FIGURE 4.1 James W. C. Pennington. Lithograph with Pennington’s signature by John Robert Dicksee, printed by Day & Son, published by Charles Gilpin [ca. 1850]. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
James Pennington’s advocacy on behalf of recaptive Africans in Manhattan and Key West during the summer of 1860 illuminates an overlooked area of protest against the resurging illegal slave trade within circles of New York black abolitionists. By first examining African American activists’ arguments against the illegal slave trade and then turning more specifically to Pennington’s efforts on behalf of recaptives, this chapter argues that protest against the illegal slave trade shaped African American formulations of a concept of human rights in a climate of hardening inequality and racial determinism.3 As Mia Bay and Patrick Rael have shown, assertions by black radicals about human equality could not entirely escape the “ideological parameters” of antebellum public discourse.4 Pennington’s vision of justice for the William R. Kibby boys, for example, assumed the desirability of Christian conversion and Western education that came under the umbrella of “civilization.” Nonetheless, African American critiques of the illegal trade and recaptive policies diverged sharply from both Charleston’s proslavery rhetoric and the national illustrated weeklies’ assumption of U.S. federal benevolence in Key West. Pennington and other activists of the New York region forced the concept of recaptives’ common humanity into a prevailing discourse that depicted recaptives, for the most part, as either potential slaves or permanent savages. In doing so, they voiced significant opposition to the entrenchment of biological determinism taking hold of nineteenth-century U.S. racial ideology. The examination of northern black responses to recaptives in U.S. custody thus expands the history of the illegal slave trade and adds another transatlantic dimension to the study of late antebellum northern black politics.
Alongside writing and speaking against all forms of the slave trade, New York’s free black activists had a history of direct action on behalf of enslaved Africans arriving in the city’s harbor. Long a center of African American life and labor, New York City was home to the largest population of urban free blacks in the antebellum North, many of whom supported abolitionist organizations.5 As far back as the 1799 New York gradual emancipation law, black protest against the transatlantic slave trade intertwined with the movement to fully end slavery and secure equal rights for African Americans.6 Once federal law had abolished international slave trading (1807), established a removal policy for recaptive Africans (1819), and imposed a capital piracy sentence for slavers (1820), African American activists condemned the persistence of transatlantic slaving as a poignant symbol of the hypocrisies of the slaveholding republic. Throughout the antebellum period, therefore, New York abolitionists applied lessons of “practical abolition” learned in aiding fugitives from domestic slavery to assist captive Africans as well. In 1836, for example, a constable arrested the fearless organizer David Ruggles for his part in an attempted rescue of enslaved Africans held aboard the Brilliante, a Brazilian ship docked in the harbor.7 Nine years later, members of the New York Vigilance Committee filed a writ of habeas corpus to release West African captive Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua and his fellow crewmember from the Brazilian ship Lembrança. When New York courts refused the men’s freedom claim, Vigilance Committee members helped Baquaqua and his comrade escape from the same Eldridge Street jail where the three young William R. Kibby recaptives would later be detained.8 Pennington’s visit to the three detained African children in 1860 partook of these traditions of principled protest and practical action. Political engagement on the issue of slave trade suppression thus constituted an important thread of transatlantic activism in which black intellectuals like James Pennington connected their own history, rights, and destiny to those of Africans trafficked by illegal slavers.
