Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  The interaction of white elites with Echo shipmates on the grounds of Fort Sumter also reveals the centrality of visual experience to the ongoing making of race in the U.S. history of slave trade suppression. Visual culture, historian Stephanie Camp reminds us, played a formative role in the development of European racial ideologies.127 In the nineteenth century, men of science like Morton, Nott, and Gliddon using the “natural history method” placed great faith in their ability to see into bodies, far below skin color. “The science of ethnology,” scholar Molly Rogers argues, “was above all a science of looking.”128 Given this fact, and the political uses that slave trade revivalists wanted to make of recaptives’ bodies, it is notable that none of the city leaders on the 31 August excursion thought to take along a photographist.129 Instead, slave trade revivalists, such as College of Charleston professor Frederick A. Porcher, relied on their reputation to lend authority to their conclusions. In a series of editorials written in the Mercury, Porcher held up his firsthand observations against abolitionist accounts of the “far famed horrors of the ‘middle passage.’” The Dolphin’s capture of the Echo, wrote Porcher, “has permitted us to see the sons of Africa in puris naturalibus [state of nature].” Having seen for himself, Porcher proclaimed, “We now know that they would, in every respect, be improved by removal to this country.”130 Having dispensed with the abolitionists, Porcher next turned to the missionaries. Dismissing Bowen’s colonizationist vision as a “chimera,” Porcher asserted the common proslavery view of black racial destiny, arguing that “a successful voyage of an African slaver does more for civilization than all the missionaries that are spending their lives on the African continent.”131

  Slave trade spectatorship extended far beyond elite proslavery interests, however, for antebellum racial ideology was made in the pursuit of entertainment as often as in scientific discourse. An emergent mode of scientific inquiry, ethnology did not have clear professional boundaries, and amateur interests frequently shaded into modes of popular amusement.132 A letter to the Carolina Spartan testified to the crowd appeal of the Echo shipmates when it claimed, “Very many of the younger portion of our citizens have availed themselves of the opportunity of seeing real live Africans.” Indicating an awareness of the ethnographic images that photographic technology was starting to make possible, the Spartan’s correspondent wished that a local photographer had been present: “What an excellent chance they have, of taking a grouped picture of some half dozen of these wild negroes; and what an interesting sun-sketch would it prove to be to our country friends, who have no opportunity of seeing the originals!”133 This enthusiastic endorsement of slave trade spectatorship points to yet another way in which slave trade survivors were drawn into the circuits of popular consumption in a slaveholding nation. By 1860, when recaptives landed at Key West, the visual representation of slave ship refugees as exotic ethnographic subjects would be fully realized in national illustrated weeklies.

  Ethnographic curiosity directed at the Africans in Fort Sumter partook of a long history of public display of black and brown bodies for white popular entertainment mixed with varying degrees of scientific purpose. Scholars have given considerable attention to the story of the Khoekhoe woman Saartjie Baartman, privately examined and publicly exhibited to European audiences as the “Hottentot Venus” by Louis Agassiz’s mentor Georges Cuvier.134 In Europe, photography created a visual index of physical difference that could be used by scientists and displayed for popular consumption.135 In the antebellum United States, poor and enslaved African Americans had long been subjected to exposure in medical school amphitheaters, and their racialized images were popularized on the minstrel stage. Indeed, the greatest showman of the century, P. T. Barnum, began his rise to fame by exhibiting an aging enslaved woman, Joice Heth, as George Washington’s 161-year-old former nurse.136 Popular interest in Echo recaptives similarly reflected what cultural historian Susan Pearson calls the “complex dynamic of objectification and identification” that characterized the spectrum of nineteenth-century racial display, from the “freak” exhibit to the use of patients as medical specimens.137 Holding that such exhibition could be instructive as well as entertaining, the Charleston Mercury praised the “beneficial” value of allowing “all classes, black and white, to see and judge for themselves of the natural condition and calibre of these poor wretches fresh from their native land.”138 By implication, the Mercury held that all Charlestonians, including free and enslaved blacks, would readily perceive the merits of southern slavery by viewing slave ship survivors whose degraded “caliber” seemed to be rooted not only in their history of enslavement but in their essential natures.

