James Pennington’s arguments on behalf of recaptives in Key West and New York City built upon his long-standing commitment to human rights and black self-redemption shaped by past experience with the Amistad shipmates and West African missions. Despite the fact that Pennington’s language reflected the assumed hierarchies of nineteenth-century Christian benevolence, his interventions proved strikingly free of the ethnographic voyeurism discussed in earlier chapters. Departing from the racial exoticism that characterized much of the mainstream press coverage on recaptives in U.S. custody, Pennington’s World editorials placed young people freed from illegal slavers within the longer historical campaign for transatlantic abolition. Linking the Wildfire and its fellow slavers to the Amistad, Pennington viewed recaptive shipmates as victims “wrongfully and wickedly torn from their homes” by a global system of stolen labor and lives. He thus addressed their condition as refugees and forced migrants—“young strangers”—without homes and in perilous health. Furthermore, he drew attention to the structural obstacles to effective suppression presented by U.S. policies that valued African lives less than the prize money they represented. In summary, action on behalf of recaptive Africans expressed Pennington’s conviction that “taking for granted that certain portions of the human family are incapable of, or not worth the effort of attempting to civilize, is a dangerous state or church policy.”126
Yet Pennington’s activism on behalf of recaptives should be understood not just in terms of his individual biography but also as a reflection of an overlooked theme in antebellum black politics. Perhaps because of the emphasis on trials and slave ships, rather than recaptives, historians have tended to treat the nineteenth-century slave trade—including its suppression and threatened revival—as tangential to or entirely separate from the concerns of northern antebellum black protest.127 A closer look, however, demonstrates what can be gained from examining how northern black activists confronted the illegal transatlantic trade. One insight offered by this chapter is a deeper understanding of regional political cultures of northern black abolitionism. The burgeoning literature on African American abolitionism and northern black communities in recent years affords us an opportunity to explore the subtleties of emphasis and strategy that distinguished particular regions.128 Although news of the illegal slave trade circulated across the northern abolitionist press, New York’s black activists seem to have been particularly galvanized by the city’s complicity in transatlantic slaving. Promulgating their ideas in the Anglo-African publications, black intellectuals in New York drew explicit connections between the beleaguered condition of northern free blacks and the threat of transatlantic slave trade revitalization.
Following the thread of black protest against the transatlantic slave trade also makes visible on certain counterintuitive parallels between recaptivity and the fugitivity to which New York’s activists responded. Early eighteenth-century narratives by African abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano sought to transform a world where neither the transatlantic slave trade nor slavery as a system of property and labor had yet been criminalized.129 In comparison, members of New York’s “freedom generation” had, in their lifetimes, seen the emergence of a nation and a world crosscut by shifting zones of slavery and emancipation. People of color traveled through this partial geography of emancipation at their peril, whether crossing the Ohio River or the Atlantic Ocean. Located in a city known for its support of the Fugitive Slave Act and the real threat of kidnapping, New York’s black activists understood how treacherous journeys across these boundaries could be. They knew all too well that there was no safe ground, no clear “free soil” where men, women, and children of color could claim their liberty without a struggle. Knowledge of the dangers of black mobility deepened Pennington’s concern for recaptives whose vulnerability did not cease once in the hands of federal authorities like Isaiah Rynders. Decades of “practical abolition” mobilized against slave hunters at home and collective engagement with the transatlantic politics of emancipation prepared New York activists to speak out against the terrible human cost of the slavers regularly departing their port city.
