Exhibition of recaptives via elite inspection and steamboat excursions revealed an early form of imperial visual culture, which by the 1890s would be more widely institutionalized in world fairs and museum exhibits. Charleston’s version of exhibition extended the imaginations of Lowcountry white audiences. Instead of merely reading about Africa in midcentury exploration literature, Charlestonians could now see living Africans in their “native condition.” The display of Echo shipmates is an important part of the Echo story because it illuminates both the cultural politics of race and the political culture of proslavery imperialism. Furthermore, the very fact that white Charleston sightseers paid to see slave ship recaptives as a form of entertainment vividly illustrates the human cost of slave trade suppression policies carried out by a slaveholding republic. The animosity of slave trade revivalists to federal authority contributed to the urgency of the shipmates’ removal, thus sending recaptives on another ocean crossing long before their bodies had time to recover from their first traumatic passage.
While scholars of nineteenth-century racial spectatorship in other contexts have explored the ability of racial subjects to gaze back and engage in “performative act[s] of self-determination,” there is very little evidence available to explore this line of analysis with Echo shipmates.162 Rather, it is more accurate to think of West Central African slave ship survivors at Fort Sumter as engaged in a parallel struggle for survival and meaning in the midst of the obscenity of their racial display. Under federal guard and popular gaze, recaptives constituted a collective of shipmates, a nascent and emerging community. The relationships forged within and across language groups, between younger and older, were the raw materials out of which recaptives sought to make their ordeal legible. Their struggle would be repeated two years later in another federal camp, this time among a larger and more diverse group of shipmates in Key West, Florida. By the time recaptives arrived in Key West, slave trade revival politics had faded in the face of impending national division and the fractious presidential campaigns. Nevertheless, the American public continued its fascination with recaptive Africans as exotic spectacles for mass consumption. Once again, the sensation of “native Africans” in the popular press would submerge the social ordeal of slave ship survivors. Yet, recaptives continued to wage their parallel struggle, building shipmate bonds in order to lend their own meanings to the category of “recaptive.”
3: Suffering and Spectacle
What is to come even a bird with a long neck cannot see, but our Lord only.
∼Narrative of the Travels of Ali Eisami, Sierra Leone, ca. 1850
Beginning in May 1860, a transient settlement of slave ship refugees sprang up on the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys.1 The Key West “African Depot,” as U.S. marshal Fernando Moreno called it, resulted from newly vigilant U.S. Home Squadron patrols near the Cuban coast that intercepted three ships trafficking in contraband human cargo: the Wildfire (26 April), the William (9 May), and the Bogota (23 May). Despite having orders from the secretary of the navy to bring any recaptives seized to the healthier ports of New England, Lieutenant T. Augustus Craven of the U.S. steamer Mohawk determined that the longer journey would prove lethal for most of the young recaptives crowded below deck. Craven thus took the Wildfire to Key West and established a precedent for the other two captured slave ships.2 Two years earlier, Moreno had turned the Echo away from Key West, sending the seized slaver on to Charleston.3 By the summer of 1860, however, the largest group of “recaptured Africans” to enter U.S. ports waited on the southernmost Florida key for their mandated removal to Liberia.
To a certain extent, the Key West Depot resembled many of the temporary encampments of diverse groups of recaptives located across the Atlantic World in sites that included Freetown, St. Helena, and Rio de Janeiro.4 In Key West, the 1860 surge in U.S. slave ship interceptions brought together recaptives from two different regions of Africa. West Central Africans from the Wildfire and the William had already been encamped for a month in Key West when a predominantly adult group of recaptives from the Bight of Benin arrived in the Bogota. The New Orleans Picayune remarked on the Bogota shipmates, “They are of distinct tribe, or tribes, from the others, having no affinity in common with them—each to the other was quite a subject of curiosity and wonder.”5 As death continued to erode their numbers, hundreds of slave trade refugees made their survival intelligible primarily through relationships to their immediate shipmates and others with whom they shared language, geographic origins, and—in exceptional cases—kinship. In this sense, an analysis of recaptives at Key West expands the discussion of the reconstruction of social life initiated with the story of the Echo shipmates.
