Recaptured Africans
Page 27
As a coda to the mid-nineteenth-century journeys of African shipmates, it is also instructive to consider the global transformations of colonized labor that took place within the lifetimes of the last generation of slave trade recaptives. Just as the figure of the recaptive complicates the concept of an age of emancipation, so, too, do new forced voyages in the wake of the last known slave ships complicate the idea of the end of the middle passage. Throughout this account, we have seen hints of the arrangements of indenture and apprenticeship emerging to take the place of a system of chattel slavery in the Americas. French recruitment of “indentured” African laborers and the mass transportation of Chinese and South Asian workers in the “coolie” trade are just two of the primary examples of the shifting character of forced migration in the wake of the American hemispheric emancipations.14 As with the illegal slave trade, children in forced migration continued to supply global labor markets. Child captives, for example, comprised more than 60 percent of the Central African captives transshipped from East Africa across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to destinations as far away as the Persian Gulf and India.15 The sobering truth is that we should see the young recaptives in this study not as some of the last among millions but as an early generation of an ongoing traffic in young people that extended beyond the Atlantic and continues today in the form of modern-day slavery.16
Furthermore, the global movement to suppress the banned slave trade combined with the expansion of consumer markets in European countries to produce a new wave of colonization in Africa. Many of the colonial practices of mission schooling, waged and apprenticed labor, and military enlistment first devised for recaptives in Liberia and Sierra Leone now extended into new regions and new populations across the African continent. European powers moved inland from the coast, imposing colonial administrations and marshaling new forms of coerced labor and commodity extraction. These late nineteenth-century developments opened up new routes of “return” previously closed to former recaptives. Once again, certain groups of recaptives occupied a liminal position, between the powers of colonization and newly targeted indigenous populations.
Two anecdotes involving recaptive “Congo” communities in the Bahamas and Liberia illustrate continued migration (or aspirations of migration) set in motion by late nineteenth-century colonial developments. By 1885, Leopold II of Belgium had claimed direct rights to a vast holding in Central Africa that he called the Congo Free State. Compelled by Belgium’s humanitarian rhetoric of “civilization” and “free labor,” former recaptive “Congoes” began to explore the prospects of migration, ironically to the very sites of former slaver trading along the lower banks of the Congo River. Historian Rosanne Adderley depicts how, long after their seizure from a Spanish slaver by the British, liberated Africans in the Bahamas joined together in the Congo No. 1 mutual aid society. In 1888 they petitioned Leopold for funds to migrate to the Congo Free State, staking their claim of natal belonging with the opening declaration, “We were born in the Congo Land beside the Great River.”17 As a diasporic community acculturated to British West Indian society, these exiled “Natives of the Congo” saw in the Belgian takeover an opportunity for repatriation to a region they already figuratively claimed as home. At the same time, their construction of a return, as Adderley points out, was premised on “transplanting” many of the norms of West Indian colonial society.18 The petition reached the Belgian archives but does not seem to have resulted in the desired migration.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic, Liberian “Congoes” made their move to the Congo Free State in an exodus that illustrated the complicated dynamics of return. In 1889, a twenty-six-year-old Belgian agent named Dragutin Lerman visited Liberia.19 He had heard that two Congo families had recently moved their coffee-farming operations from Liberia to “their old homes,” near Boma, along the lower Congo River near the West Central African coast. The commissioned civil servant for King Leopold sought to capitalize on the acculturation and language skills of Liberian Congoes. Within just a few months, Lerman had relocated six additional families of former recaptives to Boma, where he hoped they would “continue the life of Christianity and be a good example to their savage brethren.”20 Given the date and the presence of children, these migrant families would have been not only returnees from enslavement thirty years earlier but also the children of those recaptives born in Liberia. The 1889 migration of former West Central African recaptives from Liberia takes us full cycle. Child captives, possibly sold from Boma, the headquarters for slave trade barracoons in 1860, could now find themselves migrating back to Boma, the leading edge of Leopold’s devastating colonial reign.
The Boma migrations serve as reminders of the elusive nature of “home” for recaptives in diaspora and the efforts of recaptive shipmates to create collective identities in spite of imposed exile.21 Recaptives could not help but be transformed by their experiences of forced migration and struggles to survive U.S. camps, transport ships, and Liberian apprenticeships. Their arrival in Boma as “civilized” recruits of Belgian agents and farmers of colonial export commodities positioned them in a new kind of liminal zone between the colonial administration and the current inhabitants of their “old homes.” No longer propertyless and having built precious family and church community ties, recaptives nevertheless still inhabited a world of “betweens.” Stories of subsequent migration to the Congo Free State remind us once more of the many ways in which recaptives sought to ensure survival and enact freedom while confronting the complex legacies of both transatlantic slavery and its suppression.