Awareness of the illegal slave trade and its proslavery advocates further shaped black abolitionist demands for racial justice couched as a human right. As targets of hardening theories of racial determinism in the 1840s and ‘50s, free African Americans held a distinctive stake in debates concerning the “family of man.” The embrace of polygenist ethnology by slave trade revivalists such as Frederick Porcher and Leonidas Spratt in South Carolina served to sharpen black intellectuals’ egalitarian counterarguments. The Weekly Anglo-African articulated this broad vision of human equality in November 1860 in an article about Queen Victoria’s knighting of Edward Jordan, a Jamaican man of color. Astutely invoking the political landscape of the 1850s, the writer concluded the review of Sir Edward Jordan’s accomplishments with the following admonition: “We only add here that he is a negro—one of the same blood with those whom our Chief Justice declares to have no rights that white men are bound to respect—one of the same material of common human nature with those who are bought and sold as merchandise in Richmond and New Orleans—one who has no more title to be a man than if he had come from Congo in a slave ship.”130 The Dred Scott decision, the domestic slave trade, and the illegal traffic in West Central African youth had in common the complicity of U.S. law, whether through enforcement or neglect. In the wake of the summer’s wave of recaptive arrivals, the Congo captive became for the Anglo-African a vibrant symbol through which to assert black entitlement to human rights across the nineteenth-century Atlantic.
Informed by the wealth of his life experiences, James Pennington recognized not just the political symbolism of the recaptive but also the immediate social crisis of recaptive children, men, and women. In the name of “justice and humanity,” he warned of further suffering for recaptive Africans in Key West facing an imminent second ocean crossing. In this last prediction, Pennington showed tragic foresight. The politically expedient removal of recaptives from Charleston and Key West sent slave trade refugees in fragile states of health back across the Atlantic. Admittedly, there were no easy answers to Pennington’s call for justice and humanity for slave trade recaptives. Even if recaptives had been temporarily and adequately sheltered in the United States according to Pennington’s proposal, questions of repatriation and redress would still have remained. Furthermore, black abolitionists’ articulation of shared human rights could not address the socially specific crisis faced by recaptives in their Atlantic odyssey. In this respect, African American advocacy reached its practical limits. On their own, slave ship survivors in transit to Liberia responded to the social crisis of death and loss by building shipmate communities through the day-to-day art of innovation amidst scarcity.
5: Surviving Recaptive Transport
We are the finished. We are the people
at the railing, peering into the water,
waiting for the Great White Whale, waiting
for the shark of many jaws. We are the
jokers who laugh like fire falling into
water.
∼Yvette Christiansë, “What the Girl Who Was a Cabin Boy Heard or Said—Which Is Not Clear,” from Castaway
Almost seven weeks into the Castilian’s crossing from Key West to Liberia, a group of women recaptives brought a companion in great distress to the ship’s white American doctor, William Proby Young. As Young noted in his journal later that day, the women gestured to their shipmate’s abdomen and breasts, exclaiming, “Picanini,” to indicate her pregnancy. Within hours, the afflicted woman began to hemorrhage and soon “was delivered of a foetus between 6 and 7 months old.” Young stanched the bleeding with a cloth tampon and treated her with laudanum, giving strictest instructions to the ship’s black nurse that she should stay in the hospital. Privately he confided to his journal, “It is hardly possible she can recover.” To his surprise, Young discovered the next morning that female recaptives, led by
the spokeswoman Bomba, had insisted on moving their shipmate out of the foul-smelling sickroom and back to the women’s quarters below. For the next two days, Bomba watched over the woman and relayed news of her condition to the doctor. Though Young prevailed in the end by moving the patient back to the hospital, recaptive women played an active role in her care, quite possibly contributing to her survival in the critical period immediately following her miscarriage.1
The interaction between recaptive women shipmates and the government-appointed physician William P. Young vividly illustrates how slave ship refugees responded to the social crisis of recaptivity in the midst of death and debility. Far from depicting recaptives as passive victims of their ordeal, the incident reveals African women organizing collective care on behalf of a companion and negotiating shipboard authority in the figure of the white physician and the space of the designated “hospital.” The women’s actions convey what Vincent Brown has so aptly called the “politics of survival, existential struggle transcending resistance to enslavement.”2 Bomba’s authoritative actions and the women’s refusal to leave their weakened companion enacted a recaptive politics of survival that asserted the social world of shipmates over Young’s idea of black patient care. The forced policy of recaptive removal, however, often compounded the difficulties of reconstructing such social bonds. Another ocean voyage, following in the wake of the middle passage, extended recaptives’ physical trauma and deepened the threat of alienation, even as shipmates created a temporary society at sea. For this reason, the movement of recaptive shipmates through the death-filled journeys of government-chartered ships illuminates the intertwined nature of trauma and resilience as well as the power relations underlying recaptive survival strategies.3
