British plantation labor demands initiated most of the recaptive journeys that followed quickly on the heels of slave ship passages. Labor agents routinely targeted the recaptive yard in Sierra Leone and transit camps in St. Helena for coerced emigrant labor to the West Indies and Cape Colony.21 Additionally, some male recaptives were pressured or compelled into military service.22 The shift in venue for most slave ship hearings from mixed commissions to British vice-admiralty courts gave British authorities full authorization to structure recaptive policies that steered slave ship refugees toward West Indian migration. In Trinidad, for example, planters sought apprenticed African laborers to boost the flagging production of post-abolition sugar plantations.23 In all, transport ships carried roughly 30,000 liberated Africans as emigrant laborers to postemancipation Caribbean colonies. British officials from the 1830s to the 1860s made a variety of arrangements, including private subcontracting, military transports, and monopoly contract, to transport apprenticed African recaptives.24 Recaptives who had already experienced the terrors of a slave ship distrusted these emigrant vessels for obvious reasons, and many refused labor recruiters. Notwithstanding their fears, when confronted with undesirable alternatives, thousands of malnourished, diseased, and exhausted people recrossed the Atlantic on voyages that ruptured shipmate bonds and forced recaptives to forge new social ties in distant plantation communities.25
A different political context, however, produced the recaptive journeys to Liberia under U.S. federal jurisdiction after 1819. The entrenchment of antebellum proslavery ideology discouraged any association between American recaptive policies and abolitionism. Nor did the United States follow other second slavery societies like Cuba and Brazil in classifying emancipados as a special category of domestic black laborers who were neither free nor enslaved.26 Although rare individuals like African American abolitionist James Pennington supported humane asylum in northern homes, no one advocated for recaptives’ incorporation as citizens of the United States. One reprinted piece in the Charleston Mercury flatly asserted, “Emancipation of itself will not do.”27 To “turn them loose as free negroes,” other pundits opined, would only exacerbate sectional conflict and introduce “barbarism,” yet repatriation to specific African homelands would prove too complicated and costly.28 The 1819 law compelling American presidents to remove slave ship recaptives beyond the nation’s borders thus remained in force under President James Buchanan, reflecting U.S. unilateral suppression policy and internal fears about the status of a free black population.29
Two other unusual journeys of slave ship survivors prove the exception to the rule of alienated and dangerous recaptive voyages. The Amistad shipmates, for example, sailed with American missionaries for Freetown after more than two years in the United States. On a crossing that Marcus Rediker calls “reversing the Middle Passage,” thirty-five African adults and children traveled as conventional free passengers aboard the Gentleman, without incident of death or flogging. As passenger Kinna wrote to Lewis Tappan, “We have been on great water. Not any danger fell upon us.”30 In 1860, Tony, Pablo, and Suguilo, the recaptive boys from the slaver William R. Kibby, also experienced a safe passage with other emigrant passengers to Liberia following months in New York’s Eldridge Street jail. At the conclusion of thirty-three days at sea, the missionary C. Colden Hoffman, who took charge of the boys, wrote, “We have had a good voyage and a pleasant one; no accident has occurred, and no serious sickness.”31 In both cases, small groups of African passengers who had some time to recover physically from their middle passage ordeal traveled with sympathetic advocates and, in the case of the Amistad company, played a part in arrangements for the voyage. Larger cohorts of recaptive Africans in U.S. custody, however, traveled in circumstances far more coercive and lethal.
