Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  FIGURE 6.2 An 1867 survey clearly depicts the houses and fields of a Congo Town between the Mesurado and Junk Rivers in Liberia. Captn. Kelly, St. Pauls River, Liberia at its mouth (New York: Endicott & Co. Lith, 1867), map detail. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/96684981.

  The term “Congoes” in Liberia signified only one form of collective identification created by West Central Africans around the Atlantic World. From Cuba’s Kongo cabildos to Liberia’s Congo Towns, the varying meanings of Congo/Kongo trace a history of vast dislocation and remarkable reinvention developed over more than 300 years.171 To borrow from Alexander Byrd’s discussion of enslaved “Igbos,” Liberian “Congoes” were a “people in the making,” a group forged by “centripetal exigencies of violence and suffering.”172 The forces that flung enslaved West Central Africans together did not cease with their interception by U.S. Navy warships or with their arrival in Liberia. Instead, recaptives found themselves confronting a new set of expectations for labor and compliance with Liberian institutions, all under the umbrella of slave trade suppression and African “civilization.”

  Despite John Seys’s praise for the policy that rescued enslaved Africans “from endless bondage and sent them here to be free and happy,” the agent’s own records reveal a more troubled and complicated Liberian story.173 The U.S. policy of recaptive removal, it is true, spared thousands of child and adult recaptives from the brutal regime of Cuban sugar production. Yet the alternative of Liberian apprenticeship incorporated slave trade refugees into a Liberian colonial order birthed by U.S. second slavery politics. In particular, Liberian responses to the Pons recaptives in 1845 laid the groundwork for practices of U.S. subsidy and oversight, missionary recruitment of children, and use of Liberia’s native apprenticeship laws. By 1860, all the interested parties in Liberia believed that recaptives, if supervised and subordinated, could strengthen the young republic. The incorporation of recaptive “Congoes” into Liberian society promised needed agricultural labor, young pupils for mission schools, and ultimately, a buffer population between emigrants and indigenes. This endeavor was no cynical ploy but, rather, an illustration of how antislavery benevolence, however sincerely embraced, nevertheless constrained recaptive futures and furthered the colonization of West Africa.174

  The degrees of freedom that recaptives could find within Liberian apprenticeships depended heavily on health and age. In particular, the experience of young recaptives challenges what Benjamin Lawrance calls the “myth of blanket freedom,” which in its most simplistic form views all captive Africans liberated by law from enslavement to be “free.”175 Even in their existence outside legal enslavement, recaptive children remained doubly dependent, both as apprenticed minors and as “uncivilized” subjects. Their youth and malleability carried the dual promise of valuable labor and cultural adaptability, to be realized through incorporation as dependents in mission compounds and emigrant households. The civilizing agenda of apprenticeships placed recaptives in a heavily regulated position, which some clearly resisted, as in the attempted escape from Officer’s Lutheran mission. For some vulnerable dependents suffering the total exposure of capture and forced migrations, however, a certain degree of protection and safety found in mission schools or settler households may have mattered more than an autonomous “free” existence they could not meaningfully claim.176

  Although most scholars note at least briefly the role of recaptives in the formation of Liberia, this chapter has attempted instead to examine Liberia’s role in shaping recaptive experience. In the aftermath of barracoons, slave ships, and detention camps, recaptives around the Atlantic shared similar traumas of medical crisis as well as social and spiritual alienation. Liberia’s origins as an ACS colony for African American emigrants and slave trade refugees created a distinctive context for recaptive responses to that trauma. It is important to acknowledge death as one of these responses. Not all recaptives survived the transition to Liberian society. Of those who did, some violently protested abuse in their new surroundings, while others tried unsuccessfully to escape and travel home. Bogota recaptives fought, with mixed results, to stay together and resist dependency and servitude in their Sinoe County settlement. Many young West Central Africans slowly rebuilt collective affiliations of family, church, and neighborhood under the label of “Congoes.” In light of their class subordination within Liberian society, freedom became meaningful largely through these social institutions of recaptive life. Christian converts like Daniel Bacon found status and community within church circles. Individual recaptive men and women sought mates either within their shipmate networks, with those from other recaptive ships, and less frequently, among Liberian colonists. And by the late 1860s, Congo Towns cropped up across the Liberian landscape, evidence of continued co-residence and of recaptives’ distinct sense of origin and history within the Liberian population. In no way should these Congo Towns be considered, as some U.S. agents liked to think, a recaptive homecoming. Rather, we might think of these small settlements as outposts in the uneven Atlantic geography of slavery and emancipation, testaments to the intertwined nature of recaptive loss and innovation.