Detained by a nation whose majority feared free blacks and upheld the constitutionality of human property, recaptives in U.S. custody found virtually no recognition of their social crisis in the outside world. Instead, conditions within the African Depot reflected the underlying racial politics of slave trade suppression implemented by a slaveholding republic. From the highest levels of government, federal officials viewed the supervision of recaptives as a difficult, expensive, and disagreeable task.6 Furthermore, predatory planters from the Gulf States stalked Key West, threatening abduction and reenslavement. At ground level, federal officials and other local residents sought to meet the physical needs of recaptives, who numbered roughly half the size of Key West’s total population.7 Yet the spectacular qualities of the African Depot also quickly attracted the interest of sightseers and the popular press.
From the first moments of recaptivity in the Florida Keys, slave ship survivors came under the scrutiny of a wider American public. The depot’s location just outside Fort Taylor and less than a mile from the small town of Key West gave journalists greater access to recaptives than Fort Sumter had afforded. The Savannah Republican provided a glimpse of the sensational tone of press coverage: “The African village presents a very curious spectacle: 1480 wild Africans dancing and singing night and day.”8 From Salt Lake, Utah, to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, distant news editors concocted rabid headlines about “Raw Darkies” in Florida or simply reprinted other papers’ stories.9 New York–based illustrated weeklies rushed to cover Key West as well, adding visual imagery to pages of newsprint. Harper’s Weekly produced a three-quarter-page engraving of Wildfire shipmates posed on the deck of the slave ship. Artists from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper drew up sketches of young people, too weak to walk, carried off the William by horse-drawn carts. Departing from South Carolina’s earlier slave trade revivalist agenda, illustrated news of Key West slave trade survivors emphasized white national benevolence and African exoticism, while passing lightly over recaptive survival struggles. Recaptives in Key West thus endured a peculiar kind of visibility in which popular ethnographic conventions shrouded the crisis of recaptive life and death.
Routes to Recaptivity
Like the Echo in 1858, the slavers Wildfire, William, and Bogota followed the narrowing routes of contraband slaving in the waning years of the transatlantic trade. Built in Amesbury, Massachusetts, the Wildfire left New York City with an American captain sailing along the dominant slaving route for the Congo River region. The William had been purchased in New York in 1859 and sent to Mobile, and then on to Cuba.10 In Havana, outfitters readied the William for a slaving voyage to the Congo River. Like the Echo before them, both the William and the Wildfire relied on multiple investors who circulated and laundered capital through Havana and New York businesses to feed the illicit trade. The money and men behind the Bogota also had New York connections, but the barque had been built in Honfleur, in northwestern France. Captained by a Frenchman, the Bogota cleared from New York headed for the West African port of Ouidah.11 No slavers associated with these three voyages were ever convicted; some, as foreigners, could not even be tried under U.S. laws.12 Long after the slavers had been released, their African captives remained in U.S. custody and subject to American slave trade legislation.
