Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  61. Crowther, “Narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” 312. Monica Schuler found that, similar to descriptions from slave ship embarkation, recaptives in 1843 disembarking in Trinidad feared being eaten by Europeans. See Schuler, “Enslavement, the Slave Voyage, and Astral and Aquatic Journeys,” 188.

  62. See Chapter 1 for an overview of U.S. transatlantic slave trade abolition legislation.

  63. Walsh, Notices of Brazil, 488. In one account of illegal slaving on the Indian Ocean, captives quickly let British boarding officers know their enslaved status, indicating their understanding of the British role in suppression. See Alpers, “Other Middle Passage,” 29. Caroline Emily Shaw notes that the joy of recaptives upon seizure became a narrative element in British press coverage on naval suppression; see Shaw, “British, Persecuted Foreigners, and the Emergence of the Refugee Category,” 248. For accounts of joyous greetings of U.S. and British “liberators,” see Illustrated London News, 28 April 1860, 410; Foote, Africa and the American Flag, 224, 226; “Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 19 September 1857, 283–84; and “Slave Trade,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 1, no. 2 (April 1825): 64.

  64. Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 104.

  65. Crowther, “Narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” 313, 314.

  66. “The Dolphin at Key West—Her Stern-Chase after a Slaver,” NYT, 1 September 1858; L.T., “Capture of a Slave Brig, with over Three Hundred Africans,” NYT, 30 August 1858.

  67. “Capture of a Slaver,” Illustrated London News, 20 June 1857, 596, for Zeldina recaptives who “tore everything to pieces on board in search of food.”

  68. “The Slaver Prize in Our Port,” Courier, 2 September 1858; also reported in “The Slave Brig,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.

  69. All evidence from “The Slaver, Her Crew and Cargo,” Mercury, 30 August 1858.

  70. This paragraph is based on descriptions in “The Slaver Prize in Our Port,” Courier, 2 September 1858. For the fears of slave ship contagion in nineteenth-century Cuba, see Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies, 51–61. On yellow fever in Charleston and the debate over whether or not quarantine was necessary, see “The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Charleston,” Mercury, 25 August 1858; “Yellow Fever in the City,” Mercury, 9 September 1858; “Abatement of the Fever,” Mercury, 27 September 1858; and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 73–79, 444–46.

  71. “The African Negroes—Correspondence between the Sheriff of Charleston District and the U.S. Marshal,” Mercury, 1 September 1858.

  72. See photograph “Interior View of Fort Sumter,” 14 April 1861, Record Group 121: Series, Photographs of Federal and Other Buildings in the United States, 1857–1942, NARA. My description of Fort Sumter as a space for recaptive detention is also drawn from a National Parks tour, 6 June 2009, conducted by Ranger Nate Johnson.

  73. A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.

  74. Levien, Case of the Slaver Echo, 6.

  75. Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 10.

  76. Sweet, “Quiet Violence of Ethnogenesis.”

  77. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 43–52.

  78. See, for example, the conditions of Pons recaptives described in Charles H. Bell, “The Captured Slave Ships,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 22, no. 4 (April 1846): 115–16.

  79. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 52.

  80. Krauss, “In the Ghost Forest,” 96.

  81. “The Slaver and Cargo,” Mercury, 1 September 1858; Hawthorne, “Gorge.”

  82. Martin, External Trade of the Loango Coast, 167–68.

  83. Mariana Candido makes a similar point about the implicit “violence of the law” in her discussion of late eighteenth-century Benguela uses of the concept of “original freedom.” See Candido, African Slaving Port, 207, 218, 224.

  84. A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.

  85. For the importance of drumming, music, and dance in Freetown’s Liberated African Yard, see Peterson, Province of Freedom, 185–86. Marcus Rediker writes about the potential for communication and creation of social connection in the face of slave ship commodification; see his Slave Ship, 282–84.