  Conclusion

  In recent decades, Atlantic World historians have challenged the simplistic idea of the nineteenth century as an age of emancipation. Rather, as historian Rebecca Scott maintains, freedom was often “paper thin,” lost and won and lost again by people of African descent as they moved across the boundaries of conflicting legal zones. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, for example, free people of color actively used the Cuban, Jamaican, and American courts to battle the property interests of would-be owners who sought to exploit the “latent ‘property-ness’” adhering to black bodies.1 Latent “property-ness” manifested itself fiercely in the second slavery society of the United States, where free people of color experienced an increasing threat of kidnapping and fugitive slaves who “stole themselves” faced rendition and retaliation from slaveowners. Simply put, black mobility raised suspicions and posed a potential threat to property interests throughout nineteenth-century slave societies.2 The emergence of free-soil spaces across the Atlantic raised the hopes of slavery’s opponents, but it also heightened the prevailing suspicion of black movement and spawned alternative forms of coerced labor that would outlast the old regimes of chattel slavery.

  Against this shifting geography of nineteenth-century slavery and abolition, recaptivity is best understood as a liminal category in the borderlands between enslavement and emancipation.3 As one overview of the status of Africans seized on illegal slavers around the Atlantic concludes, “Liberated Africans were to be found in every category that historians have defined as falling between full chattel slavery at one end of the spectrum and a wage-free full personal freedom at the other.”4 Regardless of the flag under which they were seized, all recaptives shared conditions of isolation, trauma, stark dependence, and exploitability. Stateless people in an era of nation-building became, to use historian Linda Kerber’s phrase, the “Citizen’s Other,” occupying a position of “extreme otherness and extreme danger.”5 Displaced, dispossessed, and often unable to speak the language of their captors, newly arrived recaptives entered their capturing societies as the “extreme other.” In the case of the United States, attempts by a predatory group of planters to kidnap African youth from the Key West Depot reveal one dimension of recaptive vulnerability. On the second Atlantic passage to Liberia, the high recaptive death toll, including suicides, indicates another form of existential danger.

  As a liminal and hence unstable and potentially threatening category, Atlantic recaptivity also provoked political controversy. The degree to which these controversies invoked the latent “property-ness” of African recaptives depended heavily on the slavery politics of the custodial nation and empire. For example, British officials applied diplomatic pressure to bring africanos livres and emancipados in Brazil and Cuba under the mantle of emancipation
and free labor practices. During the operation of the mixed-commission courts, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal all fought with British officials over the question of how recaptives would be resettled and who would take custody of them.6 Moreover, Brazil’s legislature wrestled internally with the question of whether to incorporate or “reexport” africanos livres. Finally, critics in second slavery societies were quick to point out the contradictions between British moral rhetoric and the self-interested (often coercive) recruitment of “liberated Africans” as apprentices for British West Indian plantations. Captives of illegal slavers thus often disembarked slave ships only to face new uncertainties produced by international tensions surrounding slave trade suppression.

  Political firestorms likewise swirled around African recaptives in U.S. custody. A central goal of this book has been to make recaptives and the condition of recaptivity more visible within studies of nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. The historical narrative of a divided nation has made familiar the salient categories of enslaved, free black, and fugitive life—and to a lesser extent the condition of marronage.7 The recaptive is a much less familiar figure that complicates the American domestic geography of slavery and forces antebellum U.S. history into Atlantic perspective. The very existence of recaptives under U.S. custody highlighted the contradiction between the rapid internal expansion of U.S. second slavery and the enforcement of federal slave trade suppression laws abroad. Furthermore, the American-built origins of the intercepted Echo, Wildfire, and William, from which almost 1,500 recaptives were seized, exposed American complicity in illegal slave trafficking despite accelerated naval efforts to intercept such ships. Finally, the question of what to do with recaptives on U.S. soil tapped older debates about the acceptable disposition of recaptive Africans released from illegal slavers. The continued U.S. reliance on Liberia to receive African recaptives “removed” from Charleston and Key West sparked a contentious discussion in American newspapers over black labor and black citizenship across the Atlantic. In short, the history of U.S. responses to recaptives of the illegal slave trade recasts our understanding of late-antebellum slavery politics, revealing a transatlantic geography full of symbolic import for contending forces of abolition, colonization, and proslavery imperialism.

  The illegal slave trade and its suppression furthermore played an important part in congealing American racial thought in the 1850s. We have seen how the state-sponsored “recapturing” of trafficked Africans, perceived as permanent, uncivilized strangers, produced an alchemic conversion of human suffering to racial spectacle. In this sense, the representation of slave ship recaptives in antebellum illustrated newspapers demonstrates how popular print culture disseminated the hardening racial ideology of the 1850s. As this study has shown, the timing of the U.S. Navy’s peak slave trade suppression efforts beginning in the late 1850s contributed to the racial objectification of recaptive Africans in word and image. The popularization of racial ethnography, the rise of the illustrated press, and the cultural phenomenon of displaying exoticized racial subjects created a perfect storm of voyeuristic interest in slave trade recaptives. In Charleston, proslavery ethnography in service to slave trade revival strongly influenced elite discussion of recaptives, while entrepreneurs sought to exploit recaptive bodies for public exhibition. Two years later, the well-known Harper’s Weekly engravings of Wildfire shipmates promoted the image of national benevolence and African exoticism. The spectacles generated in periodicals and newspapers can be seen as progenitors of late nineteenth-century racial exhibitions and even the modern phenomenon of today’s disaster tourism.8 Although journalists did cover the controversial political status of recaptives, the sensational emphasis on “wild Africans” overshadowed any nuanced discussion of redress and remedies for young people caught in an illegal traffic.

