150. “Excursion to Fort Sumter,” Mercury, 7, 8 September 1858; “Excursion to Fort Sumter,” Courier, 8 September 1858.
151. “Fort Sumter,” Mercury, 7 September 1858.
152. “Excursion to Fort Sumter,” Courier, 9 September 1858; “Excursion to Fort Sumter, Via Sullivan’s Island,” Mercury, 9 September 1858.
153. Several newspaper articles indignantly refuted expectations that Charleston slaveholders might try to defy federal authority and abduct recaptives from Fort Sumter. They condemned the charge as dishonorable to Charleston and the state of South Carolina. For example, see “When Was It Made?,” Courier, 8 September 1858.
154. “The Excursions to Fort Sumter,” Mercury, 9 September 1858. Excursion agent H. L. P. McCormick defended his reputation, insisting that the intention of the outing had never included a tour of the fort’s interior and that the language of the advertisement had been accurate. See H. P. McCormick, “To the Public,” Mercury, 13 September 1858.
155. F.A.P., “Who Are the Pirates? No. IV,” Mercury, 18 September 1858.
156. “Meeting on Board Steamer Gen. Clinch,” Courier, 9 September 1858 (this article claims there were 500 passengers aboard the General Clinch on the thwarted trip). See also F. A. Porcher, Mercury, 13 September 1858, and McCormick, “To the Public,” Mercury, 13 September 1858.
157. The Niagara’s voyage to Liberia is discussed in Chapter 5.
158. Bowen, Central Africa, 331 (see also 330, 333); Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches, 92, 437, 675–767.
159. Spratt, Speech Upon the Foreign Slave Trade.
160. Johnson, “White Lies,” 239–41.
161. Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom,” 43.
162. Merrill, “Exhibiting Race,” 322; Samuels, “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy”; Edwards, Anthropology and Photography; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus; Poignant, Professional Savages.
Chapter 3
1. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 28 May 1860, reel 6, RSI.
2. See Toucey’s order to bring recaptives to Boston or Portsmouth, N.H., and Craven’s explanation for deviating from it. Toucey accepted Craven’s rationale and altered his orders by July 1860. See H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 615–20.
3. See Chapter 2 discussion of Lieutenant Maffitt and the Echo.
4. Peterson, Province of Freedom, 181–88; Pearson, Distant Freedom, 106–53; Northrup, “Becoming African”; Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 30–47.
5. “The Captured Slaver. Reception of the Negroes at Key West—How They Fare,” NYT, 21 June 1860.
6. Thompson to D. H. Hamilton, 16 July 1860, and to President Buchanan, 21 May 1860, reel 1, RSI.
7. Browne, Key West, 166.
8. “The Captured Slaver. Reception of the Negroes at Key West—How They Fare,” NYT, 21 June 1860.
9. The Mountaineer, 16 June 1860, 2, and 23 June 1860, 5, 6. In “The Raw Darkies,” the Manitowoc Herald, 21 June 1860, announced, “There are now at Key West seventeen hundred Africans rescued from slavers. They are a lot of dusky, greasy cannibals, eat raw beef, and some of them occasionally gnaw away at a dead nigger.”
10. H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 615–16 (Wildfire) and 616–17 (William).
11. Ibid., 614. John Maffitt, lieutenant commander of the Crusader, learned from the Bogota’s “supercargo” (slaver in disguise as passenger) that New York investors owned two-thirds of the vessel (ibid., 621).
12. For details on attempted prosecution and foreign immunity, see Malcom, “Key West and the Slave Ships of 1860,” 5. Admiralty courts in Key West condemned both ships and ordered the sale of the ships and their goods. After court expenses, the Wildfire netted $6,088; the William, $4,344. See “The United States vs. Bark Wildfire & Cargo” and “The United States vs. Bark William & Cargo,” in Admiralty Final Record Books of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida (Key West), 1829–1911, vol. 6: July 1857–Dec. 1860, 500–501, 503–7, NARA.
13. Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade,” 57, 58, 66. In table B, p. 66, compare 95,000 estimated captives sold from the Zaire River and north to 15,300 sold from Ambriz, Luanda, and Benguela in 1851–60. See also Eltis, Economic Growth, 173–77, and Ferreira, “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” 314–15.
