal captors in Key West. As the only adult male among the Luanda affiliates, Francisco survived, in part, by using his cultural capital to gain authority over other recaptives. Through an interpreter, Francisco explained to the Harper’s correspondent that he “was a slave in Africa.” Rather than returning there, he continued, he would prefer to be “a slave to the white man in this country.”43 Physician and special government agent William Proby Young observed that Francisco quickly acquired some English and emerged as a “supervisor of the crowd” in the sprawling camp that swelled from 500 to over 1,300 people between May and mid-July 1860. According to Young, “Just before the time for their meals [Francisco] would collect them in squads of ten and beat upon a drum while they kept time by clapping their hands and singing.”44 As Francisco facilitated the depot’s daily food distribution, he secured his relationship to fellow shipmates and his usefulness to U.S. officials. His statement of preference for American enslavement can be interpreted in a number of ways, including a mistranslation, fear of another Atlantic crossing, or a perceptive attempt to gain the favor and protection of American officials. In the fragmentary evidence on Constantia, Francisco, and other Africans singled out for attention by American observers, we can catch a glimpse of how recaptives sought to assert their position within shipmate groups and gain some modicum of control over their perilous situation.
At the end of May 1860, the geographic origins of recaptives in Key West’s impromptu wayside station expanded with the arrival of a third ship. Up to that point, the camp was a West Central African transit zone peaking at 1,020 people and declining as the sickest shipmates died. Kikongo rang out, possibly merging with occasional Umbundu or Kimbundu spoken alongside the English and Spanish of the guards and camp workers and the Portuguese of the slave crew translator. On 25 May, however, news arrived of a third slaver, intercepted by the USS Crusader near Nuevitas on the northern coastline of Cuba. Aboard the French-built Bogota, U.S. naval authorities found more than 400 captive men and women embarked from Ouidah, the only location north of the equator still operating as a slaving port in 1860.45 Their arrival brought the encampment’s total population to 1,350.46 “The Depot is now full,” wrote marshal Moreno, “and not a foot of room to spare for the accommodation of any more Africans until the present occupants are removed.”47 Yoruba, Hausa, and Fon now sounded through the camp as well.48
In contrast to West Central Africans in Key West, the Bogota shipmates arrived with immediate memories of violent abduction particular to political upheavals in and around the Kingdom of Dahomey.49 Dahomey emerged as a powerful West African state in the mid-seventeenth century and gained direct access to the transatlantic trade by conquering the port city of Ouidah in 1727.50 Many of the Bogota’s shipmates had been taken as prisoners of war in Dahomean military campaigns early in 1860.51 During attacks on Yoruba-speaking towns to the north and east of Dahomey’s capital, Abomey, the king’s army took thousands of captives.52 In a long-standing tradition, returning Dahomean soldiers ritually sold their prisoners of war to the king. Captives not deemed useful to Dahomean society were then marched to Ouidah for transatlantic sale.53 Despite British diplomatic pressure to replace slave trading with palm oil exports, a brief revival of Dahomean royal support for the slave trade occurred between 1857 and 1863. During those years, eleven recorded voyages carried away over 6,800 enslaved captives.54 Compared with West Central African mechanisms of enslavement, Dahomey’s military raids resulted in many more adults—primarily men—among the Bogota shipmates. Children and elders were often killed in such attacks, and women were more likely to be retained internally. Meanwhile, royal officials sent young men, along with a small number of women and girls, on to coastal traders.
Memories of wartime devastation haunted many West African recaptives arriving in Key West, further deepening the alienation of transatlantic enslavement. Cudjo Lewis, an enslaved Yoruba man smuggled from Ouidah into Mobile Bay on the Clotilda, vividly recounted the sudden violence of his initial capture.55 Half a century later, trauma still suffused Lewis’s recounting. At dawn, formidable Dahomean forces had attacked Lewis’s town, killing scores and taking the strongest as captives. During the forced march to the coast, Lewis recalled the sight of triumphant soldiers displaying the heads of dead townspeople as war trophies.56 The threat of social death did not begin with the middle passage for Lewis but deepened with each successive move farther from home. Bogota recaptives most certainly also grieved similar losses even as they formed tentative new shipmate relations under the shadow of disease and mortality at Key West.