“Other Days Surround Us”: The Illegal Slave Trade and Radical Black Politics of the 1850s
With its reputation as “the great slave-ship mart of this continent,” New York City served as a crucible of African American protest against the illegal transatlantic slave trade.9 During the 1850s, both the financing and outfitting center for illegal slavers shifted northward from New Orleans and Baltimore to New York City.10 As a Democratic stronghold with tight business ties to southern planters, New York extended its commercial networks beyond the American South to Havana and the West African coast.11 The sheer volume of whaling voyages and legitimate West African trade leaving New York’s port provided ideal coverage for the criminal intentions of outbound slave traders.12 Evidence from condemned prize ships clearly reveals New York’s central role in the late illegal trade. At least nineteen of the forty-one ships seized by the United States as suspected slavers between 1850 and 1862 began their voyages in New York.13 It was at a pier on the East River, in fact, where the Wildfire loaded cargo to buy Francisco, Madia, Constantia, and other young Africans who would eventually land as recaptives in Key West.14 Furthermore, New York’s taverns and boardinghouses served as prime recruiting grounds for sailors who embarked, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, as crewmen for clandestine slavers. Lucius Vermilyea, for instance, signed up at the Randall and Robinson shipping office in 1860 for a voyage on the Montauk, a “Long Island whaler.” The Montauk’s other crewmembers, recalled Vermilyea, hailed from New York City and were “perfectly aware of what the business of the ship was to be.”15 New England abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond made the city’s reputation clear when, in an 1857 debate with Frederick Douglass, he charged that New York exerted “more capital and enterprise... in the prosecution of the slave trade, and in the maintenance of Slavery, than in any city of the Union.”16
By invoking New York’s function as an essential node in illegal slaving networks, black intellectuals sharpened their critical appraisal of the U.S. justice system as fundamentally corrupt. A thriving array of African American churches, schools, mutual aid societies, theater, and newspapers nurtured this northern urban culture of protest.17 After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act heightened the threat of kidnappings and the devastating 1857 Dred Scott ruling denied African American citizenship, slaveholders’ commercial interests appeared to be holding both state and federal legislation hostage.18 The literary Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African, two black-owned New York periodicals founded in 1859, urgently called attention to the illegal slave trade as another sign of the slaveholding republic’s hypocrisy.19 “Talk of government and laws! These, then, would be a ridicule truly,” scoffed a Weekly Anglo-African editorial on the reinvigorated slave trade in June 1860.20 The writer may have been thinking about New York customs officers who casually cleared questionable vessels for departure.21 Or perhaps he had in mind the U.S. Circuit Court of the New York Southern District, where Judges Samuel Rossiter Betts and Samuel Nelsen exercised well-known leniency resulting in numerous acquittals of accused slavers.22 Undoubtedly, the writers also remembered the infamous 1854 case of Captain James Smith, who, despite being the first defendant ever convicted by a New York jury under the piracy law, received a reduced two-year sentence and eventually a presidential pardon.23
Regardless of existing laws, American law enforcement appeared to be on the side of slavery at home and abroad. As the Weekly Anglo-African editors concluded, “If the people are pirates the law will be the law of pirates.”24 Two federal appointees in New York added to this impression. Just a month before the Weekly Anglo-African editors ridiculed U.S. “government and laws,” the aforementioned Judge Betts had ordered the return of two fugitive men to Maryland slaveowners, an event labeled as “slave-hunting” by the Weekly.25 Moreover, the U.S. federal marshal Isaiah Rynders avidly pursued fugitive slaves while looking the other way when suspicious ships equipped as slavers left New York harbor.26 In strictly legal terms, the status of fugitive slaves starkly contrasted with that of slave trade recaptives. U.S. law defined fugitive slaves as outlaws within U.S. boundaries. In contrast, slave trade suppression codes defined recaptives as lawf
ul charges of the government who were mandated for removal outside the nation. However, in terms of social experience, fugitives and recaptives shared common conditions of social isolation, physical suffering, and racialized suspicion from white state authorities. Drawing lessons from the vulnerability of black mobility under both domestic and transatlantic slavery laws, New York black activists extended the accusation of piracy from illegal slavers to the entire U.S. justice system.