14. Vos, “‘Without the Slave Trade,’” table 2.1, 47.
15. “The African Slave Trade,” Herald, 11 October 1860; Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, 221; Herlin, “Brazil and the Commercialization of Kongo,” 262–67; Harris, “New York Merchants and the Illegal Slave Trade.”
16. Curto, “Experiences of Enslavement in West Central Africa,” 383.
17. Lindsly, “Dreadful Sufferings Caused by the Slave Trade,” 108; Webster Lindsly to William McLain, 3 September 1860, reel 10, RSI.
18. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344; “The Capture of the Slave Bark Wildfire,” New-York Daily Tribune, 15 May 1860. In this paragraph, unless otherwise noted, the information on Wildfire shipmates comes from the Harper’s article.
19. Candido, African Slaving Port, 229–32, 237–12; Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation”; Gordon, “Abolition of the Slave Trade”; Hilton, Kingdom of Kongo, 221–23.
20. Candido, “Tracing Benguela Identity to the Homeland.”
21. Vos, “‘Without the Slave Trade,’” 51–53.
22. “The Returning Africans. Letter from the Ship Castilian,” NYT, 17 October 1860. Candido, African Slaving Port, 210, documents “endemic raiding” and upheaval in the Angolan hinterland well into the 1850s.
23. Candido, African Slaving Port, 196–97.
24. Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade,” fig. 1.6, 57.
25. Vos, “Kongo, North America, and the Slave Trade,” 45.
26. “The Returning Africans. Letter from the Ship Castilian,” NYT, 17 October 1860.
27. Vermilyea, Slaver, the War, and around the World, 7.
28. On the lack of initiation among some Clotilda survivors, see Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 118, and Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 30–31, 248–64.
29. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 344–45.
30. Pearson, Jeffs, Witkin, and MacQuarrie, Infernal Traffic, table 4.7 and 59, 63–72, 152, 153. Archaeological digs at the cemetery in Rupert’s Valley, St. Helena (a receiving point of many West Central African recaptives), showed 115 of 303 skeletons with cultural modifications of teeth, which appeared primarily among adolescents through adults, but only in about 10 percent of older children. Art history scholarship provides a sense of the social meanings attached to dental modification in regions of West Central Africa. For example, African art historian Ezio Bassani identified a series of nkonde figures from the Chiloango River region of western Congo bordering Cabinda. Each of these powerful figures, carved by a sculptor and activated by an nganga, possessed pointed, filed teeth. See Bassani, “Kongo Nail Fetishes,” 38, 40. Chokwe aesthetics (far to the southeast of the Congo River) prized pointed teeth as an attribute of beauty and womanhood. See Bastin, “Arts of the Angolan Peoples,” 40–47, 60–64. For significance of tooth filing and removal as a male rite of passage in twentieth-century West Africa (Dahomey), see Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 22. On body modification among recaptives on Liberian transports, see Chapter 6.
31. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 235–36; Sweet, Domingos Álvares.
32. Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation,” 15–16.
33. Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation”; Martin, “Cabinda and Cabindans,” 167–68. In the African Origins database, two women of “Congo” origin named Madia are listed in Havana Mixed Commission records as liberated from the slaver Matilde in 1837, which embarked from Ambriz. See African IDs 79504 and 79505.
34. On Luso-African creolization in coastal Angolan ports, see Heywood, “Portuguese into African”; Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil; and Candido, African Slavi
ng Port, 115, 193–98, 212, 288–89.
35. In the Portuguese slave trade, the significance of baptism for enslaved West Central Africans varied from an extended relationship with the church to a perfunctory rite required to certify captives as legitimately sold to foreign slave traders. See Candido, African Slaving Port, 215–16, and Miller, Way of Death, 402–5.
36. For slaving frontier, see Miller, Way of Death, 140–46. For revision, see Candido, African Slaving Port, 193–98, 288–89; Candido, “African Freedom Suits”; Ferreira, “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” 321; Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 52–87; and Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil, 63–63.
37. Candido, African Slaving Port, 112.
38. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 52–125. For similar dangers of enslavement in the Portuguese colonial port of Benguela, see Candido, African Slaving Port, 191–236.
39. An 1854 Lisbon publication, quoted in Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange, 98.
40. Ferreira, “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” 314–17, 321–28. Ferreira (p. 328) mentions the role of “seasoned Cabindan sailors” who facilitated coastal trade between Ambriz and Cabinda. On the extension of Luso-Brazilians from Luanda to Cabinda and other northern ports, see Herlin, “Brazil and the Commercialization of Kongo,” 263, 272.
41. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 345; Heywood, “Slavery and Its Transformation”; Curto, “Experiences of Enslavement in West Central Africa.”
42. On “orphanhood claims” as “a social praxis of resistance to slavery by children for whom freedom is illusory, unimaginable or unknown,” see Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 16.
43. “The Africans of the Slave Bark ‘Wildfire,’” Harper’s, 2 June 1860, 345.
44. Young Ship Log, 1 July 1860.
45. Log of United States Steamer Crusader, 23 May 1860, LNS; “Key West and the African Strangers,” Courier, 4 June 1860. The Bogota’s identity remained obscured in the days after its seizure, and thus the ship was often referred to as “name unknown.” The French origins of the ship and French trading posts in the Bight of Benin may help to explain the ship’s trade with Ouidah, rather than the Congo River area. The captain, thought to be French with possible ties to New Orleans, denied all nationality in hopes of escaping prosecution. See “Our Key West Correspondence,” Herald, 22 July [written from Key West 8 July] 1860, 2. Indeed, he was not retained for prosecution by the U.S. Navy but was dropped as “supercargo” in Havana; see H.R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 621. The crew was reported to be Spanish; see “Key West and the African Stranger,” Courier, 4 June 1860, 2. The Bogota (“Name Unknown”) was confiscated and sold for $4,572 in the Key West Admiralty Court. See “The United States Vs. Bark Name Unknown & Cargo,” in Admiralty Final Record Books of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida (Key West), 1829–1911, 28 May 1860, NARA.
46. Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 28 May 1860, reel 6, RSI.
47. Ibid., 10 June 1860.
48. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 30–54. Further indication of Yoruba speakers making up at least a portion of the Bogota shipmates comes from a list of Yoruba words recorded by McCalla on the Liberia crossing. See “African Words for Parts of the Body,” included in John Moore McCalla Papers, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown.
49. On nineteenth-century history of upheaval in West Africa, particularly present-day Benin and western Nigeria, see Peel, Religious Encounter, 50; Eltis, “Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers”; and O’Hear, “Enslavement of Yoruba.”
50. Law, Ouidah, 50–58.
51. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 45–46; Law, Ouidah, 235. For reports of the Bogota recaptives as prisoners of the Dahomean king, see the Liberator, 29 June 1860, 101, and Grymes Report, 31. The New Orleans Delta correspondent aboard the USS Crusader characterized the recaptives as having been “selected” from the Dahomey king’s recently captured prisoners of war. See Delta article reprinted in “Highly Interesting from the Gulf,” Chicago Press and Tribune, 8 June 1860.
52. Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 192, 230; Law, Ouidah, 233; Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 34. Frederick E. Forbes noted that annual wars and “slave hunts” began in November or December and ended in January; see his Dahomey and the Dahomans, 1:15.
53. Law, Ouidah, 111; Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 49–50. Given the lack of evidence, it is difficult to ascertain exactly how many of those sold to the Bogota slavers were officially royal slaves. Although U.S. contemporary reports maintained the Bogota shipmates had been selected from the king’s war captives, the exposure of U.S. readers to Western accounts of the Dahomean king may have distorted their understanding of the Ouidah trade. European and American traders at Ouidah were required to buy a portion of the king’s captives first, but they also engaged in a vigorous trade with private merchants in captives. However, because trade at Ouidah was supervised by royal officials (who also traded privately themselves at times), the impression in the American press may have been that those sold to the Bogota’s captain were all prisoners of war. See Law, Ouidah, 111–19, and Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 105.
54. Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/7vAXZCtG (accessed 27 February 2016). On the history of Ouidah, particularly during the years of Atlantic slave trade suppression, see Law, Ouidah, 18, 31–41, 160–88, 194–203, 232–37. The connection between internal Dahomean political tensions and the shift in policy to pursue the slave trade again is not entirely clear. According to Law, missionary and diplomatic evidence indicates “divisions over commercial policy.” Some of King Gezo’s advisors and his son Glele were unhappy with the shift toward palm oil, regarding it as a decline in Dahomey’s autonomy and traditional economy. Gezo had already lost power to this group of advisors, which secured its aims further when Glele came to power.
55. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 151–81. Lewis, then a young man of about nineteen years, embarked from Ouidah in May 1860 in the hold of the Clotilda, the last recorded slave ship to enter the United States. Emancipated after the Civil War, Lewis and other Clotilda shipmates formed a community of West Africans in Alabama known as African Town. Sylviane Diouf’s research on the origins of the Clotilda shipmates provides excellent background as well for those enslaved on the Bogota. Both groups of captives included a large number of Yoruba prisoners of war who were sold through Ouidah within just a few months of one another.
56. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 47. Zora Neale Hurston published Lewis’s story first in 1927, but she borrowed heavily from Emma Langdon Roche’s 1914 account. In 1928, however, Hurston interviewed Lewis more extensively and wrote an unpublished manuscript called “Barracoon.” See Hurston, “Cudjo’s Own Story.”
57. Describing Bogota shipmates in Liberia in 1861, C. C. Hoffman wrote, “There are Annagoes, Argis, Mobis, Barabas, and Housas” (“From Rev. C. C. Hoffman,” African Repository 37, no. 5 [May 1861]: 132). My appreciation to Henry Lovejoy for help with “Mobis” (email correspondence, 27 March 2015). For similar origins among Clotilda captives, see Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 35–36.
58. Grymes Report, 31.
59. Law, Ouidah, 20, 124; Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 35–36; Bay Wives of the Leopard, 48, 120.
60. Grymes Report, 31.
61. Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 56, 51–53; Crowther, “Narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” 310–11. Crowther described the bruising and choking of young boys at night that occurred when large strong men pulled on their own neck chains in anger or in order to sleep more comfortably. The young were also punished with the entire group of captives when adults fought in the holding pens in Lagos. He reported the boys’ relief when they were finally unchained and confined separately from the men.
62. Grymes Report, 31.
63. Law, Ouidah, 141–42.
64. Law and Lovejoy, Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, 149, 150. Available sources do not specifically mention the branding of Bogota shipmates.
65. Law, Ouidah, 138–44, 157–58, 191–92;
Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 60; Bay Wives of the Leopard, 47.
66. Hurston, “Cudjo’s Own Story,” 657. On the humiliation of public exposure, see Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 60–61.
67. List of crew and passengers onboard the Star of the Union, John Moore McCalla Diary typescript, John Moore McCalla Papers, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. The total of 383 is confirmed by Grymes in Grymes Report, 7, and John Moore McCalla to Jacob Thompson, 10 December 1860, Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder 1860 “Liberated Slaves,” ACSR. McCalla’s age estimates are rough because he failed to designate the ages used to define “children.” However, the assessment comports with other scholarly estimates of the percentages of child captives in the late Bight of Benin slave trade. According to Diouf, between 1851 and 1867, captives below the age of fifteen comprised 19 percent of all enslaved captives embarked from the Bight of Benin; see Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 65.
68. Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 109–10; Afolayan, “Kingdoms of West Africa,” 161. Age-grades were also important to some societies of West Central Africa, although they were replaced by other institutions in other polities. See Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 79–80, 116–17, 278.
69. Grymes Report, 12–13; McCalla Journal, 7 August 1860; Handler, “Middle Passage and the Material Culture.” My arguments on the significance of age for recaptives’ survival strategies and perceptions of slavery and freedom have been reinforced and clarified by Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans.
70. Pearson, Distant Freedom, 123.
71. Kunz, “Refugee in Flight,” 126, 135, 140; Chan and Loveridge, “Refugees ‘in Transit.’”
72. Warner, “Social Support and Distress,” 197–98.
73. Chan and Loveridge, “Refugees ‘in Transit,’” 756.
74. Federal marshal Fernando Moreno, perhaps in emulation of Fort Sumter’s similar usage in 1858, had unsuccessfully requested Fort Taylor, also still under construction, as a site for holding Africans seized in the course of slave trade suppression. See Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 13 May 1860, reel 6, RSI. Although President Buchanan refused Moreno’s request to use the fort itself, the temporary shelter built at Whitehead Point near Fort Taylor remained under federal military guard and physically separated from the free and enslaved residents of Key West. Marshal Moreno in fact sought to recoup the cost of renting a horse to travel three to four times daily from downtown Key West to the African Depot, a distance of approximately three-quarters of a mile. See Fernando Moreno to Jacob Thompson, 21 October 1860, reel 6, RSI. On slavery in Key West, see Smith, “Engineering Slavery,” 498–500.
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