The paradox of Liberian apprenticeship status appears starkly in the efforts and expense devoted to recapturing the recaptives. Without living recaptives under his supervision, Seys could not file for the U.S. government reimbursement, which was calculated per person. With no hint of irony, Seys paid Solomon S. Winkey, a formerly enslaved emigrant from Kentucky, for “Arresting and Delivering 4 fugitive Liberated Congoes.”127 Nor did efforts to capture runaways abate as the months wore on. In April and May 1861 alone, Seys recorded fifty-six recaptives “brought in” either by “commissioners” in charge of apprentices or by others paid to find escapees.128 Missionary Morris Officer reported that the eleven youth who set out from the Muhlenberg mission to find their homes encountered a violent “battle” while passing through a Kuwaa town, where some of the younger runaways were reportedly taken as slaves. At least four were injured badly in the fight, and after their leader’s final attempt to hide in a nearby swamp, Kru workers retrieved them all.129 After the boys’ return and punishment, Careysburg doctor Daniel Laing operated on and treated four of the most gravely wounded.130
Officer’s subsequent interviews with the boys provide crucial glimpses of social bonds among apprenticed youth and deep antipathy to apprenticeship status shaped by former identities. The carefully planned exodus was led by Menzamba, an older youth who asserted that neither he nor his father were slaves, and thus, in Officer’s words, “good or noble blood flowed in his veins.”131 These sentiments, conveyed through an interpreter to Morris Officer, suggest that Menzamba and perhaps other of his companions perceived their apprenticeship to be a form of enslavement. Menzamba cited his personal lineage to reject his subordinate status in Officer’s missionary household. Furthermore, the older boys sought to protect the younger ones in the last battle that led to their recapture. Finally, Officer’s frequent use of the boys’ “country names” (Zinga, Loangu, and Kualla, for instance) indicates that, at least in their first weeks of apprenticeship, young recaptives continued to assert their West Central African names, despite their involuntary renaming in Liberia.
In contrast to the efforts of younger West Central African recaptives to resist their apprenticeships, the shipmates of the Bogota drew upon their experiences of war and displacement to oppose their planned dispersal to Greenville’s settler households. The diverse assembly of West Africans included a large group of Yoruba speakers comprised of less than 10 percent children.132 As previously related, at least forty-eight men and women underwent a Christian marriage ceremony on the voyage from Key West and thus arrived in Liberia joined by a domestic institution at least theoretically recognized within Liberian settler society. All these factors together made the Bogota shipmates more likely to expect a certain amount of self-determination in their Liberian resettlement, and indeed, Liberians called them “recaptives from Whydah” or even “Dahomeans” to distinguished them from young “Congoes.”133 While still under joint U.S. and ACS supervision, the roughly 300 shipmates had resided together in “thatched houses” near the entrance to Greenville in Sinoe County.134 Henry Stewart, a Congregational minister who immigrated to Greenville with his family after their manumission from a Georgia slaveowner, recounted what happened next. “They were told Shortly after Landing that they were to be taken in a body to the falls,” he wrote. “Their was no Dissatisfaction with them in that arrangement.”135 The Bogota company’s response reflected the sentiments of recaptive shipmates from Rio de Janeiro to St. Helena who weathered daunting displacements while resisting further separation.136
Understandable alarm ensued, therefore, when in early 1861, the Liberian government took responsibility for recaptive oversight and attempted to apprentice a portion of the group. Liberian colonists in Sinoe, who struggled continually to attract emigrants to their sparsely populated town, must have viewed these mature, majority-male recaptives as a valuable infusion of agricultural labor.137 As Stewart reported, “When this Change was made and they were informed that they were to be sepperated, they immediately question the Sincerity of our motive in Doing them Good.” Apprenticeship placements directly threatened social bonds forged in two ocean crossings. Furthermore, the broken promise raised fears of reenslavement and subordination within Liberian settler households. Described throughout their Atlantic journeys as “fierce and intractable,” physically imposing, and “men of resolute and determined spirit,” the Bogota shipmates actively resisted apprenticeship.138 Militia members mustered to suppress the “troubles,” and President Benson had to visit the town twice to reassure apprehensive recaptives.139 In the ensuing conflict, Stewart reported, “Some have been Shot and others got Drowned in makein[g] their escape.”140 In the end, Greenville emigrant families prevailed in forcibly separating the tight-knit group by apprenticing more than forty recaptives, yet an older portion of the shipmates persisted in moving together to the new settlement of Ashmun at Sinoe River Falls, twelve miles from Greenville.141 Over time, Ashmun built the kind of symbiotic economic relationship with Greenville seen earlier between New Georgia and Monrovia.142
