Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  As a result, slave trade revivalists sought not only to reenslave African recaptives but to harness them as symbols for the larger global advancement of “slave racial capitalism.”37 Global production of cotton, sugar, and coffee directed toward consumer markets in the industrializing regions of Europe and the Americas characterized the period of “second slavery,” a concept of global economy developed by historian Dale Tomich.38 Cuban annexationists, Nicaraguan filibusters, and “Dixie nationalists” with their eyes on Brazil spun visions of a slaveholding empire that would hold back the tide of emancipation and capitalize on this world market.39 Walter Johnson’s recent analysis of slavery and capitalism in the lower Mississippi Valley demonstrates how “slaveholders sought to project their power outward in the shape of pro-slavery imperialism in the 1850s.”40 Many proslavery imperialists fought for open and unregulated access to a transatlantic traffic in African enslaved laborers. Thus, the presence of slave trade recaptives in federal custody gave proslavery spokesmen an opportunity to confront the tensions between U.S. slave trade suppression efforts and slaveholder aspirations for territorial expansion into the southern hemisphere.

  As I discovered in the course of researching this book, the political debate over the fate of slave trade recaptives occurred not only between government officials but also in popular print culture. Recaptured Africans is therefore distinctive as a study that incorporates cultural politics into the history of U.S. slave trade suppression. Public display and racialized representations in print and visual images constituted part of the process of “recapture” for slave trade refugees in U.S. custody. We might ask how captive youth who sat on the Wildfire’s deck in view of a Harper’s Weekly journalist or photographer in Key West experienced these intrusions. How might they have related the curiosity of soldiers and white visitors in the camps to previous experiences of being examined and probed as slave trade commodities? We do not know enough about recaptive responses to being viewed as spectacle, but it is clear that antebellum print treatment of recaptive Africans drew on the conventions of nineteenth-century travel accounts as much or more than on the abolitionist tropes of the middle passage.41 The publication of slaver memoirs and naval adventures along the African coast heightened public appetites for ethnographic fare that portrayed African bodies, social organization, and perceived behavior as evidence of human inequality.

  For a select group of southern white elite men, slave trade refugees, encamped under federal protection, created a desire to engage in firsthand observation of the racial differences that structured their worldview. Racial science of the nineteenth century increasingly represented African-descended people as biologically unable to claim forms of social belonging and autonomous personhood that Euro-Americans deemed essential for those deserving full political rights.42 The theory of polygenesis, or separate human origins, grew in popularity with the escalation of U.S. slavery debates in the 1850s. Although the obvious contradictions of polygenesis with the biblical creation story put off many otherwise sympathetic southerners, proslavery physicians from both North and South popularized the idea of inherent and natural difference between people of African descent (“the Negro race”) and white European descendants.43 Developments in racial science and proslavery ideology in the 1850s manufactured a slave trade spectacle out of the human misery of hundreds of slave ship survivors. Moreover, the racialization of recaptives, particularly in Charleston, but also in Key West, implicitly asserted that slave trade refugees were inherently incapable of benefiting from a free status. Both African travel literature and theories of racial science combined to frame recaptive shipmates of the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota as racialized ethnological subjects, specimens of “interior” Africa, and objects of white rescue. In the following pages, I ask what the print culture representations of recaptives can tell us about hardening theories of racial destiny and white supremacy that would serve not only the proslavery South but also future forms of colonialism. Just as importantly, I ask what alternative perceptions of African recaptives in the United States were eclipsed by the prevailing narrative of white rescue premised on either enslavement or colonization.

  Free black abolitionists generated one such counternarrative of human rights that challenged the escalating arguments for polygenesis and racial inequality. By analyzing the sustained protest against the illegal slave trade in the New York black press of the 1850s, Recaptured Africans reveals an understudied dimension of free black transatlantic activism.44 Northern leaders such as Frederick Douglass and the “fugitive blacksmith” minister James W. C. Pennington called attention to the human costs of the illegal slave trade with a critique of U.S. law and proslavery economics. Both men strongly condemned American complicity in illegal slaving as well as the federal policy of removal to Liberia that funneled money to the ACS. By recognizing young recaptives as human sufferers with freedom rights, African American activists asserted the common origins of humankind and uplifted Enlightenment principles (however unrealized) of human equality. At the same time, black activists also sought to recruit young recaptives for missionary projects aimed at the Christian regeneration of the African continent. Demonstrating this complex agenda, Pennington’s activism illustrates how black abolitionists in the New York area took on the illegal transatlantic trade and U.S. recaptive policy.

