The distinctiveness of the illustration of recaptives and the illegal slave trade in the U.S. news becomes clearer when examined alongside images in similar British publications. Established in 1842, the Illustrated London News introduced new technologies of pictorial reporting that by the 1850s had established middle-class readers’ expectations of being able to see as well as read about current events.137 Aware of the news value of photographs or sketches of captures, navy seamen and civilian observers often sent such images to editors of illustrated papers.138 For instance, when the British warship Arab seized the schooner Zeldina near Cuba and brought it to Jamaica’s Port Royal, “J.S.” quickly sent off photographs and written descriptions of 370 recaptives to the Illustrated London News.139 Juxtaposing abolitionist rhetoric with engraved images, the newspaper clearly framed recaptives as abject sufferers of that “horror of horrors,” the middle passage. Using the language of commodification, the written text explicitly guided readers’ perception of an illustration of young West Central African boys sitting in close formation (fig. 3.3): “The sad group of boys in the Engraving tells how they were packed—like so many bales of goods, closely wedged in!” Furthermore, the writer supplied a history for the Zeldina survivors as “ill-treated African youths... so cruelly torn from their native country.” Though sightseers flocked to the grounds of Fort Augustus in Jamaica as they did in Key West, the Illustrated London News couched the story in terms of sympathy and “humanitarian attention.”140
FIGURE 3.3 Recaptive boys of the slave ship Zeldina in Jamaica. Illustrated London News engraving, 20 June 1857. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
At the same time, British humanitarianism, as scholars have argued, emerged from a particular moment of postemancipation commerce, free labor values, and imperial maritime power, presenting itself as a moral and benevolent force.141 The Zeldina engraving most similar to the Harper’s engraving of Wildfire recaptives implicitly celebrated British postemancipation guardianship over recaptive youth (fig. 3.4).142 Illustrated London News artists placed Zeldina recaptives physically within a double ring of British protection, symbolized first by the figures of colonial authorities and then by the buildings of Fort Augusta. Small tags, visible around the necks of many recaptives, conveyed the efficiency of British imperial bureaucracy in assigning each recaptive a tin ticket stamped with an individual number documenting his “liberated African” status.143 Stock gestures chosen by staff artists reinforced the paternalistic message. Toward the center of the engraving, a white figure rested his hand on an African man’s shoulder, directing the man’s gaze upward toward his free future under British supervision. A uniformed soldier dominating the left side of the frame made a similar motion. Depicting Zeldina survivors as passive recipients of British rescue, the scene also situated recaptives in a civilizing narrative of imperial authority.144
FIGURE 3.4 Zeldina recaptives at Fort Augusta, Jamaica. Illustrated London News engraving, 20 June 1857. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Leading illustrated weeklies in the United States also conveyed naval strength in enforcing the slave trade laws, but the political realities of the slaveholding republic dictated different terms of discourse. As sectional tensions mounted in the 1860 presidential election, stories that asserted national unity and the rule of law in southern ports encouraged both northern and southern readers, in the words of one print culture historian, “to think, act, and feel nationally.”145 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reporters, for instance, dramatically recounted the U.S. steamer Wyandotte’s seizure of the William.146 Radiating national benevolence, the front page illustration depicted a long line of wagons carrying the “poor Africans” in orderly procession to the camp, “where every care was taken to provide for their cleanliness and comfort” (fig. 3.5).147 Even with the American-built and -owned slave ship William anchored prominently in the background, words and image offered readers a sanitized narrative of U.S. vigilance in the suppression of the slave trade. Similarly, Harper’s Weekly engravers portrayed the armed military guard, rendered to the left in strong white and black lines, standing before the barracks in which “the Africans are confined” (fig. 3.6).148 Another group of white men pictured on the right (probably the civilian guard hired by Moreno) represented the local contribution to protecting both African recaptives and Key West residents. In contrast to the open rupture between federal policy and radical proslavery Charlestonians two summers earlier, such illustrations depicted a law-abiding and humane slaveholding republic to middle-class American readers in a volatile political climate.