The episode at Greenville, in addition to highlighting the importance of shipmate bonds in Atlantic displacement, may also show how recaptives struggled to translate homegrown ideals of political organization into a tenuous Liberian future. The expectations of Yoruba-speaking men and women who comprised a large subgroup among the Bogota shipmates had been shaped by decades of civil war and Dahomean raids that followed the decline of Oyo. Although by the 1850s many towns in the southwestern regions of Yorubaland were composed of displaced war refugees, residents nevertheless held on to the basic Yoruba political unit of the ilu, or town, which contrasted starkly with the rural isolation of apprenticeship on Liberian farms. In war-torn Yorubaland, displaced people regrouped within towns, re-creating neighborhood compounds governed by councils of elders.143 As a dominant force within the Bogota company, Yoruba-speaking shipmates most likely sought to retain some of this ideal in their Liberian exile both in their separate settlement near the entrance to Greenville and then in their relocated residence at Sinoe Falls. As people well versed in various forms of servitude and dependence even in West Africa, they fought to maintain their collective, semiautonomous status in Liberia.144 In addition, recaptive men and boys may also have translated martial skills and military organization into Liberian militias. Ibadan, an emerging power center in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, drew much of its administrative structure from a hierarchical “chain” of military titles through which warriors might ascend to authority.145 It is likely that Yoruba-speaking recaptives in Greenville had been taken prisoners of war in towns west of Ibadan, but similar martial backgrounds most likely prevailed among them. In 1863, Henry Stewart remarked on the “imposing sight” of eighty recaptive men from the Ashmun settlement drilling with the Greenville militia company. “Their deportment and orderly behavior won the respect of all,” he concluded with satisfaction.146
Overall, although adult Bogota shipmates could not fully control the circumstances of their resettlement, their deeper reservoirs of knowledge, training, and memory enabled them to defend their community against the threat of division. In comparison, West African children had less control over their immediate circumstances, and most entered a period of Liberian apprenticeship subject to more direct pressure for acculturation and demands for their labor. Yet, as historian William Allen argues, we should not assume assimilation was all one-way, as Liberians adapted many aspects of West African indigenous foodways, architecture, and farming technology, and it would not be surprising to find they were influenced by thousands of West Central African youth taken into their households.147 Nevertheless, having escaped from chattel enslavement in the Americas, recaptives made their new lives in a Liberian colonial context shaped by the crucible of American slavery. Doubly dependent as young strangers, many recaptives entered subordinate roles in Liberian society as domestic servants and menial laborers. In the Liberian colonial borderlands, building the bonds of a larger commu
nity would prove to be a crucial dimension of freedom.
From Shipmates to “Congoes”
Beginning in the crucible of the receptacles, West Central African shipmates came to be known collectively in Liberia as “Congoes.”148 The word came first from the historical Kongo Kingdom, stretching back to the early fifteenth century and dispersed around the Atlantic, beginning with the Portuguese slave trade. “Congoes” had been present in Liberia since the founding of New Georgia decades earlier. The successive waves of recaptives, and in particular the massive third generation, cemented its usage as a term that encompassed West Central African origins, linguistic commonalities, and a historical experience of slave trade exile. To a large degree, missionaries and Liberian settler elites imposed the term “Congoes” as a “tribal” designation, using it alongside other indigenous labels like Kru, Dei, and Vai. The partial nature of existing evidence makes it difficult to determine how actively recaptives embraced this term as a way of identifying with one another in the aftermath of their arrival.149 What is clear, however, is the progression of social connections from shipmate bonds to broader ties fostered by institutions of marriage, church, and village.
