Although it is impossible to confirm absolutely the making of kóló on the Star of the Union, the creation of artistic marks intended to be seen and understood by others nevertheless signified an act of imagination in the midst of severe deprivation. Samuël Coghe’s work on recaptured Africans adjudicated by the Luandan mixed-commission court shows how officials “shaped” recaptive bodies through coerced vaccination, branding, and regulation of punishments.150 One could similarly argue that recaptives in U.S. custody continued to be regulated, disciplined, and physically shaped well after leaving the confinement of illegal slave ships. Yet in the hours it took for one recaptive woman to painfully beautify another, these women asserted themselves as more than branded cargo and isolated bodies. Although sources are not clear about whether the enslaved captives of the Bogota had been branded at the coast, other Ouidah records indicate branding continued in the illegal trading period, for the purpose of distinguishing the claims of multiple clandestine investors.151 In this moment recorded by McCalla, however, aesthetic expression reasserted social connection within a cultural context understood by the unnamed woman’s shipmate. More than the marking of an individual body, the act of creation and a mutual understanding of the marks’ significance crucially asserted corporate membership within the alien space of the transport vessel.
In terms of racial hierarchies and the prevalence of death, U.S. transports to Liberia sailed directly in the wake of illegal slavers and gave urgency to the politics of survival. Survival had a politics because, for recaptives, pursuit of life drew them into a contest for resources, meaning, and connection. The ubiquitous threat of isolation, violence, and death lent urgency to the efforts of recaptives to survive their ordeal not just individually but in shipmate collectives. In the face of death, groups of recaptives strengthened their shipmate relations, as evidenced by young women’s improvised rites of mourning led by the headwoman Bomba. On these four U.S. recaptive voyages, shipmate collaboration manifested not in ship revolt, but in daily reclamations of knowledge, ship spaces, material provisions, and socially embedded bodies.
As this chapter has shown, shipmates came to know one another in the course of their journeys enough to cooperate in accessing the locked-away food stores, gathering around the sick and dying, interceding with ship physicians, and navigating conflicts among their shipmates. Shipmate networks gained depth through the accretion of memories gathered from their shared ordeal on two transatlantic passages. While traveling on the Castilian, for example, the former captives of the Wildfire mourned the death of a man they had called Warrior.152 When a woman Young called Fancy went into convulsions, the headman Francisco remembered she had suffered six other seizures “on the passage from Africa.”153 Through such memories, shipmates recognized and reclaimed one another as people with specific histories and losses. The politics of survival was also an embodied politics, expressed in healing, mourning, and bodily aesthetics. Staying alive was indeed important for most recaptives, but survival went beyond that, joining shipmates together in shared understandings of affliction, health, sociability, and beauty.
At the same time, the nature of shipmates’ survival politics and the cultural resources available for this work of reclamation depended greatly on age and experience. Three of the four groups of recaptives considered here carried a majority of young people from West Central Africa, children and adolescents who would never come of age in their own societies. Benjamin Lawrance’s argument that the “orphans” of the Amistad lived under the shadow of a “permanent state of childhood” is highly relevant to the children of this study as well.154 Many child recaptives from the Echo, Wildfire, and William had been enslaved and on the move for most, if not all, of their known lives, exposed to an excess of death and violence. The American sailor Lucius Vermilyea, for example, observed child captives embarked from the Congo River on the Montauk in 1860: “So used were they to death, that little girls would point at and laugh at a corpse lying near them.”155 Like the boys who grouped together for self-defense on the Niagara, large numbers of children and youth aboard illegal slavers and recaptive transports experienced extreme vulnerability and exposure. Compared with the few children scattered among the Bogota adult shipmates, hundreds of West Central African children, many of whom were already sick when they embarked from Key West, had far less access to healing skills and ritual expertise. Evidence from U.S. recaptive transports thus sheds light on how the age profile of particular shipmate groups offered varying resources for survival and social relations.