  In addition to midcentury slave trade and missionary literature, Charleston’s maritime connections to slave trade suppression also contributed to the public excitement about recaptives at Fort Sumter. As residents of a significant Atlantic port, Charlestonians had a number of friends and relatives who served in the U.S. Navy, some of them in the Africa Squadron. Though an Africa Squadron cruise could be a hardship, young seamen also viewed it as an adventure and an opportunity to collect exotic souvenirs. Horatio Bridge, for example, observed that after a raid on a West African coastal town, U.S. marines gathered several “household utensils” that they intended to bring home as “trophies and curiosities.”139 During his 1859 cruise on the Marion, seaman Henry Eason noted in his journal that he had purchased a parrot from traders near Loango.140 In this manner, the material culture of the African coast made its way into the homes of Charleston families. In November 1858, when the sloop-of-war Marion arrived in Charleston with the suspected slave ship Brothers in tow, the commanding lieutenant brought with him “several curiosities,” including an elephant tusk and an “African spear,” sent by fellow officers to their friends and family.141 Within this context, the white public would have seen both the Echo and its recaptive shipmates as a particularly sensational form of African “curiosity.”

  Soon after its arrival, the Echo itself became a sort of museum, offering local visitors a peek at a genuine slave ship, rarely openly identified as such in U.S. ports by midcentury. After disembarking crew and recaptives, navy seamen securely moored the brig near the new Custom House to await its legal condemnation as a prize ship. The Mercury announced that wharf superintendent E. B. White would “undoubtedly gratify the reasonable wishes of parties, who may desire to observe the interior arrangements of a slaver.”142 Whereas Quakers in Philadelphia posted abolitionist broadsides about the cramped dimensions of the Pons slaver in 1846, the Echo’s display had more of a carnival feel.143 Even 200 miles away in upcountry Spartanburg, correspondents reported on the large numbers of sightseers who flocked to the Echo for the “gratification of curiosity.”144 The language of gratification signaled a certain thrilling pleasure that, in the smallest measure, recognized enslaved Africans’ physical ordeal while still reveling in the sight of the ship.145 Nevertheless, the presence of recaptive Africans proved far more alluring than the slave ship, and the majority of public attention remained on recaptive youth and adults.

  The exposure of Echo recaptives to hundreds of curious viewers, given the heightened slave trade debates of the time, is best understood as an act of public possession that merged popular entertainment with proslavery political culture. The most public access to the ship and its forced passengers came in the quarantine period before the naval prize crew turned African recaptives over to U.S. marshal Hamilton. Charlestonians reportedly deluged mayor Charles Macbeth with requests to board the ship. (Macbeth and several aldermen had visited the Echo themselves on the day after its arrival.) In evident disregard of quarantine rules and despite the threat of yellow fever from the city, one viewer reported that “very many went and very great was the curiosity and interest exhibited” during the two days when recaptives remained on the quarantined ship at Sullivan’s Island.146 After recaptives disembarked at the more remote Fort Sumter, tensions rose over the issue of their military guards.

 
Yet access to black bodies constituted a core prerogative of white mastery in southern slave society. For Frederick Porcher, “monstrous” federal suppression laws interfered with that access. Regarding Echo recaptives, he charged that “many a gentleman has repressed his curiosity to visit them from his unwillingness to encounter a mortifying repulse” from distrustful federal authorities.147 In fact, it appeared that federal guards continued to allow small expeditions of wealthy white men to visit the fort and interact with African shipmates. Berkley Grimball, for example, exercised his entitlement with two private trips to the fort that he made in the company of fathers and sons of several elite families. Planter Charles Manigault similarly chartered his own exploratory expedition, which included two African-born elders (one owned by Manigault and the other loaned from a city slaveholder) intended to serve as translators. According to the account, however, the old man and woman “found none of their tribe and could not make themselves understood at all.” Instead, West Central African shipmates laughed at the apparently unintelligible speech of the enslaved translators.148 Much is submerged in this account, including the perspectives of the elderly enslaved man and woman. However, the trip highlights Manigault’s power to assemble this experimental encounter in hopes of further investigating the language and origins of Echo shipmates.

