Recaptives spent their first days and weeks in Liberian receptacles where imposed confinement and the politics of survival shifted from ship to shore. Built by the ACS to accommodate new emigrants and recaptives in their transition to more permanent settlement, the simple brick or wood-frame receptacles located in Monrovia and other emigrant settlements served as sites of shelter and provision as well as medical care, schooling, and Christian proselytization.76 For newly arrived slave trade refugees, however, the spare rooms of the receptacles may have appeared as simply another carceral space, like the Cabinda barracoons, Fort Sumter, or the Key West Depot. Added to the prevalence of illness and death, receptacles were often overcrowded and chaotic. Recall how, in 1859, Echo shipmates protested the violence of daily life in the receptacles. By 1860, officials scrambled to find room for the flood of new arrivals. In Monrovia, for example, Seys had to place some of the Storm King shipmates in several unoccupied houses after the receptacle overflowed. Once the Storm King and Erie recaptives disembarked together, it was difficult for agents to distinguish between the two groups of shipmates.77The beleaguered agent spent considerable energy and cash simply finding sufficient stores of rice, country cloth, calico, and denim to feed and clothe 1,500 children and young adults.78
For most recaptives gathered in Liberian receptacles, the future must have seemed tenuous at best. Many survived their Atlantic voyages only to expire shortly thereafter.79 Star of the Union recaptives, for example, arrived in the Sinoe receptacle stunned by their most recent loss of nine men and one woman who had drowned in the roiling surf of the sandbar as Kru mariners ferried the ship’s small boats ashore. James Grymes, the white physician who crossed with them, noted with distress the men and women, recently jubilant with the end of their journey, now “wailing over the dead bodies, washed upon the beach—(scarcely cold).”80 Thirty-one of the Castilian’s passengers perished in the Robertsport receptacles within the first five months of arrival.81 One man from the Storm King or Erie, according to Seys, hung himself “in a fit of mental despondency,” and two individuals from the later-arriving slaver Bonito died after apparently refusing all nourishment.82 Such reports testify to the physical and existential crisis of recaptivity caused by both slave ship journeys and their aftermath.
Amidst the confusion and stark human need, singular moments of recognition occurred. As had happened at least once in Key West, a few recaptives found their countrymen or -women among the crowds. Seys reported the elated reunion of siblings and spouses who had been parted at some point before or in the Congo River barracoons and, once joined together again, pleaded “not to be separated.”83 Such rare encounters happened only where more than one ship arrived together and were thus not possible, at least immediately, to recaptives from Charleston and Key West, who were diverted to separate ports. Overall, however, the concentration of West Central African recaptives in Liberia produced circumstances in which slave trade refugees might find commonalities of language, homeland, and even kinship among fellow recaptives.
In these chaotic first days at the receptacles, newly arrived shipmates also encountered people from former recaptive generations with whom they made their first connections to a Liberian “Congo” identity. A “Congo man,” from Monrovia, for example, lived with a small group of the Echo shipmates in their first months of resettlement at Cape Palmas.84 During the flood of slave trade refugees into Monrovia in 1860, Seys employed seasoned “Congoes from the Pons and Echo” as interpreters and overseers to assist him with the boys and young men of the Storm King and Erie.85 Benjamin Stryker and John James, for example, earned 50 cents per day for interpreting and general domestic work in the Monrovia receptacle during October 1860.86 Nathaniel Freeman, quite possibly the instigator of the 1859 Echo shipmates’ protests, worked as a cook and interpreter along with his wife, Julie C. Freeman, who provided nursing care and domestic service for recaptives in Monrovia.87 No further details exist of daily interactions between newcomers and the receptacle workers, nor should we assume that these two generations of recaptives identified immediately with one another. Yet we can say that, for many of the disoriented 1860 recaptives, someone in their new surroundings spoke a familiar language and could provide information about their prospects. These early receptacle encounters spun the first threads out of which a more sturdy social fabric could be woven.