To a large extent, recaptive shipmates in transit were left to their own devices by crew and agents who demonstrated little of the colonizing or civilizing zeal that officials would direct at recaptives upon their arrival in Liberia. Only Grymes’s report to the ACS and McCalla’s journal comments on the marriage services performed aboard the Star of the Union expressed any sense that recaptive voyages might serve some didactic purpose for acculturating African recaptives to Protestant, Anglo-American mores.156 In the vacant spaces created by language barriers and American racial disdain, recaptive forced migrants built upon the experience of middle passage trauma to further develop shipmate affiliations that covered the spectrum from conflict to collaboration. Those who survived to disembark in Liberia encountered a more extended phase of exile, where discrete groups of shipmates would be governed by the system of Liberian apprenticeship and incorporated into a larger “Congo” recaptive identity.
6: Becoming Liberian “Congoes”
Jah-Jah! The children crying in the wilderness.
Send us a prophet, to warn the nation.
All the children in this creation,
All the people that you see
Will be the children of the Most High.
∼“Children Crying” lyrics, The Congos, Heart of the Congos album, 1977
MARRIED.—On Thursday, the 17th inst. (March,) at the Colonization Receptacle in Monrovia, by the Rev. John Seys, KABENDAH, alias JAMES BUCHANAN, to KANDAH, alias ANN LIBERIA JEFFS, both liberated Africans of the company by the US Ship Niagara.
∼African Repository quoting Liberia Christian Advocate, 1859
Four months after their arrival in Monrovia, Kandah and Kabendah, former recaptives of the Echo, were married by the U.S. agent for recaptured Africans John Seys. Everything about the ceremony revealed the tenuous nature of the couple’s new lives in Liberia. The wedding took place among fellow shipmates in the designated quarters (“Receptacle”) for newly arrived recaptives. According to a Liberian newspaper, Methodist clergyman Seys officiated, “in as nearly a civilized and christian style as their own rude and barbarous state would admit of.”1 Considering the transatlantic ordeal Kandah and Kabendah had survived together, their union powerfully illustrates how new social bonds could be built upon existing ties between shipmates. Indeed, as we shall see, just two weeks before this marriage ceremony, Echo recaptives had forcefully exerted themselves on behalf of a fellow shipmate—a fact that went unmentioned in the African Repository announcement. At the same time, however, the language of the announcement conveys how Liberian colonial interests shaped the pathways by which West Central African recaptives slowly became Liberian “Congoes.” Having passed through stormy U.S. debates over slavery and race, slave trade refugees like Kandah and Kabendah would now be claimed by a Liberian civilizing mission premised upon the wary incorporation of recaptives into African American emigrant households. Owing to the influx of an unprecedented wave of West Central African recaptives in the years immediately following their arrival, Kandah and Kabendah would become known not only by newly assigned English names but also by the broad ethnonym “Congoes.”2
Kandah and Kabendah’s story reveals in microcosm how recaptives removed to Liberia by U.S. mandate continued to confront death, dislocation, and dependency. African passengers had disembarked from the Niagara’s long voyage only to experience the death of ten more of their shipmates from illness and exhaustion. During the early months of 1859, American Colo
nization Society (ACS) and Liberian officials divided surviving shipmates into smaller contingents and distributed them throughout the settler population. A group of ailing recaptives remained behind in the Monrovian receptacles, but Liberian authorities and the U.S. agent sent approximately thirty people each to the smaller settlements of Robertsport in Grand Cape Mount, Grand Bassa, Sinoe, and Cape Palmas (see fig. 6.1).3 Protestant missions took in some of the children, while others remained in temporary housing until they could be apprenticed to Liberian families.4 As the ship’s company fragmented, Kandah remained behind in Monrovia, while Kabendah, according to the Liberian Christian Advocate, sailed unwillingly south to Grand Bassa, where he grieved for Kandah until authorities decided the two should be reunited. Although details of the pair’s relationship are sparse, we should look beyond the obvious sentimentalization of the Christian Advocate story to grasp the couple’s resolve not to be separated by administrative decision. Recaptive children, men, and women sought to build on and protect the social bonds they had forged throughout their voyages. Their initial years under Liberian apprenticeship, however, revealed the limitations of enacting emancipation within the constraints of a colonial society.