An exploration of the existential struggle for survival on four recaptive voyages to Liberia provides new insight into the historical processes of “retention, reinvention, and remembering” in the Black Atlantic (see Table 1).4 We have already considered recaptive worlds in the short-term camps of Fort Sumter and Key West, in which shipmates turned to one another to mourn the dead and carry on daily life under federal guard. Recaptive transport ships traveling for Liberia under the American flag can be seen as federal camps afloat, in which the authority of both ship captains and government-appointed physicians determined daily routines and rations. Coercive regimes of discipline, provision, medical care, and spatial confinement replicated some of the conditions of slave ships. In important respects, however, as historian Walter Hawthorne has observed for the Emilia shipmates in Brazilian custody in 1821, recaptives en route to Liberia “had no one but themselves.”5 Between moments of externally imposed authority, recaptives were often left to their own devices. How they filled long days and nights of sea travel can tell us much about recaptive politics of survival. Read carefully, partial evidence kept by American agents aboard these ships reveals a range of culturally specific practices of mourning, healing, and beautification through which recaptive shipmates improvised a social world that could carry them to the next phase of their journey. Shipmate bonds proved vital, not only for enslaved Africans in the Americas but also for recaptives in motion across the Atlantic.
TABLE 1 Dual Voyages of Recaptive Shipmates in U.S. Custody, 1858 and 1860
*All embarkation dates were reported by slave ship captains and crew to U.S. officials and cannot be independently verified.
**Including thirteen Wildfire shipmates who sailed with the South Shore to Liberia.
Sources: Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 8; Log of United States Naval Ship Niagara, 21 September–8 November 1858, LNS; Log of United States Steamer Mohawk, 26 April 1860, LNS; Log of United States Steamer Wyandotte, 9 May 1860, LNS; Log of United States Steamer Crusader, 23 May 1860, LNS; Voyages, IDs #4284, #4362, #4364, #4363; Young Ship Log; McCalla Journal; Grymes Report; H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 615–20.
Not all recaptives had equal access to resources that enabled them to reconstruct new forms of affiliation and belonging. Later sections of this chapter demonstrate that although recaptives of all ages suffered the traumas of displacement, youth and adults waged their politics of survival differently. Specifically, the West African group of older recaptives sold in Ouidah had deeper reservoirs of knowledge and skill to offer one another on their Liberian return. Survivors of Congo River enslavement, most of whom were children and adolescents, pursued a more basic path to survival, seeking protection under more powerful adults and, failing that, in their own numbers. Evidence from U.S. recaptive voyages thus extends and tests Benjamin Lawrance’s assertion, based on a study of six children of the Amistad, that “ethnicity and identity had little meaning to child slaves” and that recaptive African “orphans” prized security over the fictions of legal freedom.6
FIGURE 5.1 William Proby Young sketched this image of himself as he sailed from New York to Key West in June 1860. He fashioned himself in the tradition of intrepid African explorers with the caption “Ye unshorn physn to the Congos as he appeareth in his red plaid woolen shirt.” Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society, Richmond.
Ironically, the very ethnographic objectification that surrounded recaptives in the United States also generated much of the evidence on shipmate interaction aboard recaptive transports. Physicians William P. Young, Webster Lindsly, John Moore McCalla, and James Grymes all made observations that revealed their familiarity with the “manners and customs” genre of midcentury African exploration literature. Each of the upper South white doctors hired as federal agents expressed a certain degree of humanitarian motivation, but the opportunity for adventurous travel also influenced their acceptance of the job. Perhaps thinking of David Livingstone, Young adorned the front of his personal journal with a sketch of himself captioned, “Ye unshorn physn to the Congos” (fig. 5.1).7 In addition to keeping a daily journal, Young capitalized on the exotic element of his trip by writing a colorful letter that was reprinted by several East Coast newspapers.8 In a similar vein of tropical fantasy, Young’s counterpart John McCalla packed a “fancy dress” and other items he hoped to trade with “natives on the coast.”9 James Grymes also included lengthy ethnographic observations in his medical reports submitted to the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the federal government.10 Without a doubt, racial assumptions and imperial frames of reference shaped the observations of white agents and must be factored into any use of their writing as evidence for recaptive shipmate relations. Nevertheless, their ship journals and physician reports, in addition to a journalist’s account and the official USS Niagara log, provide the only existing daily record of U.S. recaptive transport voyages. Despite their obvious biases, these records attend to the myriad details of everyday life and death, revealing valuable insights about the social worlds of individual recaptives and their survival strategies.
