Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  Even as officials struggled to feed, clothe, and medically care for almost 800 young people in desperate condition, portions of Liberian colonial society saw these young refugees as a blessing in disguise for their nascent republic. The Pons recaptives arrived in the midst of debates over the question of Liberia’s capacity to function as an independent state.35 Both symbolically and practically, young shipmates of the Pons represented future labor and an expanded colonial population for those invested in Liberian autonomy. James Washington Lugenbeel, a white North Carolina ACS agent who became the U.S. agent for recaptives in this period, reported the eagerness with which colonists sought to take recaptives into their households, some out of benevolent sympathy, others happy to avail themselves of apprenticed labor in homes, businesses, and fields. Lugenbeel doled out recaptives to colonists he deemed able to care for them, requiring a signature of agreement to return in two months for formal apprenticeship proceedings.36 In a significant exception to this pattern, he placed seventeen “headmen” of the Pons shipmates in New Georgia “under the care of some of their countrymen,” thus connecting first and second generations of West Central African recaptives.37 The vast majority of recaptives, however, entered colonial households for seven years under apprenticeship laws written primarily for indigenous youth. It was this arrangement in the homes of better-off Monrovian colonists that Samuel S. Ball, a Colored Baptist Association elder who traveled from Illinois to Liberia in 1848, described as a starkly subordinate form of labor. According to Ball, “About their houses, these natives [including Pons apprentices] do all the menial service; such as packing wood and water and cooking and waiting about the house.” Most egregious in Ball’s view was the inability of apprenticed children to attend school as equals of Liberian youth.38

  Liberian and ACS officials assumed that the apprenticing of recaptives into settler households would result in their assimilation into Liberian, Christian social institutions.39 In this regard, child recaptives of the Pons, especially malleable in their orphaned state, generated special empathy and interest among resident missionaries. Methodist Episcopal clergy eagerly accepted 100 Pons children—80 boys and 20 girls—from the Monrovian receptacle. Caring for these orphans far from their homes, white Methodist clergyman John B. Benham hoped, would cultivate their “gratitude and fidelity,” thus leading to Christian conversion and future church membership. In a promotional letter designed for U.S. home audiences, Benham depicted the arrival of recaptive youth as a providential opportunity for “obtaining children for our mission schools, who will, in all probability, be permanently connected with them until they shall have arrived at adult age.”40 His statement conveyed the general missionary perception that slave trade suppression beneficially produced, in historian Benjamin Lawrance’s words, a “repository of vulnerable, kinless individuals.”41 Recaptive girls in particular represented “a great acquisition.” As missionary Susan Benham claimed in a letter to American church members, indigenous families resisted sending their daughters to mission schools, and thus even a small number of recaptive girls improved the gender balance among their charges.42 Missionary evangelists thus placed high hopes in the female portion of the Pons children, depending on the girls for the transmission of “civilization” through marriage and the reproduction of Christian converts. Ann Wilkins, a white long-term Methodist missionary, promised U.S. donors a personal stake in the civilizing mission by offering them the privilege of renaming recaptive girls at her boarding school in Millsburg.43 As many Liberian missionaries at the time viewed it, the “great evil” of the slave trade promised to “bring good” to Liberia in the form of pliable recaptive children.44

  Yet some Liberian emigrants remained skeptical, seeing more threat than promise. Many African Americans, free and recently manumitted, came to Liberia with expectations shaped by Western civilization discourse, but they also subsequently developed a “siege mentality” as the result of contentious relations with indigenous neighbors.45 Fears of disorder deepened when large numbers of young Pons recaptives apparently escaped the homes of their Liberian guardians. The immediate cause of their flight lay in the inability of the ACS and the U.S. government to adequately subsidize the support of almost 800 destitute children and young adults. In addition, their escape may have been prompted not only from hunger but also from fear of further enslavement; a few may have nurtured misinformed hopes of reaching their faraway West Central African homelands.46 As we shall see with later recaptive groups, attempted escape from apprenticeship was not an uncommon response. Between late 1846 and early 1847, newspaper reports of “fugitive savages” hidden in the forests and seeking to “plunder from the colonists” turned preconception to fear.47 Matilda Lomax, a Virginia-born African American woman who emigrated to Monrovia as a girl, described the Pons “Congoes” as “the most Savage, & blud thirsty people I ever saw or ever wishes to see.”48 Views of recaptives as untamed and violent existed among Liberian colonists in uneasy tension with hopes for their future acculturation.