Other Bogota captives arrived in Ouidah’s slave warehouses not as prisoners of war but as victims of pawnship practices or random kidnappings. As one of the last slaving ports in West Africa, Ouidah served as a collection point for many sorts of captives arriving from the hinterlands of the Bight of Benin. Sources from Liberia later identified Bogota recaptives as including, in addition to Yoruba and Hausa speakers, some Fon speakers from Dahomey and possibly at least a few individuals from the Bariba and Miyobe groups located in the northern regions of present-day Benin and Togo.57 James Grymes, a white physician hired to attend Bogota shipmates on their voyage to Liberia, heard through an interpreter one man’s story of being captured and taken to Ouidah while “carrying a letter from some one in ‘Paw-Paw.’”58 If the man had been abducted near one of the coastal centers of Little Popo or Grand Popo, he would then have had to travel fifteen to thirty miles eastward before being locked in an Ouidah warehouse.59 Grymes recorded the man’s description of a “large house,” to which “they kept bringing others in, day & night.”60 In Ouidah’s slave pens, captives traded stories of home and hoped for the unlikely ransom by relatives. According to another account from Ouidah, boys among the confined captives sometimes found the resilience to play games, although being confined with adult men could also result in injury and abuse.61 The arrival of foreign slavers, however, shattered tenuous alliances and most remaining kinship ties. As the anonymous Bogota man told Grymes, the buyers in Ouidah “ruthlessly divided families and relatives.”62
Like their West Central African counterparts, Bogota shipmates arrived at Key West with a similarly terrifying experience of embarkation. Once a sale had been negotiated in Ouidah, traders pushed men, women, and children from the warehouses and drove them on foot or by boat through the lagoon between Ouidah and the coast. Just before departure, men working for the slave merchants burned their captives’ flesh with marks of ownership that allowed various investors to track their portion of slave sales.63 Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, a Dendi-speaking youth sold to slavers in Ouidah during the 1840s, vividly recalled the searing iron brand that slavers pressed into his back.64 When captives arrived at the ocean, hired canoe men from the Gold Coast paddled them through the rough, shark-filled surf and over treacherous sandbars to the waiting ships.65 There, a final humiliating ritual of embarkation took place. According to Cudjo Lewis, the maritime workers stripped the remaining clothes from slaves as they scrambled from canoe to ship, imposing another stamp of dishonor and degradation.66 In similar fashion, the men, women, and children of the Bogota passed into the cramped interior of the ship, filled with fear, anger, and pain. They also carried within themselves the social identities and cultural knowledge by which some would laboriously begin to heal the wounds of their ordeal.
In contrast to the Congo River cohort of recaptives, rough demographic outlines indicate that Bogota shipmates included a much larger proportion of mature men and women. A government agent reporting on Bogota survivors embarking for Liberia tallied 266 men (69.5 percent of the total), 19 boys (5 percent), 86 women (22.5 percent), and 12 girls (3 percent).67 These numbers are significant because, as in many places, age factored heavily in shaping a person’s place and influence within West African society. Age could identify cohorts for initiation and hierarchies of obligation and power and cou
ld indicate readiness for marriage and childbearing.68 For recaptives in motion across the Atlantic, age shaped the repertoire of skills, leadership, and knowledge necessary for forging meaningful social ties among shipmates. Stripped of much of the material culture, institutions, and relationships that defined their past lives, many Bogota recaptives nevertheless carried experiences of mature participation in home communities, made visible in precise dental modifications and elaborate scarification adorning both faces and bodies.69 In the months to come, the more mature profile of Bogota survivors would influence the character of shipmate relations, the perception of survivors by U.S. authorities, and the prospects for survivors once they landed in Liberia.