  86. Howard, “A Slaver in Our Port,” Mercury, 28 August 1858. This was not the only comparison between Echo recaptives and other news sensations. One newspaper account exclaimed that Charlestonians reacted to the slave ship as New Yorkers would to the “advent of Jenny Lind [a Swedish opera singer celebrity], the funeral of Bill Poole [New York boxer and political leader who died of a gunshot in 1855], or the news of a successful cable” (“The Congo Fever in Charleston,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 8 September 1858).

  87. Immediately after the Echo’s capture, Maffitt had attempted to turn over the Echo to Key West authorities; but district court judge William Marvin was absent, and federal marshal Fernando Moreno would not accept the ship without the judge’s warrant. Lieutenant Maffitt apparently based his decision to send the Echo to Charleston rather than the closer harbor of Key West on practical considerations of the available telegraph line, water supply, health conditions in Key West, readiness of the Charleston U.S. district court, and even prevailing winds. Maffitt had been ordered to Boston for his next assignment, and he later said that he would even have sent the Echo to Boston but, given the medical condition of the captives, feared the longer journey would result in more loss of life. See “Washington, September 22,” Mercury, 27 September 1858, and “Examination of the Slaver Captain,” Mercury, 29 September 1858. For a northern Republican view, see the editorial in the New-York Daily Tribune, 10 September 1858. Another factor may have been reported yellow fever and quarantine in Key West; see “Cuban Intelligence,” Courier, 31 August 1858. Yellow fever was also present in Charleston, and one of the Echo crewmembers was even reported to have contracted yellow fever; but the location of Africans at Fort Sumter would have prevented contact between most Charleston residents and the shipmates. See E. B. Grimball to John Grimball, 1 September 1858, SCHS; Mercury, 22 September 1858; and “The Cargo of Negroes,” Mercury, 27 September 1858. By May 1861, Maffitt had resigned his duties in the U.S. Navy and assumed command as a Confederate officer; see Maffitt, Life and Services of John Newland Maffitt, 219.

  88. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 168–78; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade.

  89. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 126–35.

  90. House Special Committee on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Report of Special Committee and Report of the Minority.

  91. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 171.

  92. Ibid., 153–72; Wells, Slave Ship Wanderer, 51. Rhode Island–born Captain Edward Townsend also later walked free from a Key West courtroom.

  93. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 170; Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 69.

  94. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 170–71.

  95. “The African Negroes—Correspondence between the Sheriff of Charleston District and the U.S. Marshal,” Mercury, 1 September 1858; Levien, Case of the Slaver Echo, 7.

  96. Levien, Case of the Slaver Echo, 56–58; Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 156; Fett, “Middle Passages and Forced Migrations,” 79–80.

  97. “The Rescued African Negroes,” Courier, 8 September 1858.

  98. J. Fraser Mathewes, “For the Mercury,” Mercury, 31 August 1858. Mathewes also wrote to South Carolina congressman William Porcher Miles attempting to make apprenticeship arrangements for the Echo recaptives. Interior Secretary Jacob Thompson denied Mathewes’s request, explaining that recaptives were to be removed to West Africa. See Jacob Thompson to William P. Miles, 6 June 1860, reel 1, RSI.

  99. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 156.

  100. “The Slave Trade,” Courier, 31 August 1858. “U.S. hotel” made sarcastic reference to the initial detention of recaptives under federal guard in Castle Pinckney on the small island of Shute’s Folly.

  101. See Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, for a
far-reaching analysis of the legal and political significance of the Echo and Wanderer trials.

  102. Holt, “Marking.” For treatments of antebellum racial ideology argued within national and sectional frameworks, see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 139–57, and Bay, White Image in the Black Mind.

  103. Fowler, “Phrenological Developments of Joseph Cinquez,” 136–38; Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 128–31.

  104. “The Mendian Exhibition,” American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 July 1840, quoted in Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 196–208, quote on 205. According to Rediker, Amistad committee member Joshua Leavitt defended the moral purpose of these public exhibitions: “It was no part of the design to show off these Mendians for the purpose of indulging mere curiosity” (204, emphasis in original).

  105. For an example of racial arguments for lesser intellectual capacity among Africans from an ACS officer at the time of the Amistad case, see Lindsly, “Differences in the Intellectual Character of the Several Varieties of the Human Race.”