  FIGURE 2.1 Excursion advertisement, Charleston Daily Courier. For a fare of fifty cents, the steam packet General Clinch offered Charleston sightseers a chance to view recaptives of the Echo under federal guard at Fort Sumter.

  At the same time, public interest also inspired commercial ventures exploiting slave trade refugees as a visual spectacle. White leisure activities that consumed black bodies as part of a picturesque landscape were not entirely novel. Indeed, steamboats regularly offered pleasure excursions up and down the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. The General Clinch’s advertisements, for example, invited sightseers to witness the “mysteries of rice harvesting” in which “these periodical drum beatings and negro songs indicate that it is more a frolic than arduous work among the negroes.”149 Such excursions served as part of the social reproduction of race that naturalized the black labor enriching Lowcountry planters. Trips to Fort Sumter could likewise reinforce the racial ethnography of slave trade revivalists. The steamers Osiris and General Clinch both advertised steamboat excursions scheduled for 8 September “to enable the citizens to see the 300 Africans captured from the brig Echo.”150 (See fig. 2.1.) Notably, these ventures depended on the ethnographic lens for their unique promise. Unlike the Echo, which was exhibited specifically as a slave ship, Echo recaptives were not exhibited as victims of the slave trade but as “native” specimens of Africa. For only 25 cents and to the music of the local Cadet Band, the Mercury exclaimed, the excursion “will afford the shortest trip on record to Africa.”151The steamboat advertisement effectively replaced the middle passage with an exotic transatlantic voyage for sightseers. For the price of the ticket, white Charlestonians could figuratively become a Bowen, a Livingstone, or a slaver and see with their own eyes what the revivalist debate was about.

  Consequently, when weather and federal orders combined to foil the excursions of 8 September, some Charleston elites decried the tour’s failure as an assault on southern honor. The passengers who turned up at the Southern wharf that day faced heavy rain showers and high waves. The captain of the Osiris wisely canceled its promised trip and rescheduled for the following day, but the General Clinch forged ahead through the choppy water.152 Whether due to rough seas or federal suspicion of local slaveholders’ motives, the soldiers at Fort Sumter did not allow eager passengers to disembark and tour the grounds.153 Instead, the steamboat pulled up near the wharf, and the officers “in charge of the negros then paraded them outside the Fort, with the design of affording an opportunity for all to see.”154 Echo shipmates may have wondered what new separations awaited them as they were ushered through Fort Sumter’s gates and exhibited on the rain-swept wharf. Curious sightseers, like disappointed explorers unable to penetrate an imagined African interior, had to satisfy themselves with a distant view. Moreover, the vocal faction of General Clinch passengers clearly objected to the “forms and ceremonies” of the federal guard as an “offensive exhibition of distrust on the part of the government officials.”155

  Accusations that the General Clinch agent had failed to deliver on his exhibitionist promise quickly evolved into political controversy. On the return trip, a group led by Professor Porcher organized a committee of protest against the tour restrictions and passed several indignant resolutions.156 In light of the prevailing political excitement surrounding the Echo, limited access to African recaptives granted to sightseers by U.S. soldiers joined the list of federal insults against “the Southern people.” From Porcher’s perspective, the federal authority that denied access to Fort Sumter paralleled the federal ban on slaveholders’ access to the transatlantic slave trade. The laws and treaties of trade suppression, he argued, were responsible for restricting southern states’ rights to African bodies, whether to satisfy ethnographic curiosity or for plantation labor demands. In short, Porcher’s politicization of an episode of frustrated slave trade tourism assumed a racial destiny of continued commodification for recaptive Africans. Ultimately, however, the federal removal law of 1819 denied southern slaveholders permanent possession of recaptive bodies. After three weeks at Fort Sumter, the enormous naval steamer Niagara arrived to load the surviving shipmates for another devastating transatlantic passage.157

  FIGURE 2.2 Charleston Mercury advertisement, 21 October 1858. Charleston merchants sought to capitalize on public excitement over the slave ship Echo with this advertisement for their “handsome stock” of fall and winter clothing.