  Colonists’ anxieties quieted, however, as some young Pons recaptives found life on the margins of settlements untenable. Governor Joseph J. Roberts reassured the ACS in October 1846 that many runaways had returned and been bound out to “suitable homes.”49 Beyond the valuable labor they represented for Liberian farming and timbering, recaptives were, the Liberia Herald reported, “becoming of value to their guardians” through their impact on Liberian relations with indigenous groups. One Grand Bassa colonist in 1847 described recaptives as shifting the balance of tensions between their small settlement and nearby towns: “Our Congoes have really turned out manly; they have thrown more dread upon the Fishmen, (our former antagonists,) and the surrounding tribes, than I have ever known exerted upon them before.”50 Two years later, in the same area, twenty-five “Congoes” from the Pons participated in an armed attack on slave trader operations at New Cess.51 The emphasis on the militancy of “Congo” men in these examples diverges from most Liberian accounts of Pons survivors as abject and uncivilized. Both versions, however, defined recaptives as a distinct population whose arrival would shape Liberia’s future for better or worse. By the 1860s, when the largest and final generation of recaptives arrived, Liberians were describing surviving Pons shipmates as “docile, industrious, and worthy,” in other words—like their New Georgian predecessors—symbols of Liberia’s civilizing influence and national potential.52

  Overall, the Liberian response to Pons recaptives established the terms under which a much larger, third generation of recaptives would end their forced Atlantic travels. First, young survivors of the Pons became a bridging generation for later recaptives. Having been brought to Liberia as children and teenagers, many Pons recaptives served as interpreters and supervisors when the Echo shipmates arrived on the Niagara twelve years later. Second, the economic imperatives of a small and newly independent black republic after 1847 would continue to shape a resettlement policy that apprenticed recaptives with Liberian families. The young age of many recaptives, of course, also led to their placement as dependents within settler households and shaped external perceptions of them as a permanently dependent class.53 At the same time, future recaptives, like some of the Pons shipmates, resisted their apprenticeships through escapes and other forms of protest. Third and finally, the embarkation of Pons shipmates from Cabinda reinforced the broad umbrella term of “Congo” for the West Central African recaptive population.54 The term had first been applied, in Liberia within missionary and ACS lexicons, to the New Georgia settlement. By 1860, with the mass entrance of thousands of recaptives, “Congoes” became an ethnic designation that merged a generalized geographic origin with a historically specific experience of Atlantic displacement.55

  The 1860s “Congo Question” and Recaptive Apprenticeship

  In May 1861, the ACS periodical African Repository remarked, “The ‘Congo question,’ as the Liberians term the introduction of recaptured Africans, has caused no little excitement. All, however, is qui
et now on that score.”56 Despite the ACS’s attempt at reassurance, the arrival of the third generation of recaptives caused a long-term social, cultural, and economic transformation of Liberian society.57 And, in turn, Liberian political and economic imperatives shaped and constrained the worlds recaptives built on the foundation of their shipmate bonds. Between 1858 and 1861, the final wave of forced immigrants arrived in Liberia, numbering a total of 4,675 recaptives on nine different ships (see Table 5). At the time, the settler population of the tiny republic numbered less than 10,000, mostly concentrated in Monrovia and in colonial settlements along the St. Paul River.58 The emigration of hundreds of impoverished former slaves from the United States during this same period compounded the human costs of what Claude Clegg terms Liberia’s “era of despair.”59 Such conditions set the stage for potential friction, if not outright exploitation, between Liberian immigrants and hundreds of recaptives produced by the heightened efforts of U.S. naval patrols.