In contrast to the American policy of deportation, Liberian recaptive policy aimed to incorporate and assimilate slave trade refugees like Kandah and Kabendah, albeit as a subordinate population. From its inception by the ACS, Liberia’s founding mission connected the suppression of the slave trade to the spreading of “civilization, commerce, and Christianity.”5 By midcentury, thousands of free and manumitted African American emigrants had built a settler society in Liberia around an Americo-Liberian identity reflected in Westernized institutions of church, school, and family. The double naming of bride and groom in the wedding announcement thus conveyed the expectation that Kandah and Kabendah would be transformed into Ann Liberia Jeffs and James Buchanan, with the attendant acculturation these names implied.6 Received as “savages” into Liberian households, recaptives in Liberia were nevertheless valued by the settler population as potential laborers, converts, and allies in the young republic’s future growth.7 As a result, apprenticeships, agricultural and industrial labor, militia service, and Christian proselytization exposed recaptives to new forms of exploitation even as they offered opportunities for building collective affiliations with a larger “Congo” population.
FIGURE 6.1 American Colonization Society map of Liberia, West Africa. G. F. Nesbitt & Company, Map of Liberia, West Africa (New York: Lith. G. F. Nesbitt & Co., 183?). Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/96684983.
The emergence of recaptives under the Liberian term “Congoes” provides an instructive case study of how Atlantic World processes of “political upheaval and violence” generated new forms of identification.8 In recent years, scholars have vigorously interrogated the historical processes of ethnogenesis in the African diaspora. Ethnic signifiers such as “Igbo” and “Yoruba,” once treated as relatively fixed, now appear as complex, malleable categories shaped by forced migration, social rupture, and political turmoil. Both identification from within and imposition from without played a role in the formation of new recaptive, or “liberated African,” communities throughout the Atlantic World.9 In Liberia, an examination of the historical emergence of the “Congoes” label suggests how recaptives were grouped under the term to serve missionary and Liberian state interests. Ironically, by the mid-twentieth century, the term “Congo” had come to mean not only the descendants of recaptives but also those of black American migrants, in contrast to the indigenous “country” population.10 In the nineteenth century, however, both white ACS authorities and Liberian colonists used “Congo” to denote a specific recaptive population distinguished from both the migrant black American and the indigenous populations.11 To some extent, West Central African recaptives actively pursued affiliations with earlier generations of recaptives on the basis of geographic origin and forced migration experiences. Yet, as we have seen, children made up large portions of the recaptive population. As these young people sought protection and security in the wake of slave ship terrors, they experienced continued danger and vulnerability. Age thus played a large role in the degree of control that recaptives had over their Liberian environment. As a result, the “Congo” ethnonym emerged largely in the context of struggle with dependency and subordination in Liberian colonial society.
Recaptives in Liberian Colonial Strategy, 1820s–1840s
Shipmates of the Echo, Wildfire, William, andBogota found themselves transported to a small West African republic where the demographic category of “recaptured African” had already played a sustained role in colonial development. Although many studies of Liberia understandably focus on the ACS’s colonization of free and manumitted African Americans, the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade and the resettlement of Africans seized on illegal slavers also figured significantly in Liberia’s history.12 As we saw earlier, ACS success in lobbying for U.S. federal appropriations in 1819 rested heavily on the society’s promise to secure a West African outpost where recaptives could be resettled “beyond the limits of the United States.”13 Claims that Liberia’s existence contributed to slave trade suppression and provided a refuge for the victims of illegal slavers appeared prominently in ACS appeals for private donations and federal funding.14 From the early years of colonization in the 1820s, ACS agents in Liberia also frequently doubled as U.S. government agents for recaptured Africans.15 Furthermore, slave trade suppression objectives underwrote the deployment of U.S. naval resources along the coast of a colony not even officially claimed by the American government.16 Finally, the right of the ACS to continue to settle recaptives with American financial support after Liberian independence in 1847 constituted one of the key issues in post-independence negotiations.17 In short, the entanglement of U.S., ACS, and Liberian slave trade suppression politics strongly limited the conditions under which recaptives could establish a new life in the wake of their transatlantic voyages.18
