30. Eltis, Economic Growth, 88–89.
31. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 253; Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 192.
32. Brooks, “Samuel Hodges, Jr.,” 103.
33. John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 6:35–37, quoted in Mason, “Keeping Up Appearances,” 821–22. See also Mason, “Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators,” and Tucker, “Lieutenant Andrew H. Foote,” 32–33. Only in 1862 did Secretary of State William Henry Seward, under the Lincoln administration, negotiate a treaty establishing mutual search rights with British and U.S. participation in courts of mixed commission.
34. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 300–301. This chapter makes an argument about the cultural impact of naval memoirs and thus focuses on the text of Africa and the American Flag. Some evidence from private journals and published letters suggests that Foote’s own personal views were more critical of U.S. slave trade suppression policy and more egalitarian in terms of racial equality than he expressed in the published narrative. See Tucker, “Lieutenant Andrew H. Foote,” 34–35, 38, 39.
35. “Webster-Ashburton Treaty,” 9 August 1842, Avalon Law Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/br-1842.asp (accessed 28 May 2015).
36. In fact, in 1855 (the year following the publication of Africa and the American Flag), the United States exported $1.3 million worth of goods to ports along the African coast, an amount comparable to its shipments to Holland. See Canney, Africa Squadron, 39, 56–57; Brooks, “Samuel Hodges, Jr.,” 101–15; and Harmon, “Suppress and Protect.”
37. MacMaster, “United States Navy and African Exploration.”
38. Canney, Africa Squadron, 57.
39. France also resisted signing treaties with Britain, while Britain refused to pass anti–slave trade measures that would obstruct the flow of private capital into the banned trade. See Marques, “Contraband Slave Trade,” 33.
40. Eltis and Richardson, “New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 28.
41. Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies,” 218. See also Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 157.
42. Drake and Shufeldt, “Secret History of the Slave Trade,” 223.
43. In comparison, Britain sent twenty-two warships to the African coast in 1844. See Canney, Africa Squadron, 63, 226–27.
44. John Laurence Fox to Elizabeth Amory (Morris) Fox, 22 February 1848, BF box 3: F–Fox, folder 18, Papers of Edward Griffin Beckwith and John Laurence Fox, 1805–1909, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
45. “The Slave-Trade—the Actual Character of the Traffic,” NYT, 17 March 1860.
46. The increased U.S. naval deployment on the African coast resulted in the seizure of several slavers with thousands of recaptives who were transported on the slavers directly to Liberia. For a discussion of recaptives from the Storm King, Erie, Cora, Bonito, and Nightingale, see Chapter 6. The U.S. Navy’s procurement of five steamers in the summer of 1859 developed out of their earlier leasing by the United States for use against Paraguay, thus demonstrating linkages between U.S. slave trade suppression and other early uses of U.S. naval force abroad. See Canney, Africa Squadron, 202–3.
47. H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 107–10; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 184–85; Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” 430–32; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 304–14, 363–65, 405–6.
48. H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 605–20; Canney, Africa Squadron, 221.
49. The ten vessels were Echo, Wildfire, William, Bogota, William R. Kibby, Storm King, Erie, Bonito, Cora, and Nightingale. The number of recaptives on these ships represented 73.9 percent of all recaptives taken under the U.S. flag (6,346). See Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 350.
50. Historiographic debates on U.S. slave trade suppression include Du Bois’s condemnation of inaction as moral wrong, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade; Howard’s emphasis on the systemic failure of U.S. courts and lawmakers rather than the performance of the navy, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 206–10; and Canney’s defense of the navy’s performance given its limited resources, Africa Squadron, 227. In contrast to most historians who argue that the vast majority of U.S. involvement occurred in the banned transatlantic trade to the Caribbean and Latin America, Obadele-Starks, in Freebooters and Smugglers, emphasizes the failure of the United States to curtail slave smuggling into the Gulf states. For a careful critique of Du Bois’s Suppression legacy, a caution against overemphasizing the U.S. role in the contraband trade, and an argument for better Atlantic framing of the U.S. role, see Marques, “United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 18–19. Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” emphasizes the need to include recaptives in U.S. histories of slave trade suppression.
51. Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 349.
52. For arguments on the political importance of the category of recaptive in Brazilian history, see Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 4, 31.
53. Shaw, “British, Persecuted Foreigners, and the Emergence of the Refugee Category.”
54. Finkelman, “Regulating the Slave Trade,” 401–2; Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 96–102; An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, 426–30.
55. Bidwell, Cook, and others, Annals of Cong., 9th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 201, quoted in Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 97.
56. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 109.
57. Batterson, “Horde of Foreign Freebooters,” 13.
58. Page, “Case of Opportunity.” Georgian authorities auctioned off over 100 Tentativa captives to local slaveowners under the guise of bonding them out for expenses. In the months just prior to the arrival of the Antelope, Richard Habersham attempted unsuccessfully to regain federal custody of the bonded Africans. See Bryant, Dark Places, 92–94.
59. Batterson, “Horde of Foreign Freebooters,” 12; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 180–81.
60. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth, 157–77.
61. An Act in Addition to the Acts, 532–34. Rather than paying prizes through the resale of illegally trafficked Africans, the 1819 law established a U.S. government payout of $25 per recaptive to the prize crews (distributed according to rank) and a $50-per-recaptive incentive to informers.
62. DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind.
63. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 144.
64. Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 106–29; Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 54–117.
65. Rothman, Slave Country, 83–84.
66. Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement; Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution; Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents; Lapansky-Werner and Bacon, Back to Africa; Everill, Abolition and Empire.
67. Melish, Disowning Slavery; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny.
68. Burin, “Slave Trade Act of 1819,” 6.
69. Ibid., 7.
70. Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 173, 185; Clegg, Price of Liberty, 37.
71. Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, 67. See also Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution.
72. “Table of Emigrants,” African Repository 27, no. 5 (May 1851): 149–50.
73. “Table of Emigrants,” African Repository 33, no. 5 (May 1857): 152–55; Clegg, Price of Liberty, 198–99.
74. Scott, “Paper Thin,” 1086–87.
75. The complicated legal dispute over the Antelope recaptives is narrated in detail in Bryant, Dark Places, and Noonan, Antelope. The Portuguese claim stemmed from the privateer’s capture of enslaved Africans on a different Portuguese vessel at the same time that the privateer seized the Antelope. See Noonan, Antelope, 13–30.
76. Bryant, Dark Places, 104–5, 127, 161–64, 172; Noonan, Antelope, 45–46, 123–24, 127. While Morel justified these actions to his superior as helping to keep costs d
own, he profited doubly—once from recaptives’ labor on his estate and once from federal government reimbursements for recaptive provisions and shelter.
77. Bryant, Dark Places, 148–52. This last part of the ruling pertained to Africans captured by the privateer from an illegal U.S. slaver, the Exchange, whose captives merged with the Antelope shipmates.
78. Bryant, Dark Places, 159–60; Noonan, Antelope, 65–66.
79. Bryant, Dark Places, 218–39, 257–63.
80. Ibid., 263–67. Arriving in 1830 and also settled in New Georgia were Africans seized aboard the slave ship Guerrero. The Guerrero ran onto a reef off Key Largo during a pursuit by the British ship Nimble. Rescued by salvagers, African captives of the Guerrero stayed in Key West for seventy-five days before the U.S. marshal sent them to St. Augustine. Because they came into U.S. hands through a shipwreck, they too did not qualify under the 1819 provision for intentionally trafficked Africans. While in Florida, they were rented out to planters, such as Zephaniah Kingsley, who held thirty-six of the captives as laborers. A special appropriation from Congress funded their transport to Liberia in March 1830 on the ACS ship Heroine. See Swanson, Slave Ship Guerrero, and Bryant, Dark Places, 287–88.
81. “Intelligence. Recaptured Africans,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 3, no. 5 (July 1827): 154; Noonan, Antelope, 133–48. The flagrant corruption and cronyism that allowed Georgia congressman Richard Henry Wilde to gain ownership of the group allotted to the Spanish party is detailed in Noonan, Antelope, 139–44.