Recaptives who
disembarked the Wildfire and the William in Key West resembled 1858 Echo shipmates in terms of both their young age and origins in West Central Africa. To an even greater extent than the Echo’s embarkation port of Cabinda, the Congo River’s trading posts served as gathering points for the majority of West Central African captives in the last years of illegal transatlantic slaving.13 Of the estimated 75,865 slaves embarked by foreign slavers from Congo regional ports between 1856 and 1860, 55.5 percent came from barracoons on the Congo River, compared with 31.6 percent from the Loango Coast that included Cabinda.14 A rash of new trading posts spread along the river in the 1850s as American, Portuguese, Angolan, and Spanish traders defied naval warships in search of quick profits from Cuban slave sales. Illicit networks connecting Havana, New York, and Benguela financed the unregulated and decentralized satellite loading depots just out of view of naval cruisers on the Atlantic coast.15
Situating the Key West African Depot as an outgrowth of 1850s Congo-to-Cuba slave routes further reinforces our understanding of child captives’ vulnerability on both sides of the Atlantic.16 One government agent in Key West reported roughly 50 adults among the William’s 355 survivors, with over 300 others being children and youth between the ages of five and fourteen.17 News correspondents who boarded the Wildfire soon after its arrival in Florida also confirmed roughly three-quarters of the shipmates to be “boys aged from ten to sixteen years.”18 These comments reveal observers’ basic recognition of recaptives’ young age, despite the absence of clearly articulated criteria for designating childhood. Like recaptives of the Echo, these young people found themselves uprooted from their dependent places in home societies by mechanisms of debt, warfare, criminal sentencing, and abduction that intensified as the expansion of the nineteenth-century Atlantic commercial economy made inroads into African polities.19 Young West Central Africans experienced great vulnerability as Cuban slave prices rose. Some, who had been locally enslaved for years or even from birth, were now shunted to foreign slavers.20 Historian Jelmer Vos’s research on French indenture recruitment suggests that many enslaved youth originated from villages close to the Congo River and particularly from the port of Boma.21 Other Wildfire boys had been taken during raids and witnessed the violent deaths of their parents during attacks on their towns.22
Thrust onto illegal slave ships through a variety of mechanisms, many young captives from the Wildfire and the William shared broad social and cultural affinities as well as histories of traumatic loss. The existence of multiple states in West Central Africa as well as the undocumented and decentralized nature of the late slave trade poses difficulties for the task of identifying specific homelands for the majority of these shipmates.23 After speaking with recaptives through translators, Harper’s Weekly correspondents identified many of the Wildfire recaptives as “Congos.” The term suggests both the embarkation point and the route of captivity through Vili trading networks on the northern banks of the Congo toward the coast.24 Slave traders also crossed the Congo River from the southern side at Manianga, Isangila, and Inga to bring their captives to barracoons on the Loango Coast and near the river’s mouth.25 In general, most West Central African recaptives spoke “Bantu” languages that shared enough in common to be mutually intelligible. One agent reported that among the Wildfire survivors, linguistic variations suggested “portions of three tribes” whose differing dialects were “not so marked as to prevent intercommunication.”26
Regardless of their different routes to the barracoons, all faced the terrifying rupture that arrived with the rush and din of embarking slave ships. In 1860, seaman Lucius Vermilyea described how, after traders assembled their captives for shipment, barracoon workers drove frightened people, 80 to 100 at a time, into large coastal boats that plied deadly currents and high waves on their way to the waiting ships. The slaver Montauk, according to Vermilyea, loaded more than 1,000 captives in less than three hours. On the open upper deck, sailors packed 350 boys and girls “in nude condition” side by side, “leaving scarcely room for seamen to get to the wheel without stepping on them.”27 Crammed together on slave decks and in improvised storage spaces, terrified enslaved shipmates absorbed the rumors that ran through the ship about what might happen next.
The very bodies of these recaptives, prized as commodities by contraband traders, testified to interrupted lives and ruptured social relationships. For young men and women imprisoned in the Wildfire and the William, transatlantic enslavement and abduction interrupted stages of initiation by which they would have reached social maturity within their home societies.28 As the Harper’s correspondent observed, some of the older men and women from the Wildfire bore marks of initiation, whereas many youthful recaptives did not. Four or five of the women, according to Harper’s, “were a good deal tattooed on the back and arms.” These nuanced signs of belonging and status appeared on some of the women, alongside the “merchant’s mark” branded into their arms. In addition, many adults and adolescents also had dental modifications similar to those described for the Echo shipmates, with the two front teeth either sharpened “to a point” or with portions chipped away.29 Such deliberate shaping of appearance, also identified in skeletal remains from a St. Helena recaptive cemetery, would have been immediately intelligible to recaptives from common regions.30 Furthermore, the journalist’s explicit observation of altered teeth among “boys and girls” confirmed particular rites of beautification and initiation these young recaptives had already undergone in the now interrupted process of coming of age.