  Finally, an extensive body of evidence was generated by the officials who oversaw the detention, transportation, and apprenticeship of recaptives in Liberia. Even after declaring itself an independent republic in 1847, Liberia figured prominently in American slavery debates and continued to serve as justification for an American naval presence along the West African coast. In contrast to proslavery advocates and most abolitionists, the ACS viewed the unprecedented waves of recaptives between 1858 and 1861 as both a daunting challenge and a potential boost to Liberian “commerce, civilization, and Christianity.”45 ACS and U.S. government records thus reflect paternalistic responses to a humanitarian crisis while revealing the colonial racial hierarchy of Liberian apprenticeships. By carefully reading bureaucratic records and receipts against correspondence from ACS, American, and Liberian officials, we can glimpse the strategies of recaptive men, women, and children as they attempted to survive and build a future among strangers.

  Situating the United States within the wider nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade, this book begins with the racial politics of federal recaptive policies. Chapter 1 examines the precedents established by the deportation of African shipmates from the Antelope, General Páez, Fenix, and Pons in the period between the passage of the 1819 removal law and 1845. The first chapter also charts the emergence of a literary genre of “slave trade ethnography” in slaver and naval narratives that contributed to the racial representation of recaptives in 1850s print culture. Chapter 2 follows the Echo recaptives’ arrival in Charleston in 1858. While West Central African shipmates sought to survive their physical trauma and social crisis in the confines of Fort Sumter, local attempts at ethnological inquiry and slave trade tourism thrived in a proslavery atmosphere. Chapter 3 turns to the recaptive camp at Fort Taylor, Key West, in the summer of 1860. It examines how recaptives reconstituted a tenuous social life amidst death under the gaze of popular illustrated news stories that turned suffering into spectacle.

  In the second half of the book, although racial representation remains relevant as a context for recaptive struggles, the analysis turns to the social experience of recaptive Africans as historical subjects of forced migration caught up in the uneven processes of Atlantic emancipation. Chapter 4 explores how James Pennington and other African American activists in the New York area advocated for recaptured Africans with a radical formulation of equal rights based on human unity. Chapter 5 considers recaptives as forced migrants on their passage to Liberia, a journey that echoed the middle passage but also served as the matrix for new shipmate relationships. Finally, Chapter 6 explores how these former slave ship captives—embarked from Ouidah and the Congo Riv
er region—began the next phase of their displacement in Liberian apprenticeships. Just as they had throughout the entire Atlantic odyssey, shipmate relations played a crucial role in the future social worlds built by recaptives now called “Congoes” in Liberia.

  Africans recaptured from the mid-nineteenth-century slave trade, as this study shows, journeyed through a dangerous liminal space between enslavement and an uncertain future. By dwelling on the bleak spaces adjacent, but not identical, to enslaved captivity, Recaptured Africans explores the meaning of recapture for slave ship survivors in U.S. custody. The following pages thus present a bifurcated view of recaptivity as a confrontation with both the alienation of enslavement and a racially caricatured representation of “native Africans” in need of white rescue. An existential gap opened between the urgency of recaptives’ fragile shipmate bonds and the inability of almost any American observers to recognize the survival imperatives of those same bonds. That gap in human comprehension was also a spawn, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, of the slaveholding republic’s polluted nest. In the racialized representation of American print culture, slave trade survivors could only exit the status of human commodity through the door of ethnographic spectacle. Other routes of exit—such as that of the civic personhood fought for by free blacks and abolitionists in northern states—were foreclosed by recaptives’ legal status as outsiders mandated for removal and the increasingly biological definitions of race that turned slave trade refugees into traveling specimens of “interior” Africa. Remarkably, those who survived this vast oceanic circuit drew on shipmate bonds and the social resources of their past to painstakingly craft a new collective existence in Liberian “Congo” communities. With one foot in saltwater slavery and one foot on alien ground, recaptive voyagers outlined the borderlands that foreshadowed the future perils of a postemancipation Atlantic World.

  1: Recaptives of a Slaveholding Republic

  For if the influence of economic motives on the action of mankind ever had clearer illustration it was in the modern history of the African race, and particularly in America.

  ∼W. E. B. Du Bois, “Apologia,” in 1954 reprint of The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, to the United States of America [1896]

  At the age of eighty-six, W. E. B. Du Bois took a rare opportunity to reflect back over sixty years of his own scholarship to his Harvard dissertation on the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. Du Bois’s carefully researched study, published in 1896, framed the troubled enforcement of U.S. slave trade abolition laws as a moral challenge to a nation whose highest court had just enshrined the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In the conclusion to the original work, Du Bois had demanded, “How far in a State can a recognized moral wrong safely be compromised?”1 By 1954, however, Du Bois critiqued as simplistic the idea that human behavior was motivated by “a series of conscious moral judgments.” From his mid-twentieth-century vantage point, Du Bois remained proud of the study but regretted his “ignorance” of Freudian and Marxist theory. From Freud, he implied, he would have borrowed the insight of complex psychological responses to the politics of abolition that contributed to the persistence of racial inequality. Informed by Marx, he wrote, he would have substituted a focus on “moral lassitude” with an analysis of “the willingness of a privileged class of Americans to get power and comfort at the expense of degrading a class of black slaves.”2 For the mature Du Bois, the suppression of the slave trade could be understood not as a narrow encounter between individual conscience and the law but, rather, as the product of entangled histories of global labor, racial subordination, and economic interest.3