82. As Swanson suggests for the Guerrero shipmates, some of the Antelope recaptives carried to Liberia the surnames of elite U.S. slaveholders who “leased” them while legal proceedings were under way. See Swanson, Slave Ship Guerrero, 77, 120. Census data on the Antelope survivors arriving by the Norfolk appears in Senate Ex. Doc. No. 150, 175–79.
83. British reports identified the “Phoenix” as formerly the Trimmer of New Orleans. See George Salkeld to W. S. Macleay, 23 July 1840, in “Correspondence with the British Commissioners, Havana, No. 99.” Although sources do not discuss the origins of the Fenix’s African captives, a comparison of names of the Fenix shipmates recorded in 1835 in Liberia with the African Origins database suggests West African origins, including Igbo-language and Muslim (Arabic) names. See Senate Ex. Doc. No. 150, 261–63.
84. “On the Capture, by a United States Vessel, of the Spanish Ship Fenix,” in box 4, U.S. v. Schooner Fenix, Sept. 1831, Record Group 60: Supreme Court Case Papers, 1809–1870, General Records of the Department of Justice, NARA. The little-known history of the Fenix and its West African recaptives in New Orleans during several years of litigation calls for further exploration.
85. The reprinted congressional document names “Alfred Heuner, Esq.” as the lawyer submitting the habeus corpus claim. No such name appears among New Orleans records, but Alfred Hennen was a leading lawyer and known colonizationist in the city. Born in Maryland in 1786, Hennen moved to New Orleans during the territorial years and was widely known as a jurist and church leader. Like most southern colonizationists, he was also a slaveowner, having acquired a plantation in St. Tammany Parish in 1822, where by 1838 he kept twenty to thirty enslaved laborers. See Reilly, “Louisiana Colonization Society”; Reilly, “Conscience of a Colonizationist,” 425; and Curry, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined, 192.
86. “On the Capture, by a United States Vessel, of the Spanish Ship Fenix,” in box 4, U.S. v. Schooner Fenix, Sept. 1831, Record Group 60: Supreme Court Case Papers, 1809–1870, General Records of the Department of Justice, NARA, 871.
87. Ibid. Appropriations reported in Newbern Sentinel, 31 August 1831, 1.
88. “Report of the Managers to the American Colonization Society, at Its Nineteenth Annual Meeting,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 12, no. 1 (January 1836): 16.
89. Apparently, the privateer had intercepted a slave ship outbound from Cape Mesurado in West Africa. After delivering the captives for bounty to authorities in the British West Indies, Chase then signed on a small group of men and boys as crew members before departing for Baltimore. See Mouser, “Baltimore/Pongo Connection,” 316. This ship had previously been named the General Peace and was owned by George DeWolf of the DeWolf family of slave traders in Bristol, Rhode Island; see Marques, “United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 114, 134.
90. Notably, the district attorney for Georgia, Richard Habersham, had filed the Antelope case with the Supreme Court just seven months before. However, both the Antelope case and a decision on the status of the General Páez African captives stalled out with little direction from the Monroe administration and a less-than-promising prospect for the struggling ACS venture in West Africa. See Noonan, Antelope, 74.
91. Bruce Mouser has detailed the legal twists and turns of this case as well as the trade connections between Baltimore and the Windward Coast. See Mouser, “Baltimore’s African Experiment.”
92. Ibid., 117.
93. Ibid., 120.
94. “Sixth Annual Report,” 71; also excerpted in “Liberated Africans,” Religious Intelligencer, 31 January 1824, 549–51. The African Origins database shows several men and boys named Doree or some variations of this name, identified as a Mende-language name. They had embarked from the Gallinas region. See African IDs 21076, 20923, and 108008.
95. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 228–38.
96. Out of the original fourteen Africans, three young men remain unaccounted for in Baltimore’s extant records. See Mouser, “Baltimore’s African Experiment,” 120, 125 (n. 28), and Southard, “Documents,” 280.