Despite the optimistic spin on the recaptive transports imparted by some elements of the American press, inexperience and hurried preparations compounded the difficulties of recaptive journeys. With a removal policy firmly established, the American government rushed to arrange transportation from southern ports where federal custody of recaptive Africans inflamed states’ rights politics. In 1858, Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey ordered the steamer Niagara, the nation’s largest wooden warship, to carry the Echo’s survivors. “Put the Negroes on board outside the bar [not in the harbor],” Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson directed the federal marshal in Charleston. “Let there be no delay.”32 The appearance of the Niagara drew the ire of South Carolina slave trade revivalists, yet major national papers celebrated the steamer’s Liberian mission as both modern and benevolent. In the Niagara’s “spacious apartments,” the New York Times reassured readers, “the poor negroes will find abundant room, and none of the horrors of the middle passage.”33 The journey to Monrovia under steam power was expected to last no more than three weeks, though as it turned out, sailing against a southerly wind pushed the voyage to seven.34 Furthermore, the Echo shipmates would travel in comfort with food and blankets on the spar deck like other “lower class passengers.”35 President Buchanan appointed Thomas Rainey, a New York–based scientist and ocean steamship enthusiast with North Carolina roots, as special U.S. agent in charge of recaptured Africans during the crossing.36 The Niagara’s crew also included a surgeon and an assistant surgeon to serve the medical needs of the ship’s 300 sailors and 50 marines.37 Press coverage suggested that the Echo captives would travel in comfort and protection. As the 26 percent mortality rate of the Niagara’s voyage revealed, however, these expectations proved tragically naive.
Responding to the Key West encampment two years later, Secretary Thompson and U.S. marshal Moreno also pursued a “speedy removal” of recaptive shipmates to Liberia. Thompson gave orders for the inspection and certification of “A1” quality ships for the Liberian voyage.38 The recaptive voyages in 1860 reflected close collaboration between the federal officials and the ACS to implement recaptive policy. Working in concert with ACS secretary William McLain, Thompson appointed four doctors from Washington, D.C., to accompany the ships as government agents. William Proby Young, a twenty-six-year-old Virginia native, sailed on the Castilian with the survivors of the Wildfire. Webster Lindsly, the twenty-four-year-old son of ACS Executive Committee member Harvey Lindsly, received an appointment to oversee the ailing William youth on the South Shore. Kentucky-born John Moore McCalla, accompanied by another Virginia physician, James W. Grymes, sailed on the Star of the Union with the Bogota shipmates.39 The ACS and government officials also worked together to assemble medical supplies and provisions for each journey. Compared with the slavers on which Key West recaptives had been taken from Africa, each of the chartered ships proved to be significantly larger. For example, captive shipmates who had crossed the Atlantic in the 300-ton barque Bogota departed Key West in the Star of the Union, a 1,057-ton clipper ship stocked with cases of medicine and food stores.40 Despite these practical preparations and the good health of the ships’ crews, however, recaptive shipmates experienced high mortality rates, sometimes even higher than those of the middle passage.
Middle Passages and Coercive Recaptive Transport
The anomie, violence, and coercion that marked recaptives’ journeys to Liberia suggest continuities with earlier phases of enslavement and displacement. Historians Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher have urged scholars to ask how that “epitome” of forced migration, the transatlantic middle passage, might provide insight into the “many middle passages” of a wide range of subordinated peoples set in motion by shifting global economies.41 The middle passage nature of the four Liberian transports considered here surfaces in the physical depletion of recaptive bodies, the racial disparagement of the crews, the snap of the rope whip, and the clank of shackles. Though the law of slave trade suppression clearly mattered to setting these journeys in motion, legal categories mattered less at sea. Rather, the gritty realities of daily maritime travel served as the matrix from which recaptives forged their “politics of survival.”<
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Embarkation in itself proved coercive, for despite the severe conditions of temporary federal camps, many sources reported the fear and grim resignation with which recaptives faced their impending journeys. None of these journalistic descriptions can be taken at face value, however, since secondhand reports by white observers varied wildly, from tearful pleas to remain as slaves of “civilized” American planters to calm satisfaction with their return accommodations.42 What can be discerned is that, at least in Key West, recaptives received the misleading assurance that they would “soon return to their own Country” by voicing a preference to stay where they were.43 Another correspondent in Key West noted the unusual quiet and “stolid indifference” with which Wildfire shipmates boarded the waiting Castilian, “mute, listless and many sobbing.”44 Yet another observer emphasized the distress shown by William shipmates: “They begged on their knees, threw themselves down, and by signs, in every possible way, communicated their repugnance to going back. Such as had picked up a few English words, spoke for themselves and the rest, asking the physician and the marshal to allow them to remain, and let the citizens do whatever they wished with them.”45 It is hardly necessary to accept the proslavery political agenda of some invested observers to consider the terror that another voyage evoked in young people who had experienced long, suffocating weeks packed into the deck of an illegal slaver. Reports of those who attempted to convey their alarm using English acquired during weeks in the Key West camp indicate the emotional distress caused by the approaching recaptive transport ships.
