121. Blum, View from the Masthead, 4–10. For other slaver narratives in this genre, see Drake and West, Revelations of a Slave Smuggler; Manning, Six Months on a Slaver; Thomes, Slaver’s Adventure; and Vermilyea, Slaver, the War, and around the World.
122. Mouser, “Théophilus Conneau,” 98.
123. Holsoe, “Theodore Canot at Cape Mount”; Mouser, “Théophilus Conneau,” 99; Canney, Africa Squadron, 92–93; B., “Cape Mount,” 63.
124. Mouser, “Théophilus Conneau,” 97. Hall first met Canot in 1836–37 in West Africa; see Jones, “Théophile Conneau,” 90. In 1976, Prentice Hall published the manuscript of Theophilus Conneau, allegedly found in editor Brantz Mayer’s papers, as A Slaver’s Log Book. Because this chapter is concerned with the publicly marketed version of Canot’s life, I have used the 1854 New York publication of Captain Canot as primary source and have referenced Conneau’s manuscript only to gain a sense of Mayer’s editorial contributions. Because literary representation is the focus of this section, I refer to “Canot” to designate Conneau’s literary persona.
125. Jones, “Théophile Conneau,” 89–90. Mayer’s experiences with early imperial ventures of the U.S. government actually linked him more directly with Foote than Canot; see New-England Historic Genealogical Society, Memorial Biographies, 321. Other titles by Mayer include Mexico: Aztec, Spanish, and Republican and History of the War between Mexico and the United States. In another link to important antebellum slavery literature, Mayer dedicated Captain Canot to “N.P. Willis of Idlewild.” Nathaniel Parker Willis was a well-known American writer and employer of the fugitive author Harriet Jacobs. See Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, xvi.
126. See, for example, “Captain Canot,” North American Review; “Captain Canot; or Twenty Years of an African Slaver,” National Era, 26 October 1854, 170; “The African Slave Trade,” De Bow’s Review 18, nos. 1 & 3 (January & March 1855): 16–20, 297–305; “Capt. Canot,” African Repository 30, no. 11 (November 1854): 327–30.
127. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 223.
128. On the gothic turn and body horror, see Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 47–57, and Lively, Masks, 64–85.
129. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 228–29. The description, quoted in British parliamentary papers, came from Walsh, Notices of Brazil, 479–88.
130. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 243–46, 247.
131. Mayer, Captain Canot, 74 (emphasis in original).
132. Ibid., 104.
133. Ibid., 105.
134. Drake and West, Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, 21–22, 88–89.
135. Mayer, Captain Canot, 408.
136. Ibid., 228–29.
137. Ibid., 126, 128, 387.
138. See, for example, Dalzel, Kingdom of Dahomey.
139. Mayer, Captain Canot, 126, 128. For this figure, Mayer cites Lugenbeel, Sketches of Liberia, 45. The circularity between Canot’s and Lugenbeel’s texts continued when Lugenbeel publicly endorsed the authenticity of Canot’s account. See Lugenbeel, “Authenticity of Captain Canot,” 2.
140. “Captain Canot,” North American Review, 153–54.
141. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 180.
142. For historical analysis of slavery in Africa, see Miller, Problem of Slavery as History; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery; Manning, Slavery and African Life; and Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa.
143. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 51–52.
144. Ibid., 207. Foote later contradicted his earlier generalizations about the ubiquity of African cruelty when he explained that “natives” at the mouth of the Congo River had grown “treacherous and cruel” through association with the slave trade, but that “interior” groups untouched by the slave trade were “civil and inoffensive” (ibid., 347).
145. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 218–19.
146. Eason Journal, 14 May 1858.
147. Thomas Aloysius Dornin, 8 March 1861, Journal & Remarks on Board the U. States Frigate San Jacinto, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
148. “Capt. Canot,” African Repository 30, no. 11 (November 1854): 329.
149. Mayer, Captain Canot, 184–89. For other accounts of rescue of enslaved Africans by Canot, see 391, 443, 425. Foote excerpts British officer Frederick Forbes’s account of rescuing several war captives on the verge of their deaths in a Dahomean ceremony. Quoted in Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 88–89. See Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans, 2:49–51, 206. Horatio Bridge’s naval memoir remarked on the desire to intervene in a ceremony of “human sacrifice”: “We are all anxious to go on shore to see the ceremonies, and try to save the destined victim” (Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, 127).