  The question of African racial destiny lingered weeks after the surviving Echo shipmates had departed for Liberia. A sign of the popular impact of recaptives at Fort Sumter appeared in the form of an advertisement posted in the Mercury on 21 October. “GREAT EXCITEMENT!! ANOTHER SLAVER CAPTURED / ARRIVAL OF 261 AFRICANS / PUBLIC MEETING CALLED THIS DAY,” trumpeted the eye-catching boldface headlines (see fig. 2.2). On second glance—and reading literally between the headlines—curious readers detected another message in smaller typeface: A “large and handsome stock” of “Carolina clothing” had arrived from New York, and “the good judgment” shown by Charleston’s citizens “in relation to the captured Africans” would be no less demonstrated by patronizing the establishment of Cohen, Willis & Co. on King Street. By associating the excitement generated by the arrival of recaptive Africans with an opportunity to shop, the Charleston clothing merchants drew the Echo shipmates into yet another system of valuation, that of slaveholding consumer culture, in which enslaved black bodies became exchangeable for other material goods. At the top of the column, the phrase “THE LARGE AND HANDSOME STOCK” appeared in an intermediate typeface, smaller than the slave trade headlines but larger than the clothing descriptions. Ambivalence about the kind of “large and handsome stock” being promised would not have been lost on a southern antebellum reader.

  While the ad played on the pun of African “stock,” it also reflected a central theme in slave trade suppression politics, for its cleverness depended on an implicit opposition to the category of “legitimate” commerce. As alluded to earlier, advocates of slave trade suppression and colonization placed great faith in the ability of “lawful” commerce such as trade in ivory and palm oil to eradicate both the African internal and the international slave trade. Missionary Thomas Jefferson Bowen put it precisely: “The little palm nut is the greatest enemy that has ever reared its head against the slave trade.”158 Slave trade revivalists, however, rejected the legal demarcation entirely. Asserting the right to human property on racial grounds, Spratt and others argued that the federal government had no right to ban the illegal slave trade any more than it had the right to ban the shipment of any other product from one country to another.159 Enslaved Africans could be reputably compared to “Carolina clothing” and
great “excitement” generated by the prospects of acquiring both. Lying just below the surface of this equivalence between clothing and African bodies was another parallel drawn by slave trade revivalists between the U.S. domestic slave trade and the transatlantic trade they desired to renew.160 With a wink to a time when foreign slave ships openly advertised their wares at the Charleston wharf (and to a future when that might again be so), Cohen, Willis & Co. capitalized on Echo recaptives’ recent presence to capture consumers’ attention.

  Historian Beatriz Mamigonian notes that the category of “liberated African” arose as a “by-product of the suppression activities,” leading to the treatment of liberated Africans in most places under British influence as part of a broader imperial “abolitionist experiment.”161 Recaptives at Fort Sumter were equally “by-products” of slave trade suppression, coming into custody of U.S. authorities ill prepared to shelter and feed them. Yet, the arrival of the Echo shipmates in a hotbed of U.S. slave trade revivalism resulted in the adamant rejection of their potentially “liberated” status. Rather, Charleston slave trade revivalists sought access to recaptive bodies to assert the natural existence of human inequality and chattel slavery. Despite some acknowledgment of abject medical suffering, public discussion of recaptives primarily treated them as ethnographic subjects whose bodies revealed not the ravages of slave ship captivity but the barbarity of people intrinsically suited for enslavement.