The process of loading the transports could also amplify distress. The Niagara’s imposing size, for example, inspired wonder even for navy seamen such as Henry Eason, who, when glimpsing the Niagara at sea, described it as looking “like a floating island.”46 The boarding conditions for Echo shipmates in rough waters near Charleston on a Sunday afternoon in September could easily have converted wonder to terror. High waves made it impossible for the steamboat General Clinch (of Fort Sumter excursion fame) to convey African passengers to the Niagara until the supervising officials devised a precarious method of loading groups of recaptives through the stern port of the Niagara in a cargo tub. In a process lasting well into the evening, all 271 adults and young people (including 2 infants) went aboard the naval steamship, enduring an “exportation” in “tubfulls,” as the Mercury phrased it.47 In Key West, authorities loading young recaptives aboard the South Shore used a leaky boat that capsized, drowning two people before the journey even began.48 Such measures reflected a view of African recaptives as a “cargo” to be moved as quickly as possible from camp to ship.49
Given the large numbers of children and the existing gulf of communication, it is likely that many recaptives entered their assigned transport ships not fully comprehending the purpose of their journey.50 Language barriers, both with the crew and government agents and among recaptive shipmates, contributed to the sense of disorientation and may have compounded tensions between recaptives and crew. U.S. agents relied primarily on speakers of Portuguese or Spanish to bridge the gap between English and indigenous African languages. Among the white U.S. agents, only Thomas Rainey spoke some Portuguese as a result of his previous travels to Brazil. Rainey also had the help of a Portuguese-speaking Echo crewmember, known under the name of Frank Lear, who accompanied the Niagara as interpreter and “overseer.”51 On the Castilian, Constantia, Francisco, and others who had spent extended time in Luanda used their knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish to translate for fellow shipmates.52 One crewmember on the Star of the Union spoke Spanish, and other “interpreters” (perhaps among the recaptives) contributed to the task of daily communication.53 The evolving linguistic abilities of all shipmates as they lived with one another and came into contact with crewmembers also added to the ship as a multilingual site.54 During the previously mentioned medical crisis over the miscarrying woman, for example, the women’s use of both the word “picanini” and hand signs demonstrated the improvisation necessary to communicate across language barriers.55
Linguistic obstacles nevertheless contributed to conflict and isolation during the weeks at sea. In the Castilian’s hospital, the black nurse George, who had been hired by the ACS for his stated ability to “talk Congo,” had great difficulty communicating with his recaptive charges.56 On the Star of the Union, the physician James Grymes also noted the mutual incomprehension of several languages spoken in the West African shipmates’ quarters. “Those even who assumed to be interpreters scarcely comprehended the most common place words,” he wrote, “and when signs failed to convince, all hope was lost.”57 Most poignantly, two or three recaptives from the Wildfire found themselves separated from their shipmates, placed aboard the South Shore, and “unable to communicate with the rest of the company” for the duration of the fifty-three-day journey.58 As in the middle passage, linguistic isolation added to the experience of alienation even as new language abilities slowly began to bridge that gap.