Compared with their counterparts in Sierra Leone and the Caribbean, Liberia’s recaptive population was more heavily West Central African.150 Apart from the unique case of the Bogota shipmates, the only other recaptives embarking from any other region arrived very early in the colony’s history. In the 1830s, for example, Igbo-speaking captives from the Bight of Benin lived with “Congo” neighbors along two opposite sides of New Georgia’s main street.151 Every slave ship the U.S. Navy intercepted after 1840, except for the Bogota, embarked from either Cabinda or Congo River barracoons. Of course, West Central Africa is a vast region, and recaptives arrived from multiple polities. Yet their origins from Lower Kongo and northern Angola homelands reinforced the Liberian idea of a “Congo tribe.”152 The presence of West Central African interpreters and overseers from one generation to the next strengthened the association between recaptive status and shared “Congo” origins. The sheer size of the third wave of recaptive arrivals increased the likelihood that young slave trade refugees would find other newcomers who shared mutually intelligible languages and the same desire for security, protection, and belonging.
Among men and women deemed old enough to begin families of their own, marriage represented a socially acceptable step toward adulthood recognized by both recaptives and Liberian officials. Through marriage, recaptives could transition out of their placement in settler households.153 Historian Benjamin Lawrance has argued that many child recaptives, like those of the Amistad, faced a form of permanent dependency as a result of being stripped from their kin and age sets before they could undergo crucial coming-of-age rituals.154 In the case of Liberian recaptives, the chance to reintegrate with homeland communities was never an option, which might have made new marriage practices possible even in the absence of required initiations. Over the years, many younger recaptives who married and established families did so within the framework of Liberian Christian mores, such as the emphasis on monogamy. Thus, in comparison with the “social exclusion” of Amistad orphans never circumcised and never married, young West Central African men and women had recourse to socially recognized adulthood, but only through the colonial institutions of Liberian society.155
Some of the first recorded marriages occurred within shipmate groups or across two different companies of West Central African shipmates. The earlier-mentioned matrimonial ceremony between Kandah and Kabendah joined together two Echo shipmates who had known each other at least since the barracoons of Cabinda. With 93 percent of the third wave of recaptives embarking from Congo River and Cabinda sites, marriages also occurred across shipmate groups within the West Central African population.156 A man from the Echo sent in 1858 to Grand Cape Mount, for example, married a woman from the Erie’s company soon after her arrival in Monrovia.157 A young woman from the Storm King married a shoemaker who had come to Liberia on the Pons as a small boy.158 While the couple might have shared a more specific home region, it was just as likely that their mutual recaptive experiences and broader linguistic and geographic commonalities drew them together. Even so, during the initial period of oversight, recaptive couples had to apply to Seys for permission to marry officially, another sign of their subordinate position in Liberia.
As Alexander Crummell had anticipated and recommended, the heavily male recaptive population also looked for wives among Liberian African American emigrants. In New Georgia during the 1830s, recaptive men coming from several years of detention in Georgia had married women from among the less elite class of African American emigrants.159 Although some critics, such as William Nesbit, looked down on such unions as a mark of colonists’ “degradation,” others like Crummell viewed marriage between Liberian emigrants and native Africans as a bridge to a more unified Liberian future.160 According to Seys, two men among the Echo shipmates found African American wives.161 Given their varying experiences of enslavement and migration, neither recaptives nor Liberian settlers would have brought extended kin networks or many material resources to their partnerships. Nevertheless, marriage offered recaptives some measure of economic stability, recognition of adulthood, and, of crucial importance, the hope of future generations who could maintain the relationship between the worlds of the living and the dead.