With so many young people in the West Central African captive population, adult men and women assumed particular authority as hierarchies formed among shipmates. A Harper’s correspondent remarked, for example, that Madia, an unbaptized “pagan” of about twenty years with a “fine personal appearance,” possessed significant status, judging from the “deference that seemed to be paid to her by some of her companions” (see fig. 3.1). Although the correspondent did not elaborate on the basis of Madia’s evident authority, the brief remark suggests an internal social hierarchy commonly understood by West Central African shipmates but obscured to outside observers. Madia’s ability to command respect or fear could have derived from spiritual authority, as was the case of documented healers forcibly transported into American slave societies.31 Furthermore, witchcraft charges could have resulted in a woman of higher status being sent into Atlantic exile, for existing prohibitions against the enslavement of freeborn Kongo subjects accused of witchcraft had weakened considerably by the eighteenth century.32 It is also possible that Madia’s companions recognized her as a high-born woman, for even the nobility could find themselves enslaved due to political rivalries caused by the rapidly transforming state economies in nineteenth-century Loango and Kongo.33 In a recaptive population skewed unnaturally toward youth, Madia’s mature age may have further reinforced authority based on either social class or ritual expertise. However, it is also significant that Harper’s noted only “some” Wildfire recaptives deferred to Madia, hinting at the presence of subsets of shipmates who were most recognizable to one another among hundreds of strangers.
FIGURE 3.1 “The Princess Madia,” Harper’s Weekly engraving, 2 June 1860. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Several recaptives of the Wildfire, by virtue of their exposure to Luso-African culture in Luanda, served as translators in conversations with Key West journalists and government authorities.34 According to Harper’s Weekly, the recaptives, who gave their names as Francisco, Salvador, Constantia, Antonia, and Amelia, “did not belong to the same tribe that the rest do.” All had been baptized by Catholic priests in Luanda and spoke some Portuguese.35 Luanda’s many languages afforded some captives the chance to gain language skills that were particularly useful on contraband slave ships where at least some of the crew invariably spoke Portuguese and Spanish.
The presence of Wildfire recaptives associated with Luanda further confirms recent scholarly revisions of the concept of an advanci
ng inland “slaving frontier.” Rather than positing African slave raids progressively far inland, historians now find that many nineteenth-century transatlantic captives originated in towns and villages closer to the coast.36 As a center of Luso-African commerce with a population of more than 12,000 by the 1850s, the port of Luanda operated as one such site of enslavement.37 Historian Roquinaldo Ferreira argues that Luanda proved dangerous to both free and locally enslaved residents, who were kidnapped and sold to foreign slavers despite regulations against wrongful enslavement.38 Nineteenth-century Portuguese sources reported the common sight of mothers “banging old kitchen pots on the streets of the city” to seek help in the search for their kidnapped children.39 Once the Brazilian slave trade closed in 1850, coastal traders simply moved captives like Francisco and Constantia up the coast to the Congo River through trade networks stretching from Benguela to Cabinda.40
The young Wildfire shipmate Constantia traveled this pathway from Luanda into Atlantic enslavement. According to the Harper’s interviewer, “She does not remember her father; she was stolen away when she was young, and was sold by her brother.” Constantia’s story illustrated the climate of insecurity prevailing in and near Luanda, where young people could be not only kidnapped but also sold or pawned, sometimes by their own relatives.41 Constantia’s interview with Harper’s also revealed her own gendered survival strategies as an isolated young, female recaptive. Representing herself as fatherless and in need of protection can be understood as a strategy congruent with her hopes for acquiring some minimal protection as a domestic dependent within a new household.42 Like the others enslaved through Luanda, Constantia seems to have used her exposure to Luso-African culture and her facility in Portuguese to communicate her story and perhaps gain some advantage in her state of exile.
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