FIGURE 3.5 William shipmates disembarking at Key West. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper engraving, 23 June 1860. The caption reads, “Landing of the cargo of slaves captured on board the American bark Williams by the U.S. steamer Wyandotte—disembarkation at Key West.—Photographed by David Lawrence.” Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Despite their implicit support of U.S. slave trade suppression, the New York news illustrations avoided abolitionist overtones in their depiction of recaptive subjects. Occupying fully three-quarters of the page, Harper’s striking woodcut engraving “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire’” best illustrates this point (fig. 3.7). The image shows a crowd of young male recaptives seated on the captured ship’s wooden deck. A canvas covering, commonly known as “the house,” shaded the men and boys on an otherwise exposed deck, while crudely sketched female figures appeared on a raised platform behind them.149 The image captured a particularly uncertain time for recaptives as they remained on board the ship, moored at the government wharf for four days, awaiting the completion of hastily erected barracks.150 Although the young men at the front of the image have distinctive features, the overall effect is one of an anonymous sea of thin bodies packed tightly into the confines of the ship. The nakedness of these bodies further distanced African recaptives from the presumably well-clothed white reader and evoked conventional associations of nudity with inherent barbarism, rather than holding slave traders responsible for stripping their captives.151 In contrast with the British imperial setting depicted for Zeldina shipmates at Fort Augustus, no government officials or Key West landscapes appeared within the frame to remind readers how these captive figures arrived in their current state. Rather, recaptives appear as anonymous representatives of “native Africa,” suspended in time within the confines of the ship’s deck.
FIGURE 3.6 “The Barracoon at Key West,” Harper’s Weekly engraving, 2 June 1860. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Slave trade commodification relied on the anonymity and interchangeability of bodies, but so did nineteenth-century ethnographic conventions in which Harper’s took part. The technology of photography and mass-produced illustrations became a new tool in the production of scientific racism focused on the idea of human “types.”152 “The type,” writes art critic Brian Wallis, “represented an average example of a racial group, an abstraction, though not necessarily the ideal, that defined the general form or character of individuals within the group; it subsumed individuality.”153 Like the previously discussed Agassiz photographs of enslaved men and women in South Carolina, typological photographs consisted of one or two figures intended to represent a racially defined group for use in academic and medical literature. Many illustrated weeklies adopted this convention for a more popular use.154 The Illustrated London News, for example, presented a pictorial survey of ethnographic types living in Sierra Leone during the 1850s. Written text next to the image of a “young Congo or Angola lad—a liberated African” informed the reader that Congos/Angolans were “apparently not an ambitious race of people,” yet they were “much esteemed as both soldiers and servants.”155 The use of one illustrated figure to represent the traits of a “race” or tribe demonstrated how mass-produced weeklies used images of recaptives to make ethnographic claims.
FIGURE 3.7 “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘W
ildfire.’—[From our own Correspondent.] The Slave Deck of the Bark ‘Wildfire,’ Brought into Key West on April 30, 1860.—[From a Daguerreotype.]” Harper’s Weekly engraving, 2 June 1860. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Artist John McNevin, responsible for creating the Wildfire image that Harper’s staff workers then engraved, would have been familiar with the Anglo-American visual conventions of both abolition persuasion and ethnographic display. Trained as an artist in Dublin, Ireland, McNevin completed a series of paintings of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London and illustrated the Crimean War; thus he was familiar with conventions of imperial spectacle and power.156 McNevin served as the pictorial reporter on the Crimean War for the Illustrated London News before immigrating to New York to become a Harper’s Weekly artist and book illustrator, known for his epic historical and wartime subject matter.157 It is not known whether he had drawn African subjects before taking on the Wildfire image, whose caption indicated “From a Daguerreotype.” He could easily have seen the 1857 Zeldina images in the paper where he formerly worked.158 Though little more is known about McNevin’s views on slavery, his artistic eye captured the sensational potential of the Wildfire shipmates’ presence and displayed their image for the avid consumption of Harper’s readers.