  106. Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 25–35; Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 30–72; Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 42–44. Pre-Adamic and polygenist theories have roots in early modern philosophy. See Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, 92–113.

  107. Morton, Crania Americana, 5, table on p. 65; Carson, Measure of Merit, 4, 81–97; Fabian, Skull Collectors.

  108. Luse, “Slavery’s Champions Stood at Odds”; Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion, 165–66; Will, “American School of Ethnology.” South Carolina’s J. H. Guenebault played a role in the rise of American ethnology with his translation of French polygenist work in 1837. See Drescher, “Ending of the Slave Trade,” 375.

  109. McCord, “Diversity of the Races,” 399.

  110. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 550. Dedicated to Samuel Morton, Types of Mankind excerpted Morton’s publications and included writing by other leading scientific voices, such as Louis Agassiz.

  111. Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile; Weiner with Hough, Sex, Sickness, and Slavery, 17–19.

  112. Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion, 165–217.

  113. Agassiz, “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 49 (July 1850): 125, quoted in Rogers, Delia’s Tears, 218.

  114. Rogers, “Slave Daguerreotypes of the Peabody Museum,” 39–41, 51. See also Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion, 174; Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 45–54; and Reichlin, “Faces of Slavery.”

  115. Bowen, Central Africa, 331, 350, 113.

  116. Ibid., 160. Leonidas Spratt, in his defense of the Echo crew, cited Bowen, Livingstone, and Captain Canot, among others, to claim that the slavers could not have robbed their captives of freedom (i.e., committed piracy) because most Africans were already slaves. See Woodruff, Report of the Trials, 69. Although Bowen did discuss forms of slavery in West Africa, in truth Central Africa argued that societies in the interior did not participate in slavery to the extent that coastal peoples did. In contrast to Spratt’s citation of Captain Canot to assert that “five-sixths” of Africans were slaves, Bowen emphatically claimed of Yoruba society, “At least four fifths of the people are free” (320).

  117. Meyer, “T. J. Bowen and Central Africa,” 247–60; MacMaster, “United States Navy and African Exploration.” Bowen received praise from both the Liberator and Liberian president Stephen Benson for his portrayals of wealth and civilization in Africa. See “Learned and Wealthy Africans,” Liberator, 29 July 1859, 119, and Guannu, Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of Liberia, 32.

  118. P.A.F., “The Law of Piracy,” Mercury, 15 October 1858. Several months after the departure of the Echo shipmates, a Charleston writer accused Bowen of “making a show of science” to support his colonization schemes. See Ductor Dubitantium, “For the Mercury—the Rev. T. J. Bowen,” Mercury, 9 November 1858.

  119. Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion, 166, 197–206, 216. Bachman criticized the methods used by Agassiz to contrast “Mandingo” and “Guinea” as distinct African racial types.

  120. First-person archival discussions of this event remain elusive. All evidence on the 31 August encounter at Fort Sumter comes from “The Slaver and Cargo,” Mercury, 1 September 1858. The Mercury’s account of the 31 August event circulated nationally. See “The Slaver Echo and Her Cargo at Charleston,” NYT, 6 September 1858.

  121. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 185, 180, 416. Bowen, despite his defense of the civilizable “interior tribes,” described the people of Congo as “short, stubby, silly fellows” (Central Africa, 94).

  122. Maffitt, Life and Services of John Newland Maffitt, 206; Hunt, Negro’s Place in Nature, 18; “Correspondence of the Mercury, Washington, D.C., Aug 31,” Mercury, 3 September 1858; “Highly Interesting from the Gulf,” Chicago Press and Tribune, 8 June 1860; “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 345.

  123. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 135–37; Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 159–60; Young, Rituals of Resistance; Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.”

  124. A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.

  125. Burmeister, Black Man, 1. Indicating his popular audience, Burmeister’s piece was published in the New York Evening Post as well as in separate book form. Burmeister took a monogenist position that “the negro is like the European, a man,” but he also viewed white supremacy as a biological fact and believed the slave trade to be ineradicable for centuries to come due to human tendencies for the strong to dominate the weak. On the “discovery” of “Bantu” by European scientists studying African languages in Brazil, see Slenes, “‘Malungu, Ngoma’s Coming!,’” 221.