97. See Mouser’s argument that the General Páez case depicts the U.S. government shifting from repatriation to deportation of illegally trafficked Africans. When courts ruled that the African men in question could not be transported under section 2 of the 1819 act, both the attorney general and the secretary of the navy explored the possibility of whether Monroe could issue a presidential order for deportation to authorize their removal. See Mouser, “Baltimore’s African Experiment,” 118, 120.
98. Samuel H. Harper, “United States vs. 62 Africans arrived in Schooner Fenix,” in box 4, U.S. v. Schooner Fenix, Sept. 1831, Record Group 60: Supreme Court Case Papers, 1809–1870, General Records of the Department of Justice, NARA, 3 March 1831.
99. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 219–65.
100. Mouser, “Baltimore/Pongo Connection,” 313–33; Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 213–15; Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 221–28.
101. “Capture of the Slaver Pons,” Boston Daily Atlas, 19 March 1846; Charles H. Bell, “The Captured Slave Ships,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 22, no. 4 (April 1846): 115–16.
102. Gilliland, Voyage to a Thousand Cares, 196–97, 271–85, 294–99. The crew of the USS Yorktown divided $18,900 of prize money, distributed through all ranks, from captain to Kru mariners. The crew of the Pons could not be prosecuted because they were not U.S. citizens.
103. Curtin, Image of Africa; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness; Lively, Masks; Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination; White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies.
104. Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches; Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?
105. See Chapter 2.
106. The 1820 designation of slaving as piracy in U.S. law further amplified the appeal of slaver narratives like Canot’s by associating them with romantic sea ventures of bygone pirate ships. See DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 254. On the Wanderer, see Voyages, ID #4974; Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 153–86; Calonius, Wanderer, 186–220, 229–38; Wells, Slave Ship Wanderer; and Soodalter, Hanging Captain Gordon, 9–10.
107. “The Slave Trade in New York,” National Era, 21 December 1854, 201; “The Slave Trade in New York,” De Bow’s Review 18, no. 2 (1855): 223–28. Both of these papers republished an original interview with James Smith from the New York paper The Evangelist.
108. DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 254–55.
; 109. “The Wanderer’s Cargo,” Mercury, 17 December 1858; Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 145–46.
110. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 163–64, 169–72.
111. “Grand Democratic Musical Festival and Breakdown,” Weekly Anglo-African, 12 May 1860.
112. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 92–94; Davis, “Buchanian Espionage,” 271–78; Davis, “James Buchanan,” 446–59.
113. “The Slave Trade in Alabama,” Daily Evening Bulletin, 7 August 1860; Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 87–88.
114. “‘More Africans,’” Courier, 11 July 1860.
115. Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, v.
116. See also Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, and Thomas, Adventures. Thomas was an English-born Methodist clergyman from Georgia who served as chaplain for the Africa Squadron on the Jamestown between 1855 and 1857. He first published his account of African travels in serialized chapters in 1858 in the Southern Christian Advocate.
117. Miller, “Atlantic Ambiguities,” 686, see also 678–79. Also on early decades of American empire, see Streeby, “American Sensations.” Slave trade suppression provides an excellent case study for Amy Kaplan’s suggestion that insight is gained from understanding “United States nation-building and empire-building as historically coterminous and mutually defining” (Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America,’” 17).
118. Renda, Taking Haiti, 17–18. Curtin, Image of Africa, 322, identifies naval memoirs of slave trade suppression as a subset of British exploration literature on Africa. Other than biographical articles or “fact checking” approaches, almost no literary or historical criticism exists on the genre of U.S. slaver narratives. One exception is DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 252–94.
119. Foote’s generally optimistic assessment relied heavily on ACS agent J. W. Lugenbeel’s positive report Sketches of Liberia.
120. “Africa and the American Flag,” African Repository 30, no. 7 (July 1854): 213; D. Appleton advertisements in Christian Review 19, no. 77 (July 1854): 491, and “Captain Foote’s Africa and the American Flag,” National Era, 14 September 1854, 147; “Book Trade—2. Africa and the American Flag.”
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