“Emancipation of Itself Will Not Do”: Recaptive Voyages in Comparative Perspective
The 1858 and 1860 recaptive voyages considered here belong to a broader Atlantic history of migration forced upon recaptives after their seizure on illegal slave ships.11 The vast majority of slave trade refugees had little to no say in their subsequent journeys. Extended movement under circumstances ranging from difficult to lethal must thus be considered as one of the key attributes of recaptivity that profoundly shaped the possibilities for survival, protection, and community formation in the first weeks and months after the interruption of a slaving voyage. When navy vessels intercepted slavers at sea, recaptives often endured weeks of further confinement in the slave decks before being allowed to disembark. Once landed in temporary receiving areas, thousands of recaptives soon found themselves shipped to distant locations for resettlement according to the policies of the capturing nation. Situating U.S. recaptives within the context of other forced migrations of nineteenth-century slave trade refugees illuminates both the commonalities of recaptive survival struggles and the distinct impact of American removal policies.
For captives seized on slavers far from an adjudicating port, the
voyage of a slaver in the hands of a naval prize crew often extended the suffering and mortality of the middle passage. In one horrific instance publicized by a British chaplain in 1844, a British prize crew took fifty days to sail the slaver Progresso from the Mozambique Channel to the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage marked by sailor abuse, slave deck revolt, and 163 recaptive deaths.12 Captives of slave ships seized along the western coast of Africa also experienced extended voyages and further deprivation caused by inexperienced crews, insufficient provisions, and countervailing winds and currents as prize ships sailed for Sierra Leone and Liberia.13 In fact, British officials began using St. Helena in 1840 as a transit site in part to reduce the long days spent by recaptives on seized slaving vessels.14 Although prize ships intercepted by the U.S. Navy near Cuba reached Key West and Charleston within just a few days, recaptives aboard four other slavers seized that same summer on the African coast by the U.S. Africa Squadron endured greater additional time at sea. The USS Mohican, for example, captured the slaver Erie near the Congo River on 8 August 1860, but it took almost two more weeks to bring 900 “wretched and emaciated” children, men, and women to Monrovia, during which time at least thirty more deaths occurred despite medical attention provided by the prize crew.15 The Pons, in 1845, had an even more terrible two-week passage from Cabinda to Monrovia, resulting in the deaths of 150 young people and the suicide of one male recaptive.16 Even after naval captors took control of illegal slave ships, African recaptives continued to endure middle passage conditions.
In other cases, the extended confinement of slave ship refugees resulted from international disagreements in mixed-commission courts.17 During the 1820s and 1830s, multilateral slave trade suppression treaties created significant tensions between British abolitionism and the interests of second slavery societies like Cuba and Brazil.18 As Beatriz Mamigonian and Rosanne Adderley have argued, British officials imbued the category of “liberated African” with free labor and abolitionist meanings, even as they sought to take advantage of a potential new reservoir of labor.19 The resulting international controversies prolonged the uncertainty for recaptives waiting to disembark seized slave ships. In 1839, for instance, 500 recaptives aboard the slavers Diligente and Feliz anchored for weeks at Rio de Janeiro while Brazilian and British authorities negotiated the rules for mixed-commission adjudication. Held as diplomatic “bargaining pieces,” African shipmates waiting in the harbor became virtual slave ship prisoners, suffering from perilous health and the dangers of abduction while British officials threatened to send the ships to the British colony of Demerara. The conflict eventually resolved with the disembarkation of recaptives as africanos livres in Rio de Janeiro, but many recaptives did indeed find themselves quickly loaded onto ships for other unfamiliar destinations.20
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