  Shipmates of the slaver Echo, the first of a third wave of slave trade refugees, arrived from Charleston on the USS Niagara in early November 1858. Conflict followed quickly, as recaptive men, women, and children spent months confined to the receptacle in Monrovia under the supervision of ACS agent Henry Dennis and U.S. agent for recaptured Africans John Seys. In March 1859, tensions over conditions and treatment in the receptacle ignited when the husband of Mrs. Freeman, one of the women employed to serve as nurse and “matron” to recaptive children, beat a recaptive youth for failing to perform an order. Significantly, Mr. Freeman did not play any official role in the receptacle but simply lived with his employed wife. In Seys’s opinion at least, Mr. Freeman had wrongly attempted to use recaptive labor for his personal benefit. An angry crowd immediately left the receptacle with the injured young man, searching for Seys at the U.S. consulate office. Their march to the consulate building suggests that for recaptives, survival strategies included acquiring knowledge about the terrain of local authority in their new environment. However, failing to find an interpreter who could help them express their indignation over the young recaptive’s bleeding eye and welted back, a growing crowd turned their anger on Mr. Freeman, who had hidden in a nearby home. The ensuing rare description of recaptive armed resistance suggested a sense of cohesion among Echo shipmates forged across their extended journey.60

  Retaliation by recaptives on behalf of an injured shipmate reflected both an ethos of collective protection and a refusal to accept arbitrary violence as a condition of their new lives. According to John Seys, “The whole congoe fraternity rallied around their injured brother.” He went on to describe the growing “mob” of “men—women—boys—girls—all uniting and all armed with stones, clubs, and some with cutlasses,” as they attacked the home where Freeman had sought refuge. During the dispute, Liberians fired muskets upon the angry “Echoites,” and a young recaptive woman received a gunshot wound before the protest was finally put down by local authorities. After the magistrate court imposed a fine on Freeman and had the leaders of the protest “soundly thrashed,” U.S. agent John Seys held a mass meeting, asking recaptives to bring future grievances to him and other agents, who would “see them redressed.”61 At the same time, ACS agent Dennis quickly mobilized to remove “unruly” recaptives from Monrovia and contract them as apprentices throughout Liberia’s rural districts.62 Though quickly suppressed, the Echo shipmates’ rebellion illuminates both shipmate solidarity and Liberian supervisors’ concerns with controlling potential unrest.

  Compared with Echo shipmates, recaptives of the three chartered vessels sailing from Key West less than two years later entered Liberia in much different circumstances alongside a swelling tide of recaptives newly seized off the West Central African coast. In August 1860, U.S. Navy prize crews brought two slavers, the Storm King and the Erie, into Monrovia, carrying a total of nearly 1,500 young recaptives embarked from the Congo River barracoons.63 Within the next half year, the U.S. Africa Squadron intercepted three additional American-built slavers near the African coast (Cora, Bonito, and Nightingale), bringing another 2,100 young people to Liberia’s doorstep.64 The majority of recaptives sailing from Key West thus entered Liberia with thousands of other slave trade refugees, considered by Liberian officials to be their “countrymen” and fellow “Congoes.”65

  TABLE 5 Recaptive Arrivals in Liberia, 1858–1861

  *Including 3 recaptive boys from the Wm. R. Kibby, arrived in M.C. Stevens, 15 December 1860.

  Source: Letters Received from John Seys, reel 10, RSI.