As “A Journal of Civilization,” however, Harper’s Weekly emphasized themes that drew readers’ attention away from the enslavement of the Wildfire shipmates and portrayed them instead as exotic specimens usually seen only by intrepid white travelers. The correspondent proved more interested in markings of “tribe” (filed teeth, tattoos, hair, etc.) than in the dislocations of the slave trade.159 Recall that a British correspondent directed the Illustrated London News audience to imagine the horrors of the middle passage in the physical posture of the Zeldina boys. In contrast, Harper’s informed readers, “Travelers describe the natives of Congo as being small of stature” and “possessed of little energy either of mind or body.” Indeed, noted the article, “Negro indolence is carried with them to the utmost excess.”160 This ethnographic claim, printed directly adjacent to the image of a desolate young recaptive (“An African”) squatting on the ship deck (fig. 3.8), effaced the social experience of forced migration and overlooked the American investors who produced enslaved children’s displacement.161 Rather, the article used the Wildfire as a vehicle to convey readers to faraway Africa.162
FIGURE 3.8 “An African,” Harper’s Weekly engraving, 2 June 1860. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
As an exceptional category of recaptive due to their smaller numbers, women received more ambiguous depiction. Harper’s Weekly illustrations situated recaptive women in a liminal space between female dependence and inherent racial inferiority by depicting them as the only clothed figures and the only recaptives with familial ties. “The Only Baby among the Africans” (fig. 3.9), for example, combined the genre of ethnographic representation with a second popular genre of domestic portraiture, prized by middle-class consumers as tokens of sentimental attachment and legally validated personhood.163 Abolitionist literature frequently invoked the slave trade’s violation of mother-child bonds as evidence of the system’s inherent evil. Several mid-nineteenth-century book illustrations of transatlantic slaving, for example, depicted enslaved infants at their mother’s breast as icons of innocence in the fundamentally corrupt setting of the slave ship.164 The Harper’s image of mother and child thus had the potential to resonate with the sympathetic newspaper descriptions of mother-daughter reunion and infant burial, previously discussed.
Crucially, however, the artist’s depiction of the recaptive mother’s partial clothing limited the identification of Harper’s readers with the woman’s maternal suffering. Most obviously, the woman’s bared breasts evoked a truly overdetermined set of associations between race, reproduction, and womanhood.165 The recaptive mother, though presumably no longer defined as slavers’ property, remained exposed in the image, as did other non-Western women in nineteenth-century newsweeklies or enslaved women at auction.166 Prominently revealed, the woman’s breasts exposed her black female body in contrast to white middle-class women’s conventions of sexual propriety. Although the illustration did not possess the anonymity of a typological photo, the way in which the woman’s blouse was staged to expose her ample breasts called attention to her radical distance from both middle-class white mother-child portraiture and abolitionist morality.167 Even recaptive women’s exceptional portrayal turned in the end toward ethnographic exhibit.
FIGURE 3.9 “The Only Baby among the Africans,” Harper’s Weekly engraving, 2 June 1860. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
The representation of Key West recaptives in illustrated weeklies and daily newspapers used the consequences of slave trade suppression to generate a print culture product for mass consumption. Critical race studies scholars have offered the useful metaphor of “alchemy” to analyze the production of “race” in U.S. history from elements of genealogy, law, and property claims.168 Illustrated weekly coverage of the Key West Depot performed the alchemy of race with engravings of destitute but exotic strangers from a “Dark Continent” known to middle-class readers through missionary, naval, and slaver accounts. Mass-produced images made recaptives peculiarly visible outside U.S. domestic circuits of value; destined for removal, they would be neither human property in the American South nor low-wage laborers in the North. The sensational news coverage of the African Depot thus performed a distinct kind of alchemy that transformed misery, isolation, and death into didactic entertainment and newspaper sales. The ethnographic framing of recaptive experience made it more difficult for most Americans to think in terms of human rights in the wake of a slave ship and thus contributed to the visual culture of racial inequality in a postemancipation world.