Restricted movement and confined spaces evoked other continuities with slave ships. In clear contrast to the first middle passage, in which captives lay spooned together and naked on a dark slave deck with less than four feet of vertical clearance, the passengers on Liberian transports had greater personal freedom to move and congregate in designated areas. Nevertheless, sleeping quarters remained segregated by gender, and the ship’s spaces were cordoned into permissible and restricted areas. For example, the Niagara’s captain John S. Chauncey ordered the creation of separate male, female, and sick sections on the expansive spar deck of the massive steamer and established strict “police regulations” to control the movements of African passengers.59 A rope barrier stretching across the deck demarcated the permissible areas for recaptives on the Castilian.60 Below deck, in the men’s and women’s sleeping areas on the Star of the Union, the air hung still and close. Especially when rainstorms forced the closing of the vessel’s “three small hatches,” wrote Grymes, the atmosphere became “oppressive and sickening.”61 On other ships, where passengers embarked in poorer health, similar conditions resulted in “many slow and torturing deaths” that unfolded over weeks of grinding monotony.62 In terms of spatial confinement and regulation, conditions on the Liberian voyages thus bore some similarity to those on slave ships as well as on many of the forced transoceanic migrations of convicts and indentured and contracted laborers in the mid-nineteenth century.63
Closely supervised mess times, which in some cases borrowed from slave ship equipment and routines, also reflected the imposed discipline of recaptive journeys. According to Grymes, the Star of the Union shipmates “were watered” twice daily from a common barrel (although they could then drink “as much as desired”), while the crew distributed salted meat and rice in buckets morning and afternoon. The government doctors Grymes and McCalla devised a feeding system comprised of numbered wooden tags hung around each person’s neck to organize the shipmates by “gangs” of ten.64 Significantly, Grymes also reported that the tag system doubled as a means of surveillance by which unruly recaptives could be “easily remembered and detected.”65 In making arrangements for the Star of the Union’s galley, Grymes consulted a Key West sea captain “well acquainted with the customs etc. of the Africans” to arrange for cooking rice that would resemble West African diets. In reality, the captain’s advice more accurately conveyed the customs of transatlantic slavers, for the system of feeding recaptives twice daily from large buckets of rice and salted meat closely resembled the arrangements on many slave ships.66 In fact, the boiler that cooked massive amounts of rice each day had been taken from the galley of the slave ship William in Key West. The forty-gallon sheet-iron cooker, as Grymes put it, perfectly suited “our ‘peculiar passengers.’”67
Despite Grymes’s satisfaction with the galley, months of poor diet and exposure to the elements resulted in widespread disease and high levels of mortality on Liberian journeys. As Webster Lindsly’s report to the ACS clearly indicates, young people who embarked sickly an
d weak from the William suffered most from these cumulative effects. Lindsly described the “whole company” of child recaptives aboard the South Shore as exhibiting a “cachetic” condition, wasted away “by long confinement, vitiated air, improper food and want of exercise.” Of the 355 who boarded at Key West, Lindsly estimated that 80 had been in the depot hospital. Two-thirds of the rest remained “in a diseased condition,” with ailments like dysentery, edema, and ophthalmic blindness.68 Without the careful ministrations of Paul Hall, a black nurse hired for the journey, Lindsly reported, the death toll would have been even higher.69 Scurvy, whose long-term cause lay in the nutritional deficits of the middle passage and U.S. camps, plagued African shipmates on the Liberian passage. On the South Shore, Captain Lathrop released a stash of fresh potatoes to ameliorate the suffering, but recaptives on other ships did not have access to the crew’s fresh food stores.70 Although some government doctors took pains to place the entire blame for the mortality on the ravages of the illegal slave trade, others saw the removal mandate as complicit in recaptive deaths.71 According to James Grymes, physician to the Bogota shipmates, “It seemed as if the change from land to shipboard the second time, was fatal to many of those, who had been sick or convalescing at Key West.”72 In effect, recaptives struggled to survive not only their present journey but also the physical imprint of the former middle passage.
Recaptured Africans Page 19