  Overwhelmed with Storm King and Erie shipmates at the Monrovia receptacles, the U.S. agent sent each of the three Key West groups to a different peripheral settlement along the Liberian coast. In each location, recaptives from Key West joined a smaller group of Echo shipmates. For example, Wildfire shipmates, including Francisco and Bomba, disembarked at Cape Mount near Liberia’s northern border. The William’s sick and emaciated young passengers came ashore at the small settlement of Bassa Cove roughly 60 miles southeast of Monrovia, where the previously mentioned Kabendah had been transported before his return to Monrovia. Finally, the Bogota’s shipmates from the Bight of Benin arrived at Greenville, Sinoe, a small settlement about 150 miles southeast of Monrovia. Sinoe had been colonized initially as Mississippi in Africa but merged with Liberia in 1841.66 As we shall see, the Bight of Benin shipmates remained an anomaly within the larger West Central African recaptive population, first for their distinct origins primarily in Yoruba towns and, second, for their more adult company. Geography and language influenced their exclusion from the broad “Congo” ethnonym, while age and experience offered adults additional resources for asserting greater autonomy and control over their futures.

  Given the crisis conditions under which recaptives arrived in Liberia in 1860, the “Congo question” actually posed several different simultaneous problems. Liberian leaders President Stephen Benson and Secretary of State John N. Lewis wondered how to access promised American funding for recaptive support while defending the integrity of the young nation’s sovereignty. U.S. and Liberian agents and physicians on the front lines of recaptive reception asked how to feed, clothe, and shelter thousands of recaptives. Liberian intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell worked to assuage concerns about how Liberia could assimilate so many “Congo” newcomers into the “settler standard” of Christianity and republicanism without endangering the dream of Liberia as a beacon of African civilization.67 And through it all, young shipmates all too familiar with separation, violence, and forced migration searched for security and belonging through reinvented social connections of kinship and community.

  Liberia’s tangled relationship with the ACS and U.S. slave trade suppression increased political tensions resulting from the third wave of slave ship recaptives. Since 1819, the ACS had received occasional U.S. congressional appropriations for the support of recaptured Africans and the U.S. Agency for Recaptured Africans stationed at Monrovia.68 After Liberia declared independence on 26 July 1847, it drew up a legal agreement outlining its political and financial relationship to the ACS. Article 1 of this agreement secured the receptacles as ACS property, while Article 4 agreed that recaptives would continue to be allowed to enter Liberia with support from the U.S. government.69 Despite these provisions, however, U.S. presidents continually refused to grant diplomatic recognition to Liberia. Given these circumstances, the U.S. intent to settle thousands of recaptives in Liberia aroused Liberian leaders’ understandable concern. If the United States expected Liberia to admit thousands of recaptives, President Benson demanded, contracts should be drawn up with Liberia, not the ACS, and U.S. funds should flow directly to Liberian treasuries. Until funding issues could be resolved, the Liberian government insisted that recaptives remain in the receptacle areas owned by the ACS.70Furthermore, the Liberian government swiftly declined U.S. agent John Seys’s request to print his own promissory notes for paying recaptive expenses.71

  As negotiations proceeded, Liberian secretar
y of state John Lewis pled for direct U.S. funding as the only means by which Liberia could mitigate the moral threat posed to the “civilized” emigrant population by “wild heathens from various tribes.” Lewis, like many other Liberian emigrants, clearly supported the idea of a black republic taking a leading role in the suppression of the slave trade.72 Yet his arguments also reflected concern over the risks posed by incorporating recaptives into the Liberian settler population.73 President Benson proposed to the ACS a plan whereby large groups of recaptives could be settled on Liberian land under long-term support and supervision that included manual labor training. Notably Benson’s plan would have removed recaptives from ACS-controlled receptacles once U.S. funding had been received, thus offering a second option for recaptive residence alongside apprenticeship.74 After a drawn-out negotiation, the ACS agreed to turn over U.S. funds to the Liberian treasury beginning in 1861. However, agent John Seys, with his own long and controversial history in Liberian politics, would remain in place to sign off on Liberian compliance before the United States fully subsidized recaptive expenses.75 The administrative imperative to account to the U.S. government for recaptive numbers provided a structure for oversight of recaptive apprentice treatment. Yet it also contributed to the surveillance and constrained geographic mobility experienced by recaptives during their first year in Liberia.