Liberia’s distinctive context for recaptive community formation becomes clearer by comparison with the evolution of Sierra Leone’s liberated African policies. Sierra Leone began in the 1780s as a British abolitionist “Province of Freedom,” colonized by a first generation of black loyalist migrants in the wake of the American Revolution.88 Quickly, however, Sierra Leone became the destination for recaptives of illegal slave ships—at least 440 captured slave ships with their human cargo arrived at Freetown during the period of British slave trade suppression.89 Recaptive Africans in British custody who disembarked at Freetown entered the walled-off compound called the King’s Yard to await a verdict on their seized slave ship.90 The yard, like the Liberian receptacles, also employed former recaptive interpreters and overseers to orient newcomers and embraced a similar imperial mission that viewed recaptives as dependent and uncivilized.91 Yet with its encampment of thousands of newly arrived recaptives from multiple regions of West and West Central Africa, the Freetown yard operated on a much larger scale than the Liberian receptacles. Thus, as soon as they arrived in the King’s Yard, liberated African men and women could join shipmate mutual aid clubs as well as more culturally and religiously specific associations.92
Significantly, British policy in Sierra Leone also diverged from Liberian practices in the establishment of communities for liberated Africans. Immediately after the 1807 ban, the colonial government attempted several forms of local recaptive apprenticeship. Some younger children were also sent to Church Missionary Society schools.93 By the 1820s, however, policies had shifted toward direct settlement of recaptives in one of several villages of liberated Africans on the peninsula near Freetown or in the surrounding mountains. (Not all recaptives took this route, for some young men were forcibly recruited into the West Indian military, and thousands of other recaptives were sent as indentured laborers to Caribbean plantations.)94 Within Sierra Leone’s villages of liberated Africans, residents organized by broad linguistic, religious, and regional affiliations and generated new political and cultural institutions.95 Though subject to colonial rule like other settlements for liberated Africans in the Caribbean, Sierra Leone’s liberated African villages nevertheless afforded survivors of the transatlantic trade a semiautonomous space for rebuilding political, social, and economic life.96 The recognition of these communities by Sierra Leone’s colonial administration represented a crucial difference between Liberian and Sierra Leone recaptive policy, although this difference would not have been felt by many young children who continued to be placed in Sierra Leone missionary schools and apprenticeships.97
Rather than rebuilding life in villages under the wing of earlier arrivals, almost all Liberian recaptives spent their first years in the country apprenticed to black American emigrant households or to missionary stations.98 According to U.S. agent John Seys, committees of “respectable citizens” distributed thousands of young people from the third wave of recaptives across 600 Liberian households and businesses in placements ranging from single individuals to as many as forty recaptives at a time.99 During the colonial period, Liberia had passed apprenticeship laws mainly designed for the sons and daughters of indigenes, with some features closely resembling local systems of pawnship.100 The arrival of the Pons prompted a new 1846 law directed at both adults and children, crafted to incorporate recaptives as well as indigenous youth. That law allowed the binding of recaptives to Liberian households for seven years or until age twenty-one for males and eighteen for females. Households, in turn, owed recaptives clothing, provisions, decent treatment, and instruction in “civilized life.”101 During the first six months to one year of the appren
ticeship (depending on specific contracts) the United States agreed to subsidize the apprenticing household heads.102 Although many Liberian colonists remained wary of recaptives as a potentially disorderly population, the apprenticeship policy served the interests of the Liberian economy. Some liberated African men enlisted in recaptive militias that defended settler communities, and others worked as porters on trading expeditions inland.103 Timber businesses on the Liberian frontier and planters on the St. Paul River north of Monrovia welcomed the infusion of a dependent labor source to cultivate sugar and coffee crops.104 In fact, historians generally attribute Liberia’s mid-nineteenth-century expansion of commodity exports to the mass arrival of recaptive laborers.105