In their analysis of the intersection between law and commerce, Anglo-African contributors developed a clear counterpoint to the vision of a slaveholding empire emanating from South Carolina and the Gulf States.27 For example, the activist educator William J. Wilson, writing under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” explained the slave trade revival movement as the outcome of Anglo-American tendencies to subordinate principles to profit.28 Responding to Charleston judge Magrath’s nullification of the piracy clause in the trial of Wanderer captain William Corrie, Wilson observed that slave trade revivalists seemed to be calling out the contradictions of American suppression law.29 Since Anglo-America already legally condoned the internal slave trade and chattel slavery, he asked, why shouldn’t “this wonderfully democratic country of ours” prove its consistency by opening the transatlantic slave trade to everyone? In a satirical celebration of American freedom rhetoric, Wilson challenged, “Let us be free. Free to buy slaves, free to sell slaves. Free to import, free to export. Free to bind, free to loose, free to flog, free to kill. We love freedom.” Although Wilson concluded by invoking a future society with “the most perfect and fullest equality,” the righteous anger seething below his satire reflected the dire circumstances of the 1850s.30 African American protestors had exposed the contradictions of the slaveholding republic since its inception, but Weekly Anglo-African editors now warned their readers of the heightened danger: “But we live now in other times. Other days surround us.”31
The southern call for slave trade revival directly threatened northern African Americans’ sense of collective progress and prompted calls for community education. At the Anglo-African office on the Lower East Side, founder Thomas Hamilton maintained a reading room that included several genres of literature on the transatlantic slave trade. Pamphlets regularly advertised for sale by the Weekly Anglo-African included reprints from the Anglo-African Magazine by “Ethiop,” James Pennington, and the Liberian-based writer Edward Wilmot Blyden.32 The Weekly Anglo-African also serialized Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America, whose revolutionary plot began with a U.S.–Cuban illegal slaving scheme.33 Even sensationalist slaver literature such as the cheap, racy novel Revelations of a Slave Smuggler found a spot in the Anglo-African reading room as a “thrilling” account of middle passage horror.34 The Weekly Anglo-African’s contributions to New York print culture thus encouraged African American readers to educate themselves about the transatlantic slave trade not as a painful chapter of history but, rather, as a present threat reasserting itself in new forms.35
Furthermore, as an 1859 letter to the Anglo-African Magazine argued, education imparted an “imperative duty” to act. The anonymous author of this letter warned that after 200 years of painful advance to “freedom and hope,” the revived slave trade would open “the flood-gates of oppression” and sweep “our race... down to a deeper gulf of degradation.” Employing the idea of African Americans as a “redeemer race” destined to counter the aggressive sensibilities of Anglo-Saxons, the letter placed a distinctive responsibility on the shoulders of its African American audience.36 Who but free people of color, asked the author, could speak for voiceless enslaved brethren in the South as well as for “our fellow-men in Africa, marked as future victims of a hellish trade?” Who would protest “in behalf of our common humanity, against the consummation of this astounding crime?” Who else, the letter concluded, “but we, the free colored inhabitants of these United States.” Calling on “our leading men” to organize a congressional petition against slave trade revival and for better enforcement through U.S. cooperation with Britain, the writer asserted a platform of global activism that joined African descendants in North America to African captives of illegal slavers.
Reflecting this diasporic vision, black activists also extended their censure of the transatlantic slave trade to coercive systems of African apprenticeship created under the guise of free labor. Speaking to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1843, James Pennington criticized the British policy of recruiting recaptive Africans in Sierra Leone for apprenticed labor on West Indian plantations as simply a “new form of slave trading.”37 Likewise, the Liberian emigrant Edward Wilmot Blyden, in an essay for the Anglo-African Magazine, charged that French apprenticeship schemes shared similarities with U.S. slave trade revival in their coercion of vulnerable African youth.38 Using the legal fiction of the contract, Blyden charged, French emigration ships on the Liberian coast embarked African boys and young men who were, in actuality, abducted or forced to sign up by village headmen seeking to fulfill labor agreements with French agents. In Blyden’s analysis, both French labor recruiters and the North American slave trade revivalists represented the death throes of the “giant oppression” of slavery. It is true that other American critics also condemned coercive British and French labor policies as a way to defend the benevolence of American slavery or the superiority of U.S. suppression policies. Yet, black radical analysis of postemancipation labor did not originate in these proslavery or nationalist concerns. Rather, Pennington’s and Blyden’s condemnation of apprenticeship and emigrant labor schemes grew out of their own bitter experiences of the barriers encountered by free black communities in the wake of northern state emancipations.39 Their awareness of the condition of Africans and their descendants living in various Atlantic zones of emancipation, enslavement, recaptivity, and apprenticeship revealed an expansive transatlantic perspective on black freedom struggles. And it was from that vantage point that James Pennington would worry about the vulnerability of young recaptives under the U.S. policy of removal.