150. The perception of Africans as metaphorical children has been discussed in Campbell, Miers, and Miller, “Children in European Systems of Slavery,” 175, and King, Stolen Childhood, xvii. Bianca Premo adds the important insight that processes of colonization “transformed the status of the minor into a multivalent legal category based only partially on age,” thereby subsuming a large number of colonized subjects into a state of legal minority; see Premo, Children of the Father King, 19–20.
151. Mayer, Captain Canot, iv–v.
152. Tucker, “Lieutenant Andrew H. Foote,” 34, 42.
153. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 180.
154. Ibid., 205, 195.
155. Ibid., 389–90.
156. “Africa and the American Flag,” African Repository 30, no. 7 (July 1854): 213.
157. “The Recaptured Africans,” African Repository 34, no. 10 (October 1858): 298–300.
158. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 2.
159. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 395–97; Sinha, “Judicial Nullification.”
160. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 11–12.
161. “The Sentiment of the State,” Courier, 7 September 1858.
162. Edmund Ruffin, “African Colonization Unveiled,” De Bow’s Review 29, no. 5 (November 1860): 642.
163. DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 252–53.
164. “Remarks of Frederick Douglass at Zion Church on Sunday 28, of Dec.,” Douglass’ Monthly, January 1863, 770.
165. Deyle, “Irony of Liberty.”
166. Henry Wheaton, The Antelope, 10 Wheaton 66, 70–14, quoted in Noonan, Antelope, 100.
Chapter 2
1. “The Slaver and Cargo,” Mercury, 1 September 1858; A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.
2. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering”; Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea; Larson, “Horrid Journeying”; Sweet, Domingos Álvares, esp. 39–42; Rediker, Slave Ship.
3. Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships.” This chapter adds a cultural argument to Manisha Sinha’s political analysis of the Echo and slave trade revival in South Carolina and geographically extends Walter Johnson’s discussion of proslavery imperialism beyond the Lower Mississippi Valley to South Carolina. See Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 125–52, and Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 395–422.
4. “Civil incapacity” comes from DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 40, 62, 64.
5. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 22.
6. Voyages Estimates, http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/aFfJm47f (accessed 24 February 2016); Zeuske, Amistad. In the last decade of Atlantic World scholarship, a focus on the Brazilian and Cuban slave trades has helped to correct the overly heavy emphasis, at least in English-language publications, on the North Atlantic. See Eltis and Richardson, “New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.”
7. “History of the Captured Slaver,” Mercury, 3 September 1858; Voyages, ID #4284. The best synthesis of the Echo’s itinerary, ownership, and funding appears in Harris, “Voyage of the Echo.”
8. Voyages Estimates, http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/bjtbcSP8 (accessed 24 February 2016).
9. My thinking about recaptivity as a condition of existential crisis borrows from Vincent Brown’s powerful discussion of enslavement as “social and spiritual crisis,” in Reaper’s Garden, 44.
10. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 8, 22–27; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 60–61.
11. MacGaffey, “Economic and Social Dimensions of Kongo Slavery.”
12. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering,” 83; Miller, Problem of Slavery as History, 134–35 and table 4.3, 172.
13. “From Liberia—Return of the Niagara,” African Repository 35, no. 1 (January 1859): 2.
14. Moráguez, “African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba,” table 6.3, 185. On Central Africans’ influence in shaping slave societies of the Americas, see Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade,” 23–35, and Vansina foreword, xi.
15. Ferreira, “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” 325–28; Broadhead, “Slave Wives, Free Sisters,” 160–81; Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, 221; Martin, “Cabinda and Cabindans”; Herlin, “Brazil and the Commercialization of Kongo,” 262–67; Vos, “‘Without the Slave Trade.’”