Liberian intellectual Alexander Crummell clearly articulated this convergence of Liberian national interest and recaptive policy during a U.S. speaking tour in 1861. Crummell, whose own Temne father had been sold to slave traders as a child in West Africa, believed that “the Congo inundation” (as he later called it) would contribute to Liberia’s larger mission of African redemption.106 “The Congoes,” he claimed, “are remarkably pliant and industrious, and peculiarly proud and ambitious of being called ‘Americans.’”107 Already they manifested their industry in the “hundreds of acres being cleared for sugar farms.” Here Crummell used “American” to indicate acculturation to Liberian settler society and its attendant institutions of church, school, English language, and commercial capitalism. Praising these “American” aspirations, Crummell envisioned incoming slave trade refugees as a counterweight to indigenous groups who greatly outnumbered Liberian colonists. As he put it in an 1861 letter to a Philadelphia paper: “The Congo additions to our force already staggers and confuses the natives at all our settlements.” Indeed, Crummell predicted that the arrival of recaptives would realign relations between settlers and indigenes and end all “native wars.”108 Furthermore, Crummell argued that an “excess of females” among Liberian emigrants conveniently matched the predominantly male population of recaptive Africans and augured well for future intermarriages. This last suggestion indicated Crummell’s distinct vision of a common future that Liberian colonists would build with native Africans under the mantle of civilization.109
Although other Liberians proved more wary than Crummell of intermarriage, many viewed the apprenticeship of recaptives in their households as an act of Christian benevolence and a boon to their own future prosperity. For example, William C. Burke, who emigrated from Virginia in 1853 after he and his family were manumitted by Robert E. Lee, worked on the committee that divided the shipmates of the Storm King and the Erie among hundreds of Liberian emigrant households. Together the Presbyterian minister William and his wife, Rosabella, took twelve “men, women & boys” into the Clay Ashland farm they christened Mount Rest. Burke’s expressed motivation for sheltering young “Africans of the Congo tribe” was explicitly to “Civilize and Christianize” them. His letters to the ACS reflect a sense of personal calling to redeem African children traumatized by the “horrors of the slave trade” through a reciprocal arrangement in which the young recaptives could be “a blessing to us and we a blessing to them.”110 In terms of the language of Christian benevolence, his paternalistic viewpoint may not have differed greatly from that expressed by James Pennington in his New York–based advocacy. At the same time, Burke was a household head benefiting from recaptive labor, and his assumption of mutually shared interests bespoke an inability to fully comprehend the terrors precipitated by placement in settler and missionary households.
These fears weighed hard on young recaptives intimately familiar with processes of inspection, selection, and distribution that characterized market sites along the Atlantic’s slaving routes. Shipmates of the Storm King and the Erie, for example, revealed deep concern about separation and reenslavement when faced with Liberians interested in apprenticing them.111 Agent John Seys’s wife, Ann, wrote of her experience with the Monrovia receptacle in a letter of appeal to American Christian women. She noted, “I have watched their intense anxiety not to be separated—those of the same family—when they were to be distributed among the citizens of Liberia.”112 A white Lutheran minister’s arrival at the receptacle stirred similar terrors. Speaking through an interpreter, Rev. Morris Officer attempted to communicate his plan for choosing a group of recaptive children for the mission. After promises of food and good treatment, he recounted, “I then began to pick out such as I wanted.” When the clergyman approached the girls, they ran and hid from him in the nearby bushes, leading Officer to send his “hired man” to coax them back. The sight of the canoe intended to transport the children to the mission prompted tears and anxiety about a new ocean passage until an interpreter could again explain the intent of the upriver voyage.113 Eventually, twenty boys and twenty girls traveled with Officer back to the new Lutheran mission at Muhlenberg, where a “Congo” man—most likely a Pons survivor—worked as their interpreter. Separated from many of their shipmates, these recaptive children joined a motley community including white missionaries, Kru canoe men, and the older recaptive interpreter, presumed by Officer to be one of their “countrymen.”114