Recaptive Life in the Shadow of Death
As one of many temporary bases for recaptive Africans around the Atlantic World, the Key West Depot dictated the material constraints under which recaptives built their fragile shipmate collectives. Like other such holding areas, Key West’s depot shared problems of crowding, disease, and scarce provisions. For example, the encampment at Rupert’s Valley, on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena from 1841 to 1867, often exceeded its capacity of 500 people. In the peak months of March and April 1850, almost 1,300 recaptives filled Rupert’s Valley’s rough shelters.70 Key West’s recaptive camp had a much shorter life, and its U.S. agents were less prepared for their task than St. Helena officials. Yet recaptive shipmates in both places waited in limbo for the next phase of their displacement. The depot’s inmates had not yet entered new labor contracts of apprenticeship, and their days in Key West were filled with uncertainty. Psychologists studying refugee trauma in twentieth-century camps have analyzed the stress of suspended existence on refugees who inhabit one or more intermediate locations between the initial rupture from home and a designated resettlement area.71 Looking at refugee experiences from a different discipline, medical anthropologists have analyzed the ways in which violence, loss of kin, and a fractured sense of identity result not only in mental trauma but “somatization,” in which the experience of displacement manifests in culturally specific physical distress.72 The scholarly insight that transit zones can become sites of “secondary traumatic experience” proves useful in thinking about recaptives’ existence in the aftermath of slave ship interception.73 Key West’s slave trade refugees countered the alienation of their liminal existence through daily relations with fellow shipmates.
As the depot’s population grew, U.S. authorities focused primarily on the daunting logistics of housing and feeding survivors, burying the dead, and maintaining control over the recaptive camp. With each new arrival of African shipmates (on 30 April, 12 May, and 25 May), the camp next to Fort Taylor evolved as a settlement defined primarily by the routines and restrictions of military oversight.74 In early May, U.S. marshal Moreno described to Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson his construction of a 140-foot-long wooden building and a kitchen on three acres of shore near Fort Taylor, surrounded by a six-foot-high fence that extended into the surf.75 He sent the most desperately ill individuals from the Wildfire to a makeshift hospital in a carpenter shop near the fort.76 Moreno’s initial optimism dwindled along with the island’s resources. “I must call the Attention of the Department to the great necessity of removing these Africans from here at the Earliest possible moment,” he wrote in mid-May. “Their continuance here for a period of two or three months will exhaust the supply of water on this island.”77 By June, the combined population of three groups of shipmates strained the depot’s capacity for basic provisions of safety, medical care, and nutrition. Although the outdoor spaces alleviated crowding during the day, in the nine rooms of the expanded barracks, each child and adult would have had just enough room to lie down.78
An ambiguous blend of protection and incarceration characterized government oversight of the recaptive camp. Well aware of the politics of slave trade revival and the value of African captives in the Deep South and Havana slave markets, Moreno took measures to prevent either “escape or recapture” and established contingency plans for any “Emergency.”79 A naval marine unit from the USS Wyandotte and an army unit from Fort Taylor with two small artillery pieces provided armed guard outside the camp.80 The danger was real, for several planters from South Carolina and Florida attempted to bribe the guards and spirit away recaptives (or “rescue” them, as one paper put it) on a clandestine steamer.81 Lowcountry planter Richard T. Morrison, described as “a principle of the party,” told Young that had their plans not been foiled by rumors of stiff federal resistance, “I should have had every one of them. I’d give $50,000 cash to have them landed on the Coast of Carolina.”82 Whether or not recaptives were aware of this additional danger, the security measures in place contributed to the guarded atmosphere of the depot.