NOTES
Abbreviations
ACSR
American Colonization Society Records, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Courier
Charleston Daily Courier
Eason Journal
Henry Eason, “Journal, 1858–September 1860,” Log 902, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum Inc., on-line document, http://library.mysticseaport.org/initiative/PageImage.cfm?BibID=32915 (accessed 12 January 2016)
Frank Leslie’s
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
Grymes Report
J. W. Grymes, “Report of Doctr Grymes of Wash. City, D.C.,” 10 December 1860, Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder 1860 “Liberated Slaves,” ACSR
Harper’s
Harper’s Weekly
Herald
New York Herald
LNS
Logs of US Naval Ships, 1801–1915, Logs of Ships and Stations, 1801–1946, Record Group 24: Records of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, NARA
McCalla Journal
John Moore McCalla Journal, 1860–61, John M. McCalla Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Mercury
Charleston Mercury
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland
NYT
New York Times
Officer Diary
Morris Officer Diary, Lutheran Historical Society, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
RSI
Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to the Suppression of the African Slave Trade and Negro Colonization, 1854–1872, NARA
SCHS
Folder Correspondence, 1855–1858, Grimball, John, 1840–1922, John Grimball Family Papers, 1804–1893 (bulk 1858–1885) (0426), South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston
Young Ship Log
William Proby Young, “Ship Log, New York to Liberia, 1860,” Mss 5:1 Y876:1, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond
Introduction
1. Calculated from 1836, when a transatlantic slaving ban was passed for Portuguese territories in Africa; see Voyages Estimates search 1836–1866, http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/Oy8At2u2 (accessed 23 February 2016). See also table 1.7 in Eltis and Richardson, “New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slav
e Trade.”
2. Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies,” 218.
3. Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 349.
4. Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family’”; Cole, “Liberated Slaves and Islam”; Fyle, “Yoruba Diaspora in Sierra Leone’s Krio Society”; Jones, “Recaptive Nations”; Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom”; Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 7–8; Schuler, Alas! Alas! Kongo; Schuler, Liberated Africans in Nineteenth Century Guyana; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”; Fernández, “Havana Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission”; Conrad, “Neither Slave nor Free”; Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation; Pearson, Distant Freedom.
5. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 95–96, 108–9; Finkelman, “Regulating the Slave Trade”; Mason, “Slavery Overshadowed”; Burin, “Slave Trade Act of 1819,” 6.
6. An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, 428.
7. An Act in Addition to the Acts, 532–34.
8. Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” 427; Burin, “Slave Trade Act of 1819.”
9. Finkelman, “Regulating the Slave Trade,” 403.
10. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 136–41; Bryant, Dark Places, 35–38.
11. See Foote, Africa and the American Flag, and Mayer, Captain Canot, both discussed in Chapter 1.
12. Douglass, “Slavery and the Limits of Nonintervention,” 282.
13. Curtis, “Native Africans in the Bay,” Courier, 30 August 1858.
14. Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America.’”
15. For a similar administrative viewpoint on St. Helena, see Pearson, Jeffs, Witkin, and MacQuarrie, Infernal Traffic, 148.
16. Law, “Yoruba Liberated Slaves”; Northrup, “Becoming African”; Conrad, “Neither Slave nor Free”; Fernández, “Havana Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission.”
17. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery.
18. Miller, Way of Death; Byrd, Captives and Voyagers; Larson, “Horrid Journeying.”
19. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering.”
20. Kunz, “Refugee in Flight”; Chan and Loveridge, “Refugees ‘in Transit.’” Adderley introduces the term “slave trade refugees” in “New Negroes from Africa,” 2, 3.
21. Percentages based on weighted mean ratios in Eltis and Engerman, “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios,” table 1, 310.
22. Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women, 26, 67. Lawrance contributes the analytical category of “orphan” in Amistad’s Orphans, 15–21, 28–39.
23. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans; Lovejoy, “Children of Slavery,” 198–99; Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Child Slaves in the Modern World.
24. The importance of shipmate relationships as foundational for enslaved Africans in the Black Atlantic has been well established in several decades of historical scholarship. See Mintz and Price, Birth of African-American Culture, 43–44; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 448–49; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 45–46; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 67, 88; Rediker, Slave Ship, 305–7; Slenes, “‘Malungu, Ngoma’s Coming!,’” 222; Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family’”; Lindsay, “‘To Return to the Bosom of Their Fatherland,’” 28; Northrup, “Becoming African,” 12; and Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers, 57–83.
25. Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family,’” 59, 56.
26. Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 361.
27. Zeuske, Amistad, 18.
28. Northrup, “Becoming African,” 4, 9, 17.
29. Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” 1248.
30. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13 (emphasis in original).
31. Mason, Social Death and Resurrection; Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family’”; Sweet, “Defying Social Death”; Candido, African Slaving Port, 18, 120, 219; Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 18–21.
32. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 155–56; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 407, 414–15; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 212–24.
33. Spratt, Speech Upon the Foreign Slave Trade, 9 (emphasis in original); Spratt, Foreign Slave Trade the Source of Political Power, 17–22.
34. Rothman, Slave Country; Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire,” 405–38.
35. Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 234; Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation; White, Encountering Revolution, 124–65; Schoeppner, “Status across Borders,” 47.
36. Cottrol, Long, Lingering Shadow, 48–50.
37. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 14.
38. Tomich, “‘Second Slavery.’”
39. Horne, Deepest South, 117; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 303–94.
40. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 8.
41. Curtin, Image of Africa, 289–317.
42. DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 6–10.
43. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro Slavery; Luse, “Slavery’s Champions Stood at Odds.”
44. On the transatlantic orientation of nineteenth-century American abolitionist ideology, lecture circuits, and funding networks, see Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall; Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourn; and Sinha, Slave’s Cause, 339–80.
45. Akpan, “Black Imperialism”; Clegg, Price of Liberty; Everill, Abolition and Empire.
Chapter 1
1. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 199.
2. Du Bois, “Apologia,” 327–29.
3. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds.”
4. Tomich, “‘Second Slavery,’” 104; Zeuske and Lavina, Second Slavery; Kaye, “Second Slavery.”
5. Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 349.
6. I use “ethnography” as a term that best differentiates the racialized “customs and manners” popular literature from racial science ethnology publications by scientists in the same period. Antebellum writers, however, often used “ethnology” and “ethnography” interchangeably in the absence of clear distinctions between professional and popular domains. See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; Poignant, “Surveying the Field of View”; and Erickson, “American School of Anthropology.”
7. Foote, Africa and the American Flag; Mayer, Captain Canot.
8. On the ahistorical nature of European ethnological discussions of non-Western societies, see Wolf, Europe and the People, and Trouillot, Global Transformations.
9. Tomich, “‘Second Slavery,’” 115.
10. Marques, “Contraband Slave Trade,” 1; Zeuske, Amistad, 82–94.
11. Mouser, “Baltimore/Pongo Connection”; Brooks, West Africa and Cabo Verde; Zeuske, Amistad, 193–202.
12. Tomich, “‘Second Slavery,’” 109.
13. Eltis, Economic Growth, 83.
14. Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, 112. The wry phrasing is most likely from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who edited Bridge’s “journal” heavily. See Brancaccio, “Black Man’s Paradise.”
15. Brooks, “Samuel Hodges, Jr.”; Brooks, West Africa and Cabo Verde; Law, From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery.
16. Law, Ouidah, 203–14, 222–30; O’Hear, “Enslavement of Yoruba,” 65–66.
17. Heywood, “Slavery and Forced Labor,” 417–18; Gordon, “Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 920, 928.
18. Harms, “Sustaining the System”; Broadhead, “Slave Wives, Free Sisters,” 174–79; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 237–38.
19. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 237–38.
20. Miller, “Atlantic Ambiguities”; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 141; Eltis, Economic Growth, 225–26.
21. Marques, “United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 189–91; Zeuske, Amistad.
22. This arrangement helped slave traders evade seizure by British patrols under the 1835 equipment provisions of international treaties that criminalized the possession of equipment associated with the slave trade. By refusing to enter such treatie
s, the United States was able to carry slaving equipment and trading supplies on the outbound leg of many slaving voyages that returned from Africa under a different flag. See Marques, “Contraband Slave Trade,” 18–19. Marques provides a nuanced analysis of how U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade varied over time from 1776 to 1867. See also Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies, 12–39.
23. Harris, “New York Merchants and the Illegal Slave Trade”; Marques, “Contraband Slave Trade,” 26–28.
24. See for example, Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, and Equiano, Interesting Narrative. Equiano argued that the end of the slave trade would create new sources of cotton and indigo and a huge African consumer market: “It opens a most immense, glorious, and happy prospect—the clothing, &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumference, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures” (253–54). See also Brown, “British Government and the Slave Trade.”
25. Curtin, Image of Africa, 289–317; Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa.
26. Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City, 87–91, quote on 91. For economic destabilization and political upheaval due to coastal factories and missions along the equatorial coast region, see Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 210–11, 230–35.
27. Eltis, Economic Growth, 88–89, 224–32; Law, “Abolition and Imperialism”; Howard, “Nineteenth-Century Coastal Slave Trading.”
28. Eltis, Economic Growth, 81–101; Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City, 87; Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation.
29. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 136–48. In 1836, Portugal had banned the slave trade in the South Atlantic but resisted signing a treaty with Britain that would allow rights of mutual search. Capitulation to British search rights in 1839 occurred in the context of British coercion. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 161–62, and Law, Ouidah, 155–60.