How pointless the attentions of reporters and sightseers must have seemed to Wildfire, William, and Bogota shipmates confronting the physical and social crisis of their Florida detention. As mortality figures rose, recaptives mourned their dead and attempted to guard shipmate bonds they had begun to forge in previous phases of their captivity. Removal threatened new separations, but remarkably, most of the original shipmates seem to have remained together when three ships arrived one after the other to transport recaptives to Liberia. Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson simply instructed Moreno to distribute the depot population by thirds on each of the chartered vessels.169 Yet agent William Proby Young clearly identified Wildfire shipmates embarked together on the Castilian.170 Likewise, the agent James Grymes recorded traveling with men and women first taken across the sea in the Bogota, and physician Webster Lindsly wrote that all but thirteen recaptive passengers on the South Shore had shared a lethal passage in the William.171 Did recaptives exert what little influence they had to ensure these continuous shipmate groupings? Though the answer is not definitive, we do know that a few individuals separated from their shipmates bore an additional burden of social isolation while traveling to Liberia. As agent Webster Lindsly reported, several of the Wildfire recaptives transported with William shipmates “were unable to communicate with the rest of the company,” despite shared West Central African origins.172 In an environment of extreme scarcity, pervasive uncertainty, and continued illness, shipmate relations served as vital bonds of identification.
As antebellum news coverage of the Key West African Depot shows, few constituencies in the United States could perceive recaptives as a displaced group in social crisis. When it came to the representation of recaptivity, the ethnography of race and the contentious politics of slavery created almost no space in contemporary discourse for a discussion of the common humanity or effective freedom of slave ship survivors in U.S. custody. One important exception, however, was that of free black activists in the New York region well acquainted with the open secret of their city as a financial center for the contraband slave trade. Black transatlantic activism centered in New York linked the illega
l slave trade and the Liberian removal of recaptives to broader visions of emancipation and black progress. The following chapter shifts focus to one of New York’s African American activists who took up the cause of young recaptive Africans during the summer of 1860.
4: A Human Rights Counterpoint
A shrewd lawyer once said that he could drive a coach and four through any law ever yet made in America. Laws in America are made to drive coaches and fours through at any time, or a ship, or a fleet of ships either, when necessary.
∼Weekly Anglo-African, 23 June 1860
Taking the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota altogether, it will be found that they have conveyed to our shores about two thousand living Africans, wrongfully and wickedly torn from their homes. How many they buried on the middle—that most awful and destructive of all passages—no tongues but the guilty parties can tell.
∼J. W. C. Pennington, 20 July 1860
Brought together by the Atlantic slave routes of two different centuries, a unique gathering took place on 16 August 1860 in a Lower East Side city jail: three West Central African recaptive boys and a fifty-three-year-old Presbyterian minister whose grandfather had crossed the ocean in shackles during the mid-eighteenth century. The youths had been brought by naval officers to New York and detained as witnesses after their discovery aboard the William R. Kibby, a slave ship abandoned near the Cuban coast. James W. C. Pennington (fig. 4.1) accompanied a New York Times reporter to the airless quarters the three boys occupied on the second floor of the Eldridge Street jail.1 There, Pennington attempted to communicate with the youth through hand signs, counting exercises, and prayer.2 The minister must have been deeply moved, for he himself had experienced capture and incarceration when he fled from his Maryland owner at age twenty. His interests, however, also extended to finding an interpreter so that he could call attention to the boys as victims of the ongoing slave trade. In other words, Pennington not only personally identified with the human condition of recaptivity but also mounted a systemic protest of the illegal slave trade.
Recaptured Africans Page 14
