Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  Personal experience moved Pennington to direct action on behalf of others in similarly vulnerable situations. Soon after arriving in Brooklyn in 1827, the young Pennington joined the New York Vigilance Committee, an organization known for providing both legal aid and direct physical intervention to protect fugitives from being returned into slavery. Harriet and James Pennington’s Hartford home served for several years as a safe house for numerous passengers on the Underground Railroad.91 Of course, the legal status of fugitive slaves contrasted with that of the slave trade recaptives in whom Pennington later took interest; the former fled the reach of the federal government, while the latter ostensibly received protection from federal authority. Yet Pennington would have understood that certain experiences of the fugitive, such as the enduring traumas of enslavement and the difficulties of reconstructing secure social and family ties, shadowed African recaptives as well.

  A catastrophic family event in 1854 further emphasized the fragility of the free life Pennington had built for himself in the North. In May of that year, Pennington’s brother, Stephen Pembroke, and his two nephews, Robert and Jacob, made their escape from Sharpsburg, Maryland, moving through the Underground Railroad first to Philadelphia and then toward New York. There, at the safe house to which Pennington had conveyed them, slave-catchers captured the three fugitives and secured their forced return to Maryland. After extended negotiations and great expense, abolitionist supporters managed to arrange the purchase of Pennington’s brother, but his nephews were sold away to North Carolina.92 Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad organizer William Still later suggested that Pennington, overwhelmed by the emotional reunion, failed to anticipate the fugitives’ dangerous situation.93 News of the calamity rippled through a distressed northern fugitive aid network, but no one could have grieved over the recapture of the Pembroke men more than their brother and uncle, James Pennington. Compounding the emotional toll of these events, other personal difficulties soon threatened to destroy the respectable reputation Pennington had worked his entire adult life to establish.

  A close examination of Pennington’s biography in the five years prior to the World editorials and the visit to the jailed boys from the William R. Kibbyplaces Pennington’s activism against the illegal slave trade at a critical moment of his life and career. In 1854, rumors began to surface that Pennington, a living symbol of moral rectitude, had broken his temperance vows. Added to the accusations of intemperance, growing debts and allegations of financial irregularities loomed over Pennington.94 At the end of 1855, the Shiloh Presbyterian congregation requested his resignation, and he returned temporarily to the Talcott Street Colored Congregational Church in Hartford and then to the Newtown, Long Island, community where he had first begun to teach. A lull in his usually prolific writing and organizing ensued between 1856 and 1858.95 In order to support his family and provide for his ailing wife Elmira, James Pennington felt it necessary to ask for financial assistance from several abolitionist friends to supplement his small teaching salary. “I do not know in my own case whether most to blame the South for enslaving me, or the North for oppressing me,” he wrote to Gerrit Smith, “for since I have been North few men have been required to make more bricks with less straw than myself.”96 The biblical allusion to the bondage of northern poverty is telling. When in 1860 Pennington revived his activism and publicly challenged U.S. slave trade suppression policy, he did so with a painful sense of how blurred the lines between slavery and freedom could be.97

  The cause of slave trade recaptives not only offered Pennington an opportunity to reassert his voice as a national abolitionist leader, but it also brought together the scholarly, religious, and political strands of the minister’s activism. In the 13 and 20 July letters to the World, Pennington first tackled the larger picture of slave trade suppression before turning to the more immediate issue of how best to redress African recaptives’ wrongs. Citing both the recent congressional appropriation of $250,000 and government contracts with the ACS for recaptive settlement in Liberia, Pennington charged that U.S. slave trade suppression had become “a brisk business” that failed to prioritize the immediate cessation of the transatlantic traffic. Prize ships served as “a golden vein” for naval officers, the ACS thrived on federal contracts, and “guilty slavers are never punished as pirates as they should be.”98 Everyone profited, implied Pennington, except the direct victims of the trade. He rejected a sentimental or sensationalist view of the illegal trade, focusing instead on the institutional structures that kept U.S. slave trade suppression operational but ineffective. His incisive criticism offered a counternarrative to the benevolent claims of white rescue that permeated naval accounts such as Foote’s Africa and the American Flag.99 For Pennington, slave trade suppression had become yet another business in which whites profited through the exploitation of African bodies.