  At its heart, then, the history of recaptive Africans in U.S. custody constitutes an important chapter in the longer history of nineteenth-century human rights struggles. Viewed by observers primarily as either pitiable savages or potential property, recaptured Africans had very few advocates who could see their condition in terms of rights or justice. Notable exceptions to the prevailing racialization of recaptives include the little-known activism of James W. C. Pennington and the piercing condemnation of the Anglo-African press, both of which furthered a black diasporic vision of human rights. In word and deed, they challenged the biological essentialism of polygenists and critiqued U.S. legal hypocrisy at home and abroad, linking the predicament of fugitives and recaptives. Pennington’s long experience with fugitive slaves and the shipmates of the Amistad shaped his plea for humane conditions and protection for recaptives in Key West and for three West Central African boys in New York’s Eldridge Street jail. Seen in this light, Pennington’s advocacy on recaptive issues transcended a narrow antislavery position and evoked a broader human rights claim.

  Regardless of debates that circled around them, recaptive Africans were forced to look internally, within shipmate networks, for means of survival and modes of social belonging. Recaptive journeys from slave ships to Liberian apprenticeships demand that we ask, rather than assume, what freedom in limited degrees meant for shipmate communities. For some, death and isolation overwhelmed the struggle to assert new forms of social identity. Recall that especially among young West Central African recaptives, the exit from slave ships did not mean an end to dependence and vulnerability. Particularly for children and youth, as historian Benjamin Lawrance has argued, it is likely that abstract concepts of legal freedom paled in the face of continued subordination as orphaned minors.9 Interrupted initiations and unfinished educations in home societies stranded young recaptives, setting barriers to adulthood and mature social identities. Such assertions of permanent alienation and dependence exist in creative tension with the arguments of other historians about the imperatives of re-creation and social “resurrection” acted upon throughout the diaspora of African enslavement and displacement.10 Scholars who insist on the ability of enslaved Africans to reject social death and painstakingly rebuild new associations may overlook the realities of isolation, poor health, linguistic barriers, young age, and numerous other factors. On the other hand, scholars who emphasize the heavy shadow of death, debility, and permanent exile may underestimate the ability of shipmate bonds and resourceful innovation to facilitate the reconstruction of shattered worlds.

  Throughout this book, I have sought to show that a comprehensive understanding of the liminal status of slave trade recaptives incorporates the perspectives of both the threat of social death and the hope of social resurrection. The Atlantic voyages of recaptive men, women, and children bound for Liberia vividly illustrate the ways in which age informed recaptives’ survival politics and social resources.11 Perhaps because this study involves recaptive adults traveling alongside children, I have argued for the twinned nature of trauma and collective resilience rather than choosing one side of the debate over the other. Life and death inextricably wove together in the elemental world of recaptive voyaging. In this history of survival strategies, we cannot lose sight of how many died along the way. Fully half of those embarking on four illegal slave ships from Ouidah and the Congo River region lost their lives in transit. Others did not last even through the first months in Liberia. As we have seen, surviving adults and children drew on reserves of knowledge and memory, at first to forge shipmate bonds and later to build more enduring networks of family and neighborhood in Liberia. The Bogota shipmates and West Central African adults, like the Wildfire headwoman Bomba, demonstrated their deeper repertoire of life experiences in acts of healing, leadership, and group opposition to Liberian apprenticeship. At the same time, the willingness of young recaptives to oppose abuse, risk escapes, and gradually build new forms of belonging in Liberian Congo communities testifies to the resourcefulness and adaptability of children and youth in forced Atlantic migration.

  The story of Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota shipmates who made double Atlantic crossings directs our att
ention to the responses of African recaptives to the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe of saltwater enslavement. Many times in the course of writing this book, I have longed for richer records of recaptive testimony, of words that revealed more clearly individual perceptions, motivations, and the forever-lost moments that occurred outside the view of mostly white observers. In the absence of those records, I have taken as guide Joseph Miller’s call to find “plausible, even probable answers... not by attempting to ‘read the lips’ of those silenced” in written sources, “but by watching what those who expressed themselves in deed, not words, did, based on an informed sense of what values they brought with them from Africa that their experience of enslavement most threatened.”12 Evidence of the deeds of silenced recaptives is often fragmentary and flawed, embedded in more copious accounts of slave ships and slave traders. Today, exciting new studies continue to emerge on the slaver networks, financial institutions, and international politics that set both illegal slave ships and slave trade suppression in motion across the Atlantic Basin.13 However, this book has examined instead the experience and treatment of Africans forced together as shipmates by the flawed and contradictory attempt of the United States to end the largest forced migration in human history. Only by putting recaptive experience at the center of inquiry can we fully grasp the human consequences of a transatlantic slave trade suppression policy carried out by the American slaveholding republic.