The collective “Congo” identity was fostered as well in religious communities and missions. As missionaries anticipated, both the vulnerability of youth and distance from home opened doors for sustained Protestant proselytization, although it is equally important to remember that some West Central African recaptives, such as Francisco and Constantia of the Wildfire, had experiences with Christianity that pre-dated their terrible Atlantic journeys. Drawing on studies of Yoruba identity in Sierra Leone, historian David Northrup suggests that the Christian gospel offered “spiritual consolation” to traumatized slave trade refugees.162 Recaptive converts in Liberia’s churches may have viewed their new communities in the nuanced terms expressed by Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the West African Anglican bishop. Crowther described his journey out of enslavement as guided by Providence “to a place where His Gospel is preached.” Nonetheless, he never forgot that his spiritual journey began with being “violently turned out of my father’s house, and separated from relations.”163 The theft of old communities and the birth of new ones remained joined in Crowther’s memory.
Although there is a lack of sources on Liberian recaptives’ own responses to proselytization, mission schools and churches in Liberia clearly offered new forms of belonging that bridged past ruptures and addressed the crisis of isolation. Daniel Bacon’s story of conversion and ordination serves as a case in point. Brought to Liberia as a nine-year-old on the Pons, Bacon grew up in the household of Methodist Episcopal preacher J. W. Roberts.164 In 1861, the Methodist Episcopal Church licensed Bacon as an “exhorter.” Bacon’s 1863 report for a short three-month period placed him at recaptive congregations scattered in at least seven different settlements on both banks of the St. Paul River, where a large number of recent recaptives had been apprenticed.165 His work bridged generations of recaptives and connected apprenticed youth who could not yet travel as freely as he did.
With the heavy emphasis on recaptive church membership and conversion, existing sources only hint at culturally specific practices carried to Liberia from the lower Congo River region. The Liberia Herald relayed one such instance of an encounter in 1847 between two New Georgia boys with a lingering illness and a recaptive healer from the Pons, who informed the boys’ caretakers, “I go make da witch come up” from the afflicted children.166 Although the Herald recounted the anecdote as an exposé of a devious and fraudulent African “conjurer,” the practitioner’s ritual cutting of the boys, herbal applications, and suction over the site of affliction correspond closely to Kongo therapeutic practices of nsamba.167 After the massive 1860 “Congo inundation,” missionaries and Liber
ian officials preferred to emphasize reports of church membership and newly acquired literacy.168 Yet the interaction of New Georgians with a trained ritual specialist suggests an initiated adult enslaved with the Pons’s many youths. It reveals not only the culturally specific practices of a West Central African healer living in an established recaptive community but also the disdain with which Liberian emigrant society greeted such open practices. Prevailing silences on continuities of Kongo tradition in Liberian written sources should not be taken as proof of their absence in recaptive communities.
In addition to the slowly growing recaptive church networks, recaptive residential patterns also signified continued “Congo” affinities. Although we need to know more about how West Central African notions of status, lineage, and leadership were negotiated over time, the presence of these residential centers is clear. As recaptives ended their apprenticeships, married, and acquired plots of land, West Central African settlements proliferated on Liberian maps. For example, one such Congo Town appeared on the south bank of the Junk River north of Marshall, another Congo Town emerged along a Mesurado River tributary that was christened Congo Creek, and another similar settlement appeared in the backcountry to the east of Louisiana on the St. Paul River. Just southeast of Robertsport, on the beach where the Castilian shipmates had disembarked, yet another Congo Town took shape.169 Although many of these towns sprang up in proximity to older colonial settlements, some Liberian emigrants opposed the mobility and autonomy that such settlements implied. Petitions from Bassa County, for example, sought legislative prohibitions against centers of Congo residence not approved in advance by the Liberian government. Other Liberian citizens unsuccessfully sought to limit the free movement of recaptives across county lines and between settlements.170 Regardless of settler opposition, persistence of Liberian Congo Towns suggests affinities between recaptives that reached beyond individual shipmate bonds to the formation of broader communities (see fig. 6.2).
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