  126. A Charlestonian, “The Africans in the Bay,” Mercury, 2 September 1858.

  127. Stephanie M. H. Camp, “Race and Visual Culture before the Twentieth Century” (unpublished manuscript shared by Camp with author in July 2012), forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of the History of Race, ed. Matthew Pratt Guterl.

  128. Rogers, Delia’s Tears, 221.

  129. Recaptive images in illustrated newspapers are discussed in Chapter 3.

  130. P.A.F., “For the Mercury—the Law of Piracy,” Mercury, 14 October 1858.

  131. Ibid., 20 October 1858.

  132. Thurs, Science Talk, 22–52; Pandora, “Popular Science in National and Transnational Perspective.”

  133. Willie Lightheart, “Correspondence of Carolina Spartan,” Carolina Spartan, 16 September 1858, 2. A reprinted New York Herald correspondent, referencing a milk scandal in New York that received much coverage in the illustrated press, wrote, “If an artist of one of the illustrated papers could only have taken a sketch to this group of black animals, it would have beaten all the swill milk illustrations extant” (“The Niagara and the Negros,” Mercury, 28 September 1858, originally in Herald, 21 September 1858).

  134. Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 41; Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation”; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus.

  135. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 9–17.

  136. Reiss, Showman and the Slave.

  137. Pearson, “‘Infantile Specimens,’” 342.

  138. “The African Negroes—Correspondence between the Sheriff of Charleston District and the U.S. Marshal,” Mercury, 1 September 1858.

  139. Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, 84.

  140. Eason Journal, 1 April 1859.

  141. “The Ketch Brothers,” Mercury, 11 November 1858. These gifts linked the U.S. Navy to Charleston’s naturalist circles. Africa Squadron lieutenant C. M. Morris sent the tusk in care of Lieutenant Edward Stone of the Brothers’s prize crew to Gabriel Manigault. Manigault was one of Charleston’s naturalists, who knew ichthyologist and medical professor John E. Holbrook, with whom Agassiz stayed in South Carolina in 1850. See Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion, 98, and Ravenel, Charleston, 476.

  142. “Th
e Slaver and Cargo,” Mercury, 1 September 1858.

  143. “Extracts from Letters Respecting the Capture of the Slave Ship ‘Pons,’” [1845?]. The history of abolitionist display of slave ships begins, of course, with the famous Brooks image. See Rediker, Slave Ship, 308–42, and Wood, Blind Memory, 14–68, 295–301.

  144. Willie Lightheart, “Correspondence of Carolina Spartan,” Carolina Spartan, 16 September 1858.

  145. Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain,” 303–34; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography.

  146. Curtis, “Native Africans in the Bay,” Courier, 30 August 1858; “The Slaver, Her Crew and Cargo,” Mercury, 30 August 1858. In accordance with Charleston’s quarantine laws, the ship had to remain in quarantine until cleared by the port physician, Dr. W. C. Ravenel. See Levien, Case of the Slaver Echo, 5, and “The Slaver, Her Crew and Cargo,” Mercury, 30 August 1858. The navy’s acquiescence to South Carolina quarantine regulations would later become an issue in jurisdiction debates as South Carolina states’ rights men argued that if state law prevailed over naval ship movements in the harbor, state law should also prevail over recaptives brought to the harbor by the navy.

  147. F.A.P., “Who Are the Pirates?,” Mercury, 18 September 1858.

  148. Berkley Grimball to John Grimball, 27 September 1858, SCHS. The same excursion is recalled in Charles Manigault to Louis Manigault, Charleston, 28 February 1861, in Clifton, Life and Labor on Argyle Island, 316. Thanks to Kevin Dawson for this citation.

  149. “For Mulberry and Cooper River,” Mercury, 31 August 1858; “The Rice Harvest,” Mercury, 10 September 1858.