16. Eason Journal, 29 March 1859.
17. The term “Miquombas” aligns most closely with “Muchicongo” and thus, according to Jelmer Vos, signifies someone originating in or near the capital of the old Kongo Kingdom, Mbanza Kongo; see Vos, “‘Without the Slave Trade,’” 52. See also “Muchicongo” or “Mexicongo” in Karasch, Slave Life in Rio De Janeiro, 374, and Harris, “The Echo Captives,” in Harris, “Voyage of the Echo,” http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/voyage-of-the-echo-the-trials/the-echo-captives (accessed 31 January 2016).
18. Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade,” 41; Eltis, Economic Growth, 174; Moráguez, “African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba,” 189, 192–93; Martin, External Trade of the Loango Coast. Linda Heywood notes that increasing chaos of the disintegrating Kongo kingdom led by the eighteenth century to Kongo subjects being traded through Vili networks to Loango. See Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation,” 20–21. As discussed in Chapter 3, captives in the late slave trade from the Congo River region also included those enslaved from coastal areas and shipped up the coast from Luanda.
19. Lovejoy, “Pawnship, Debt, and ‘Freedom,’” 55–78; Miller, Way of Death, 94–103; Gordon, “Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 925; Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 207–37; Heywood, “Slavery and Forced Labor,” 417–19.
20. Vansina, “Ambaca Society,” 10, 11, 13, 16. For the concept of collective responsibility applied in the early history of the Kongo Kingdom, see Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation,” 15. Gordon, “Abolition of the Slave Trade,” 931, notes that in Chibembe, the language of the interior regions targeted by slave and ivory raiders that fed into Luanda, musha meant “debt,” and a mushapôle indicated “a female slave without relatives able to reclaim her.” The process by which a person was enslaved or “disappear[ed] into slavery” through debt was expressed in the phrase lobelela mu musha. See also Curto, “Experiences of Enslavement in West Central Africa,” and Miller, Way of Death, 48–53.
21. Vansina, “Ambaca Society,” 18–19.
22. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana, 15; Curtin and Vansina, “Sources of the Nineteenth Century Slave Trade,” 199, 204.
23. For two recaptive narratives of raid and abduction, see Hoyt, Land of Hope, 80.
24. “The Slaver, Her Crew and Cargo,” Mercury, 30 August 1858; Candido, African Slaving Port, 191–236.
25. Candido, “African Freedom Suits,” 450–54. Authorities in Portuguese “enclaves” viewed Africans who professed Catholicism or claimed to be a subject of the Portuguese Crown as protected from enslavement by the principle of “original freedom.” Candido shows that the concept was not consistently applied, however. See Candido, African Slaving Port, 204, 221.
26. “The Slaver and Cargo,” Mercury, 1 September 1858.
27. Martin, “Cabinda and Cabindans,” 80–96; Eltis, Economic Growth, 176–77.
28. Coquery-Vidrovitch, “African Slaves and the Atlantic,” 7.
29. Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil; Candido, African Slaving Port; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”; Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange.
30. Slenes, “‘Malungu, Ngoma’s Coming!,’” 222–23.
31. “The Captured Slaver,” Daily Ohio Statesman, 17 September 1858; “Capture of a Slaver,” Farmer’s Cabinet, 8 September 1858; “A Precedent,” Pittsfield Sun, 30 September 1858. According to newspapers, adults of the Echo ranged from ages twenty to thirty-four. For observations on height, see A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.
32. Eltis and Engerman, “Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?,” 241, 256; Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 27–46. On varying definitions of childhood, see Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Children in Slavery through the Ages, 3; Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Child Slaves in the Modern World, location 22–28, Kindle version; Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts,” 85 (n. 57); and Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 28–30.
33. Eltis and Engerman, “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios,” 310.
34. Candido, African Slaving Port, 209–10; Klein, “African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 30–32; Harms, “Sustaining the System,” 95–110; Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender,” 55–56. See also Miller, Way of Death, 40–70, and Guyer, “Wealth in People, Wealth in Things,” 83–90. The proportion of children in the East African slave trade reached even higher; see Morton, “Small Change.”
35. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 36–37, emphasizes the demands of slavers. For evidence of the Angolan slave trade trend toward a majority of young boys as a result of drought and war in the late eighteenth century, see Miller, “Slave Prices in the Portuguese Southern Atlantic,” 57–59, 61–62. See also Manning, Slavery and African Life, 99; Lovejoy, “Children of Slavery”; Miller, Way of Death, 245–83; and Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow, 3–5.
36. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering,” 83; Sweet, “Defying Social Death,” 254–57.
37. Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women, 1–2, 9, 21.
38. Martin, External Trade of the Loango Coast, 142–45.
39. “The Captured Africans,” Courier, 30 August 1858; A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.
40. Candido, African Slaving Port, 211.
41. Crowther, “Narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” 310.
42. Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 100. In general, the high numbers of children and youth may also have contributed to the declining occurrence of uprisings on nineteenth-century slave ships. See Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts,” 78, 92.
43. “Statement of the Captain of the Slave Brig,” Mercury, 10 September 1858; Levien, Case of the Slaver Echo, 8; “The Recaptured Africans,” African Repository 34, no. 10 (October 1858): 289–300.
44. Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 8. Lieutenant Carpenter, who boarded the Echo at the time of naval seizure, described the size of the brands in his Boston testimony against accused captain Townsend. See “Boston, Sept. 28,” Mercury, 1 October 1858, and “Examination of the Slaver Captain,” Mercury, 2 October 1858.
45. “Captured Slave Brig,” Daily Ohio Statesman, 3 September 1858; “Captain of the Slaver,” Georgia Telegraph, 14 September 1858. The accused captain of the slaver said that the captives’ diet included beans, rice, pork, whiskey, and tobacco. See Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 9.
46. Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 8. On conditions at time of capture based on a naval officer’s eyewitness account, see “The Cruise of the Dolphin,” Courier, 31 August 1858.
47. Thornton, “Religious and Ceremonial Life”; MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 42–62. For a discussion of how the Lemba ritual sought to curtail the disorder caused by the impact of the European slave trade on Kongo regional trade, see Janzen, Lemba.
48. Schuler, “Li
berated Central Africans,” 325–26.
49. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 71–77.
50. For the deeper history of the connection between witchcraft and the transatlantic slave trade, see Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders”; Austen, “Moral Economy of Witchcraft”; MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 62; and Sweet, Recreating Africa, 162–64. Monica Schuler argues for the lasting association between enslavement and witchcraft in liberated African ritual and memories. See Schuler, “Enslavement, the Slave Voyage, and Astral and Aquatic Journeys,” 186–89.
51. Law, Ouidah, 148–49.
52. For an example of the focus on American and slaver agency, see Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 71–84.
53. Martin, “Cabinda and Cabindans,” 86–87. Martin details the important role of Cabinda mariners in deflecting the suspicions of British patrols with false papers that identified enslaved captives as “passengers.”
54. Hurston, “Cudjo’s Own Story,” 658; Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 69.
55. Wright, “Joseph Wright of the Egba,” 331.
56. “The Slave Trade in New York,” National Era, 21 December 1854, 201.
57. Law and Lovejoy, Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, 156.
58. “Capture of the Slave Vessels and Their Cargoes,” Frank Leslie’s, 23 June 1860, 65–66. Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 244, notes eighteen died and one jumped overboard during the Pons’s lockdown while trying to evade detection (hovering near shore overnight).
59. Forbes, Six Months’ Service in the African Blockade, 99. See Pentangelo, “Sailors and Slaves,” 10 (“nothing to eat or drink for 30 hours”), and Wright, “Joseph Wright of the Egba,” 332 (“Many of the slaves had died for want of water, and many men died for crowdedness”). See also Mayer, Captain Canot, 207.
60. L.T., “Capture of a Slave Brig, with over Three Hundred Africans,” NYT, 30 August 1858; Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 104; Saunders, “Liberated Africans in Cape Colony,” 224. Several of the Echo captives may have had a better view of the USS Dolphin; some accounts indicate captive Africans visible on the deck before the slaver was seized. See “Statement of the Captain of the Slave Brig,” Mercury, 10 September 1858. In some cases, it was the naval crew instead who cheered in anticipation of prize money when they opened the hatches and discovered a human cargo. See “A Capture and Its Consequences,” NYT, 30 August 1858.
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