  Turning to recaptives themselves, Pennington went on to challenge the wisdom of federal removal policy for “hundreds of these poor young Africans brought into Key West.” He questioned the “justice and humanity of hurrying them back, either to run the risk of dying on the return passage, or to be thrown upon a strange part of that immense continent where they will never reach their own homes.” In contrast to federal policy that recorded recaptives’ ages only to calculate per capita government subsistence, Pennington perceived the heightened social vulnerability of child captives. In contrast to the illustrated weeklies’ spectacle of suffering and savagery, Pennington shifted the focus of debate to questions of justice and brought recaptives into the human family, with an insistence on full equality. His ongoing study of the colonization issue had deepened Pennington’s understanding that Liberia was “home” to neither the Bogota’s Yoruba shipmates nor the West Central African recaptives of the Wildfire and the William. Three decades of battle against colonization shaped Pennington’s opposition to a recaptive removal mandate that originated with white American fears of sharing citizenship with free blacks.

  Instead, Pennington offered an alternative plan from his past that targeted his northern, churchgoing audience. In a labor-hungry nation like the United States, he argued, there was no reason to subject the already traumatized slave trade refugees to yet another displacement. Why couldn’t the farm families of the “East, West and North” take in “some of the young strangers and train them here?” he asked. Pennington called for a guardian committee to assist the placement of recaptives with American families in free states.100 He based the merits of this approach on the example of the Amistad case, in which a committee had worked to house the freed Amistad shipmates in Farmington, Connecticut, “under christian and other instructions” in advance of return to West Africa. Pennington, who had been stationed as pastor nine miles away in Hartford at the time, assured his readers that he had visited the Amistad shipmates often and could testify to the harmony of their arrangements. In a subsequent rebuttal, although Pennington backed away from opposing the Liberian settlement of Key West recaptives, he continued to defend the idea of placing future recaptives with northern U.S. families, at least as an intermediate step in preparation for African repatriation.101 By questioning the plan for apprenticeship with Americo-Liberian settler families, Pennington sought to overturn a federal policy of expedience that treated recaptives as permanent strangers in need of quick deportation.

  Pennington’s interventions on behalf of recaptive policy also reflected his thinking as a Christian minister about the role recaptives could play in redeeming and uplifting the African continent through missionary work that was free of colonial abuse, although this idea was not apparent on the surface of his editorials. In 1841 Pennington had viewed the liberation of the “citizens of Mendi” as a providential opportunity to send missionaries to Africa “without countenancing Colonization.” In a letter to the Colored American editor Charles Ray, Pennington had expressed hope that a school could be established in Farmington so that “other persons may be placed there when taken from slavers, and be taught something
of civilization and Christianity before they return.” Such an institution would be a site of cultural exchange in which “pious young men of this country” interested in African missions could acquire necessary African-language skills and other important information from recaptives.102 Ray supported Pennington’s proposition as a means to establish a mission station in the “interior of Africa,” purified from economic exploitation, free of European deception, and “disconnected, too, with powder and ball and rum, colonization and slavery.”103 Two decades after Pennington had first proposed such a collaborative missionary endeavor, he sought to turn the seeming resurgence of the illegal slave trade toward a policy he believed would elevate the condition of African-descended peoples everywhere.