Moreno’s equal concern with an internal “African” threat led him to amplify the “geography of containment” imposed upon the depot. If, as historian Stephanie Camp has argued, the “spatial impulse” lay at the center of American enslavement, constrained movement and regimented routines also defined recaptive existence in Key West.83 The encampment featured barracks segregated by age and gender, regulated mealtimes and rations, and physical punishment in the form of stocks for individuals regarded as unruly.84 Moreno established a military guard along the camp’s external perimeter and employed a civilian guard inside the camp that he deemed “absolutely necessary to direct and keep the Africans in good discipline.” In addition, he employed a Spanish “passenger” from the slaver whose services, remarked Moreno, have been “invaluable to me in controling these people.”85 Upon the Bogota’s arrival, the marshal allowed women and children to disembark within three days but kept the men on board the anchored slaver for an additional five days until the guard could be strengthened. Moreno explained his actions by warning that the “stout” men “of gigantic proportion” on the Bogota were “much more savage than the Congo negroes.” In addition, Moreno pleaded for military reinforcements “for the purpose of aiding me in guarding and keeping these Africans under subjection.” Although existing records make no mention of recaptive protest against their confinement at Key West, Moreno feared an “outbreak” would overwhelm the depot’s armed guards.86 As the recaptive population grew, the marshal sought increased militarization that replicated certain conditions of captivity—indeed, some observers called the camp a “barracoon.”87
FIGURE 3.2 Sketch of 1860 Key West “African Depot” by unknown artist. Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to the Suppression of the African Slave Trade and Negro Colonization, 1854–1872. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
Despite its obvious carceral features, the depot’s environment also allowed recaptive shipmates to move and interact, to some extent, on their own volition. Mobility within the depot’s boundaries differed significantly from exhausting overland marches or the whip-imposed immobility of captives in a fetid slave deck. A sketch preserved in Moreno’s records conveys a sense of open space on the white sand beach that Wildfire recaptives at first found unsettling (see fig. 3.2). Harper’s Weekly reported that upon entering the newly constructed wooden barracks, the Wildfire shipmates “all arranged themselves along the sides of the building as they had been accustomed to do on the decks of the vessel, and squatted down in the same manner.”88 Aboard the Wildfire, reported Harper’s, enslaved boys and young men had been conditioned to occupy only the edges of the deck, so as to leave a central aisle for crewmembers to pass.89 Only after several hours did Moreno’s men manage to communicate the possibility of moving freely around the buildings and toward the nearby ocean, where recaptives could bathe each morning. The account offered a stark reminder that recaptivity entailed a fundamental readjustment of the body as a first step in reasserting social life.
In the bare environment of the depot, recaptives’ bodies became the first resource of collective expression. Echoing white observers at Fort Sumter in 1858, two physicians appoint
ed as government agents remarked on the sound and style of recaptive musical expression. William Proby Young compared the refrain of West Central African recaptives as they clapped and sang to Francisco’s drumming to an American evangelical “Camp Meeting.”90 Several weeks later, John Moore McCalla commented on Bogota shipmates “going through their wild dances preparatory to taking supper.” According to McCalla, one man seated on a wooden barrel sounded out a drum rhythm that accompanied and organized the distribution of food. Indulging his sense of the exotic, McCalla found some young women “extremely graceful and wild” and other dancers “ludicrous beyond description.”91 No doubt McCalla’s words reflect characteristic Victorian assumptions about uncivilized bodies, but he also unwittingly recorded the collective act of displaced people from multiple localities and language groups engaging in common expression.
Recaptives’ free movement to music served more than the utilitarian purpose of a call to meals. It is true that slave ship crews often forced captives to dance to reinvigorate their stiffened limbs, and the Key West dance could also have had overtones of coercion.92 Yet a “somatic approach” to “enslaved bodies in space,” as Camp would put it, offers an alternative interpretation of how recaptives may have danced to gather courage, summon ancestors, or grieve the dead, thus creating an intelligible world among marooned slave trade refugees. By engaging in clandestine parties in the antebellum South, Camp argues, bondsmen and -women asserted their “third bodies”—not the bodies dominated by slaveholders or suffused with pain, but the transcendent body capable of pleasure, beauty, and meaning.93 Extending this powerful analysis to recaptives in American custody suggests one of the ways in which diverse groups of destitute shipmates collectively manifested this “third body,” an expression made all the more necessary by suffering and death. By the time McCalla made his observations, only the West African shipmates of the Bogota remained in the depot. Yet even among this single shipmate group, it seemed to him as if “no two seemed to go through the same series of motions or to be singing the same words.” The remark clearly reflected McCalla’s incomprehension of West African polyphony. Yet he may also have been observing how people of different languages and traditions came together to improvise a collective present out of the fragments of individual pasts.94 Expressions of social identity that could be enacted with few resources other than the body itself, aided by memory and imagination, would remain critical to the daily existence of survivors as they embarked on their second Atlantic crossing.
Recaptured Africans Page 12