Closely connected to the question of persisting racial inequality, the contentious issue of colonization also informed African American views of U.S. slave trade suppression. Dating back to an 1817 mass meeting in Philadelphia’s Bethel A.M.E. Church held to protest the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS), northern black communities consistently condemned the racist underpinnings of the colonization movement.40 In 1827, the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published letters and editorials that opposed the colonization of free blacks but nevertheless considered Liberia’s potential to serve as a “home” and “asylum” for recaptured Africans.41 As the interracial abolitionist movement gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, however, opposition to the ACS and Liberian colonization grew even more adamant.42 James Pennington stood firmly in this camp, once comparing the prospects of freedom through colonization in Africa to “feeding a hungry man with a long spoon.”43 When New York’s Governor Washington Hunt called for state funding of the ACS in 1852, Pennington joined other black activists in the Committee of Thirteen to prepare a public protest against Hunt’s plan.44 The 1853 Colored National Convention in Rochester, New York, also created a committee to study the issue, which Pennington chaired. A small number of free African Americans weighed their odds and opted for a future in Liberia, but overall, most looked on the colonization movement with skepticism, even after Liberia’s independence in 1847.45 For that reason, U.S. recaptive policies, which relied on congressional appropriations to the ACS for recaptive transport and subsistence, generated little enthusiasm in northern free black communities.46
During the 1850s, however, questions about the fate of slave ship recaptives acquired new relevance in the context of renewed debates over the prospects for African Americans in the United States. As the Dred Scott decision and proslavery reactionary politics dimmed hopes for achieving equal citizenship, some free black leaders warmed to the idea of independent emigration to West Africa, as well as Canada, th
e Caribbean, and Central America.47 A few, such as Martin Delany and Robert Campbell, mounted West African explorations of their own, seeking to form treaties with indigenous rulers and prepare a place for autonomous black settlement.48 In 1858, Pennington’s fellow Presbyterian cleric and outspoken activist Henry Highland Garnet founded the African Civilization Society, aimed at economic development and Christian conversion of western Africa through a Niger Valley settlement.49 Just one month before discussions of the Wildfire recaptives began to appear in the news, an intense confrontation occurred in New York’s Zion Church between Garnet and opponents of the African Civilization Society.50While Garnet defended the integrity of his plan, the abolitionist businessman George Downing led opponents in a set of resolutions condemning the African Civilization Society as deceptively furthering the political aim of “shipping off the negro.”51 Although Pennington may have originally voiced support for Garnet’s organization, by 1860 Pennington placed himself firmly in the opposition.52 As we shall see in Pennington’s case, the hot button issues of Liberian colonization and African emigration strongly influenced his response to U.S. slave trade suppression policy.
Reinforcing legislative and judicial attacks on African Americans in the 1850s, the popularization of ethnology further shaped black protest against the illegal slave trade. The spread of ethnological arguments in popular print culture galvanized black clergy and scientists in defense of the unity of the “human family.”53 “Black ethnology,” to use Mia Bay’s phrase, opposed polygenist assertions of permanent black inferiority with biblical creation accounts and Enlightenment theories about the environmental causes of human variation.54 In the wake of Samuel Morton’s publications on cranial capacity and racial hierarchy, several black intellectuals published defenses of a single human creation and the equality of human souls. Pennington’s 1841 Text Book of the Origin and History, &C. &C. of the Colored People, for example, refuted “the Jefferson school” using scripture and history to show that “no man is any thing more than a man, and no man less than a man.”55 In a speech to the Troy Female Benevolent Society, Garnet affirmed, “There is but one race, as there was but one Adam.”56 Frederick Douglass, in a well-known 1854 commencement address, asserted the equality of all humans against the scientific theories of “the Notts, the Gliddens, the Agassiz, and Mortons.”57 During the first years of the Civil War, Douglass refused to endorse a Central American colonization proposal with the objection that all colonization schemes were predicated on an “ethnological apology,” which he decried as the most damaging of all proslavery defenses.58 Antebellum free black intellectuals asserted arguments of human equality not only in their own self-defense but also on behalf of Africans and their descendants globally, including those caught up in the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade.
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