  The World’s readers, many of whom advocated colonization, moved quickly to disagree. Resettlement in Liberia represented the “most humane disposal of them,” countered a former naval officer. Not only would recaptives “enjoy all of the christianizing and humanizing influences [in Liberia] that they would in our own country,” he wrote, but they would also achieve the “privileges of citizenship” and thus be better off even than the “nominal freemen” of the U.S. North.104 Refuting Pennington’s labor arguments, another reader responded that U.S. labor demands would easily be met by the poor and oppressed of Europe and asserted, “The white man will not labor beside the African in this land.”105 Although the World editors worried about the ability of Liberia’s population of African American emigrants to absorb “such an accession of barbarism,” they also rejected the idea that recaptives could thrive as free people of color in the United States. They pointed out that the World had published another letter by Pennington just the previous week about his violent ejection from the segregated New York City public streetcars. “If such is the treatment extended to black doctors of divinity, born on the Chesapeake,” they queried, “what might black heathen, fresh from the Senegambia, expect?”106

  Participants in this debate challenged not only Pennington’s ideas but also his credentials as a free man of color expressing anticolonizationist views. The former naval officer conceded that he could understand opposition to Liberian resettlement coming from self-interested slaveholders, but he expressed surprise that “a leading man of the colored race” should take this position.107 From New England, the Springfield Republican chided Pennington and other educated free blacks for “cling[ing] to white society” and failing to build their own civilization in “their native country.”108 Another critic (perhaps a supporter of black emigration) found Pennington’s opinion an odd position for an “intelligent colored man” to hold. Referencing the geographical findings of recent African explorations, this contributor noted that “the hills and valleys of the Niger, and the tablelands of Yoruba, may not be ‘home, sweet home’ to Mr. Pennington, but it was to his fathers, if not to him.” Questioning Pennington’s own sense of identity, this writer mocked the minister’s inability to understand that “Africa [is] the land and home of the African.”109 These responses, which shifted from the proper destiny of recaptive Africans in U.S. custody toward a larger argument about what free African Americans should call home, reveals the entanglement of slave trade suppression policies with antebellum racial politics.

  Despite the Key West Depot’s distance from Pennington’s New York, the city soon had its own encounter with a tiny group of slave trade recaptives. On 23 July 1860, the U.S. steamer Crusader, cruising north of the Cuban coastline, seized the William R. Kibby, which had been abandoned after disembarking roughly 600 captives from the Congo River barracoons.110 After the Crusader towed the presumably empty slaver to Key West, navy seamen cleaning the ship made the surprising discovery of three African boys secreted below deck. The naked and terrified youngsters had somehow evaded both slavers and the naval prize crew by hiding themselves for seven days in the pitch-dark forepeak of the brig and subsisting on leftover bread rations.111 By that point, all recaptives had departed from Key West for Liberia and the admiralty court’s judge was temporarily off the island. Naval lieutenant Duncan sailed the William R. Kibby to New York, taking the boys along to serve—provided interpreters could be located—“as witnesses against the vessel.” Upon reaching New York, Duncan gave custody of the boys, Tony, Pablo, and Suguilo, to the Democratic Party strongman and U.S. marshal Isaiah Rynders pending their eventual removal to Liberia.112 The boys, described variously between the ages of eight and fourteen, soon found themselves sharing a single bed in a small cell in the Eldridge Street jail.113

  Pennington may have reflected on his long experience with America’s prisons and jails as he made his way to Eldridge Street in search of the William R. Kibby stowaways. Beginning with the stages of captivity that marked his own flight from slavery in Maryland, Pennington had become intimately familiar with America’s carceral spaces during his years of fugitive slave activism.114 As a newly arrived abolitionist pastor at Talcott Street Colored Congregational Church in 1840, he would have been well aware of the Amistad shipmates’ confinement in New Haven and Hartford jails.115 In 1852, Pennington and the white lawyer John Jay collaborated in a clever legal ruse that spirited fugitive slave Nicholas Dudley (alias James Snowden) from the state prison of Sing-Sing to a free life in Canada hours before his former owner arrived to claim him as property. Although Jay secured the pardon that enabled Dudley’s early release, it was Pennington who met Dudley at the gates of Sing-Sing and walked several miles with him along the route toward the Canadian border.116 The jailing of Tony, Pablo, and Suguilo must have resonated with Pennington’s knowledge of how northern jails in general—and Eldridge in particular—often served the interests of slaveholders and their allies. Jailing nominally freed recaptive boys cast the shadow of criminality on their rescue from illegal slavers and ignored their vulnerability as young people displaced by the illegal trade. Ultimately, Pennington sought to call attention to their plight and win a more secure existence for the three boys.