  These entangled histories generated a new kind of captive experience for African children, men, and women seized by the United States from illegal slave ships in the era of second slavery. “Second slavery,” a concept first introduced by historian Dale Tomich, aims to shift our understanding of nineteenth-century slavery from a national to a global framework.4 From this vantage point, antebellum U.S. slavery constituted part of a larger “second cycle of slavery,” stretching from roughly 1804 to the 1880s and linking sites of production where slavery persisted as a dominant form of labor. Following the Haitian and British emancipations, U.S., Brazilian, and Cuban slaveholders accelerated plantation production to meet the demands of consumers in industrializing societies. The expansion of sugar, cotton, and coffee production would not have been possible without a thriving contraband transatlantic slave trade that forcibly disembarked at least 2.8 million Africans primarily in Cuba and Brazil, facilitated in part by U.S. resources.5 The small number of recaptured Africans diverted from this slave trade by U.S. intervention thus entered a society increasingly defined by the racial politics and economic interests of second slavery.

  U.S. transatlantic slave trade laws reflected the internal contradictions of suppression policies developed by a second slavery nation. As this chapter will show, U.S. policies on recaptured Africans evolved over time, treating recaptives first as saleable property and then as potentially dangerous foreigners designated for exclusion. From 1808 to 1819, recaptives brought into the United States found themselves at the mercy of state laws, treated as moveable property, and subject to continued enslavement. In 1819, federal law shifted responsibility for slave ship recaptives to federal jurisdiction but required the government to transport all recaptives beyond U.S. borders. Even then, many slave trade refugees endured years of detention in the United States under protracted legal proceedings resulting from sectional, political party, and international disputes. Colonizationists spoke about recaptive removal using the humanitarian rhetoric of repatriation, but few recaptives ever saw their homelands again. Throughout the 1840s and much of the 1850s, recaptive policy remained an abstract issue due to the rarity of slave ship interceptions by the United States. Only in the 1858–62 period did more aggressive naval enforcement bring thousands of recaptives into U.S. custody, including nearly 1,800 Africans who arrived under intense scrutiny in Charleston and Key West. By examining the entire evolution of U.S. recaptive policy with its distinctive emphasis on federal removal, we can begin to understand how shipmates from the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota slave ships were appropriated as symbols in the heated slavery debates of the late antebellum period.

  The contested politics of recaptivity drew heavily on representations of Africans and the illegal slave trade in Anglo-American print culture. Specifically, the wide circulation of African travel accounts in 1850s popular print culture generated a literary genre I call “slave trade ethnography,” which significantly shaped Americans’ interpretation of the unfamiliar figure of the slave trade recaptive.6 Naval accounts such as Commander Andrew Hull Foote’s Africa and the American Flag and slaver narratives like Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver, both published in 1854, fed the appetite of readers for ethnographic fare.7 In addition to recounting travel adventures, these works painted an ahistorical portrait of African “customs and manners” and positioned slave trade victims as objects of white rescue.8 Furthermore, by depicting Africans—and, by extension, slave trade recaptives—as permanently dependent and civically incapacitated, regardless of age, slave trade ethnography obscured the very real presence of child captives in the late transatlantic slave trade. Such representations of illegally trafficked Africans in U.S. print culture form part of the broader cultural history of second slavery.

  U.S. Slave Trade Suppression in the Era of Second Slavery

  African recaptives came into U.S. custody in the late 1850s through transatlantic routes developed over decades of contraband slaving. The financial integration of nineteenth-century trade in “legitimate” goods and contraband people proves the fallacy of a sharp break between slavery and free labor. As mercantilist restrictions on shipping and commerce gave way to free trade ideals, global capital flows linked illicit slaving and legal commerce.9 Americans became leading consumers of Brazilian coffee and Cuban molasses, grown and processed by illegally trafficked
African laborers.10 Moreover, emerging trade routes linked commerce from U.S. ports such as New York and Baltimore to an internationally diverse group of merchants and slavers along the West African coast.11 British credit financed the modern infrastructure of “railroad, steamship, and steam mills” necessary to move sugar, coffee, and cotton to European markets.12 Both U.S. and British legislators balked at regulations that would have prevented the sale of ships or trade goods to parties either indirectly or directly involved with transatlantic slave trading.13 Observing the ability of known slavers to buy American goods and access British credit, naval officer Horatio Bridge wondered “how far either Old or New England can be pronounced free from the guilt and odium of the slave trade, while, with so little indirectness, they both share its profits and contribute essential aid to its prosecution.”14 Despite the early slave trade abolitions, the global flow of capital financed human and nonhuman commodities well into the nineteenth century.