Liberia’s colonizers also expected slave trade recaptives to play a strategic role in the balance of power between colonists and indigenous groups. The small but growing population of African American migrants nurtured by the ACS at Cape Mesurado displaced and disrupted many existing polities already residing in the region of the Grain Coast.19 Indigenes including Bassa, Grebo, Dei, Vai, Kpelle, and Gola often resisted Liberian emigrants’ efforts to claim permanent title to land. Others, such as the residents of coastal Kru towns, proved far more interested in potential commercial opportunities than appeals to Christian conversion.20 Vai traders long established near the region colonists called Grand Cape Mount fought both colonists and other contending indigenous groups for access to trade relations with Europeans that included the slave trade.21 In this unstable colonial borderland, the ACS and African American emigrants looked to recaptives as an alternative labor source and a population buffer between settlers and indigenes.22 Meanwhile, missionaries anticipated that orphaned and destitute recaptives would prove better candidates than indigenous societies for Christian conversion. Publicly, both Liberian leaders and missionaries spoke of recaptives as a providential population who promised in theory to become “a blessing to Africa” as they merged with the Liberian emigrant population.23
In actuality, the recaptive population was neither as numerous nor as tractable as colonizationist rhetoric anticipated. Compared with the steady arrival of nearly 99,000 people registered as liberated Africans in the adjacent British colony of Sierra Leone, limited U.S. slave trade suppression efforts yielded only three unevenly sized generations of recaptives arriving in Liberia during the nineteenth century.24 ACS records show that the U.S. transported 286 recaptives to Liberia in the colonial period up to the 1843 census. As recounted in Chapter 1, African captives from the captured vessels Antelope and Fenix, along with the shipwrecked slaver Guerrero, constituted a significant portion of the early recaptive popu
lation.25 Survivors from these ships arrived at Cape Mesurado after years of legal limbo in Florida, Savannah, and New Orleans. In addition, colonists in Liberia seized another 150 captives from nearby Spanish coastal slaving operations during the 1820s and settled them within the new colony’s boundaries.26 By the 1830s, a recaptive community described as both “Congo” and “Eboe” (Igbo) grew up in New Georgia, roughly five miles north of Monrovia on Stockton Creek.27 A few eventually made their way to Sierra Leone or blended into the indigenous population, but most recaptives in New Georgia formed families, farmed crops, and cut timber for the Monrovia markets, living alongside a handful of African American colonists.28 Missionaries and ACS agents emphasized the assimilation of the New Georgians, citing school attendance, church membership, and even the exemplary rise of one recaptive “citizen” to legislative office.29 Yet, historian Claude Clegg reminds us, recaptives in Liberian society remained “a people between two worlds,” living with a legacy of displacement from their homelands while forging a new existence between indigenes and colonists.30 That intermediate status meant that future groups of recaptives would face colonial administrators who perceived them as both a national resource and a disorderly presence.31
Ambivalent Liberian views of recaptives intensified with the arrival of the second generation of recaptives. In December 1845, the American barque Pons appeared at Cape Mesurado carrying 756 young West Central Africans in an extreme state of trauma. Having been seized just three days out from Cabinda, the Pons took another sixteen days to reach Monrovia, during which time 150 recaptives perished. Horrified eyewitnesses who boarded the ship described how, in the absence of even a rough wooden slave deck, hundreds of boys and young men had been “piled almost in bulk, on the water casks” in the stench of the closed and darkened hold. Meanwhile, 47 girls and women crowded into a portion of the roundhouse cabin in close proximity to the captain’s and mates’ berths.32 Like the other slavers embarking from West Central Africa in this study, the Pons held a majority of young people between the ages of ten and twenty who had clearly experienced successive phases of violence and loss before being forced aboard a foreign vessel.33 Coming ashore in Monrovia, young people of the Pons more than tripled the colony’s recaptive population and placed heavy demands on local resources.34 Their arrival presented Liberian colonists with a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions that would become all too familiar in later years.
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