  First, however, Pennington needed to surmount the gulf of language that separated him from the recaptive youth. A seaman of color also lodged in the same jail cell confirmed that neither Tony, Pablo, nor Suguilo knew Spanish or Portuguese. Pennington then attempted to communicate with the youth by asking them to count to ten in their native language. Although Pennington did not know it at the time, the boys’ response in Kikongo (or a closely related dialect) confirmed their reported origins in the Lower Congo.117 Later, the boys repeated the words of the Lord’s Prayer at Pennington’s prompting. As a lifelong educator of young African Americans, Pennington may have been attempting to demonstrate the boys’ potential for learning in addition to hoping they could contribute to the ship owner’s arrest, yet he did not manage to break through the language barrier. Two weeks later, the Times reporter returned with an African-born porter, Henry Carter, who tried in vain to find a common tongue by singing a “nursery song,” listing “tribe” names, speaking a “Mandingo dialect,” and reciting verses of the Koran in Arabic.118 Considered within the broader history of U.S. recaptives, these abortive communication attempts highlighted the boys’ isolation as recaptives without a larger group of shipmates with whom they could identify.119

  From the viewpoint of Pennington and other New York abolitionists, Pablo, Tony, and Suguilo belonged in a protective, educational environment such as the Colored Orphan Asylum, not a jail.120 Yet the federally mandated removal law frustrated these objectives and led to a confrontation that underscored the hostile world through which young recaptives traveled. In the course of a discussion about financial responsibility for the William R. Kibby recaptives’ expenses, Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson had written to Rynders asking for clarification of whether the boys were merely legal witnesses, “destitute foundlings,” or African captives seized on an illegal slaver. In reality, all three conditions applied, but clarification of their status as slave ship recaptives eventually took precedence. Thompson, following the 1819 removal policy, ordered Rynders to ship the boys to Liberia at h
is earliest opportunity.121 As their departure date grew nearer, the white abolitionist Lewis Tappan and his grandson William Barney visited the marshal’s office to make a final plea for the boys’ placement in the Colored Orphan Asylum. Rynders, who had risen to fame in the 1840s as a “polling place thug” for the Democratic machine, threw Tappan and Barney out of his office.122 According to a sworn affidavit Tappan later published in the Evening Post, Rynders cursed Tappan’s philanthropic meddling and declared, “I have been annoyed enough about these dammed infernal niggers.”123 No doubt, antipathy based on past skirmishes with Tappan over fugitive slaves contributed to the New York marshal’s violent response. At the same time, his racial characterization of recaptives as troublesome black youth also revealed how northern racial politics impinged on the three young slave trade refugees in U.S. custody.

  The run-in with Rynders brought the William R. Kibby recaptives’ three-month stay in the Eldridge Street jail to a close. In November 1860, Tony, Pablo, and Suguilo embarked from Baltimore for Liberia on the ACS emigrant ship Mary Caroline Stevens in the custody of white missionary C. Colden Hoffman.124 After a safe and uneventful passage, they joined thousands of other newly arrived recaptives to begin a new chapter of their lives as “Congoes” in Liberia. By then, the lower South’s response to Lincoln’s election in the United States had considerably heightened the imminent prospect of secession and civil war. Within months of the Mary Caroline Stevens’s departure, James Pennington began a new phase of international activism as he prepared to sail for England to solicit British abolitionists’ support for the Union cause. In 1870, he died from a sudden illness while working in Florida with a freedmen’s mission.125