Along with the label “Congo,” recaptives also acquired new personal names. Like the shipmates Kandah and Kabendah, all recaptive arrivals to Liberia were assigned English names, either by U.S. agents at the receptacle or in the households to which they had been sent. For this reason, it is difficult to identify Wildfire shipmates such as Francisco, Constantia, and Bomba on the ACS’s list of survivors, where recaptives now bore names such as John Dorsey, Abraham Goods, and Eliza Holland.115 Like the earlier Pons children named by church missionary donors, most 1860 recaptives had virtually no choice in the renaming process. Lutheran minister Morris Officer described how he gathered his missionary household together to brainstorm “American” names for the forty recaptive boys and girls selected from the Monrovia receptacles. He and his assistants hung paper cards on strings around the necks of their new charges, in many cases assigning the names of American Lutheran luminaries. One young boy, for instance, received the name Samuel S. Schmucker, an homage to the revered founder of Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College. In his journal, Officer described how missionaries then attempted to teach the children how to say their new names, adding, “Many of them readily remembered them but others could not.”116 The assignment of these new names also indirectly contributed to externally imposed ethnogenesis, for with English-language names now indistinguishable from those of Liberian emigrants, recaptives were often designated in Liberian records by their personal English names and the umbrella term “Congo.”117 Individual renaming thus reflected Liberia’s assimilationist policies, while the emergence of the “Congo” ethnonym maintained the recaptives as a distinct and largely subordinate collective.
While it is likely that some traumatized young recaptives found a measure of security and an end to repetitive displacement in their apprenticeships, others entered new forms of servitude and abuse. Just months after the initial distribution of apprentices, Seys reported that in a few instances “some have been ill used and I have had to take them away and put them in other and better hands.”118 Recaptives, including young boys and girls, were put to a variety of agricultural and domestic work even as they continued to experience health problems from their previous enslavement. For some, illness and accidents ended their short existence in Liberia. In September 1860, coroner Thomas Travis had to be called to examine the body of a recaptive boy who died in the home of Liberian emigrant Walker Wright.119 The persistence of commodification that accompanied his apprenticeship surfaced in the coroner’s description of the boy as having been “possessed by” Wright. Travis found his skills called for once again in November when the death of a “Congoe boy” at Officer’s Lutheran mission compelled him to assemble twelve men for an inquest.120 The young boy renamed Samuel S. Schmucker had drowned in the river while bathing with a group of recaptive youth. He was buried near the Muhlenberg mission, far from where
he had been born.121 These two recorded deaths call attention to the many other slave trade refugees whose short lives ended anonymously and without ceremony soon after they arrived in Liberia.
A good number of Liberia’s apprentices took advantage of the relatively relaxed oversight (compared with receptacles and barracoons) and struck out beyond the boundaries of their assigned households.122 The pattern of group escapes suggests that shipmate relations, such as the tight-knit groups of young men and boys mentioned previously on the Niagara, formed the social bonds on which “runaway” recaptives relied. From Monrovia, Seys reported, “A number of our recaptives have wandered away under the idea of returning to their own country.” The apprehension of twenty-five of these recaptives in a single day implies the scale of cooperation among West Central African shipmates.123 From Cape Mount, a missionary reported that twenty-four of the Wildfire company, “enticed away by the natives,” had left the receptacle.124 At the Muhlenberg mission, eleven of twenty Erie and Storm King shipmates, ranging from young to older boys, determined they would leave the mission after learning that recaptive apprentices at the nearby Outland farm had already made their escape. The fact that the recaptive youth learned this information upon being sent to the area to cut grass indicates both communication between apprentices on nearby farms and the labor regimes that some recaptives sought to escape. (Both boys and girls regularly worked clearing and then cultivating the new mission’s twenty acres.)125 The runaways left the mission several days later with their grass-cutting knives, gathering cassava and a canoe as they tracked the sun to the southeast. In response to a passerby who asked, they reported that they “were on their way to the Congo country” aiming to navigate their way home by the position of the sun.126
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