84. “‘The Rev. J. W. C. Pennington,’” Anti-Slavery Reporter, 28 June 1843.
85. Pennington, “Report on Colonization,” 47.
86. Pennington, “Review of Slavery and the Slave Trade,” 93. In Text Book, 42–43, Pennington uses de las Casas’s metaphor of a devouring lion to describe the Spanish colonization of the Americas. However, Pennington did not address the recommendation, which de las Casas later regretted, that Spain consider Africans as an alternative source of enslaved labor. See Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas, 103, 135–39. Earlier black abolitionist anticolonial arguments appear in Cornish and Wright, Colonization Scheme, 12–14.
87. Pennington, “Report on Colonization,” 56. Pennington characterized the right of African Americans to “remain where they are, and eventually occupy the lands which they have watered with their sweat and tears,” as “distributive justice” (Pennington, introduction to Narrative of the Events from the Life of J. H. Banks, 5).
88. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 25 June 1846, 15; Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 40.
89. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 32–43.
90. Rev. Dr. Pennington, “Successful Purchase of a D.D.,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 June 1851, and “The Purchaser of Dr. Pennington,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 August 1856.
91. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 57; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 263. On the vigilance committee, see Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 206–14, and Hodges, David Ruggles, 1, 5, 89–101, 127, 133.
92. “Escape and Capture of Stephen Pembroke, Related by Himself,” New-York Daily Tribune, 18 July 1854; Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 57–59; Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 169–71; Webber, American to the Backbone, 404–7, 410–12; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 264.
93. Still, Underground Railroad, 172–74.
94. The allegation that Pennington had become a “confirmed drunkard” comes from Lewis Tappan’s letterbook report of an 1854 meeting with Samuel Cornish. Although it is evident that the mid- to late 1850s constituted a crisis period for Pennington personally and professionally, the degree of Pennington’s use of alcohol in the crisis is less clear. Pennington’s biographers have taken the drinking charge seriously, but at least one scholar questions the motives and meaning of Tappan’s phrasing. Blackett interprets Tappan’s report as confirmation that Pennington “had lapsed into alcoholism” (Beating against the Barriers, 72). Swift uses the presbytery hearing minutes to conclude that the church’s disciplinary proceedings indicated the “occasional or regular consumption of alcohol” (Black Prophets of Justice, 269–70). Webber is more defensive of Pennington, pointing out Cornish’s anger at the Presbyterian Church’s position on slavery, the condemnation of temperance societies of even limited alcohol consumption, and the “gossipy” nature of Tappan’s remarks against Pennington; see American to the Backbone, 408–10. If Pennington was indeed consuming alcohol on a regular basis, it would have violated his own temperance position. In one of his sermons Pennington drew a parallel between the slaveholder, the lottery dealer, and the rum seller; see Pennington, Two Years’ Absence, 25.
95. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 71, 79. “His problems with alcoholism,” writes historian R. J. M. Blackett, “which seem to have lasted until 1858, temporarily destroyed Pennington’s self-esteem.” In the last decade of his life, he never returned to his previous national leadership status.
96. Pennington to Gerrit Smith, 5 September 1859, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University, Black Abolitionist Papers, Proquest, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88–2004&res_dat=xri:bap:&rft_dat=xri:bap:rec:bap:10171 (accessed 17 January 2016). Pennington asked John Jay for a $5 loan, noting that his Newtown teaching and preaching garnered only a small annual salary of $200. See J. W. C. Pennington to John Jay, 12, 17 December 1859, Columbia University, John Jay Papers, Black Abolitionist Papers, Proquest, http://0-gateway.proquest.com.oasys.lib.oxy.edu/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88–2004&res_dat=xri:bap:&rft_dat=xri:bap:rec:bap:00279 (accessed 17 January 2016). See also Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 39, 73.
97. “Lecture by Dr. Pennington,” Weekly Anglo-African, 15 October 1859; Pennington to Gerrit Smith, 5 September 1859, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University, Black Abolitionist Papers, Proquest, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88–2004&res_dat=xri:bap:&rft_dat=xri:bap:rec:bap:10171 (accessed 17 January 2016); “Free Suffrage Convention,” Weekly Anglo-African, 19 May 1860.
98. Pennington, “Slave Trade—Wildfire” (emphasis in original).
99. On Foote’s Africa and the American Flag, see Chapter 1.
100. Pennington, “Slave Trade—Wildfire.”
101. Pennington, “Why the Guilty Slavers Are Never Punished.”
102. “A Thought by the Way,” Colored American, 17 April 1841.
103. “‘A Thought by the Way,’” Colored American, 24 April 1841.
104. “The Captured Africans,” World, 14 July 1860.
105. J. L. D., “Africa for the Africans,” World, 16 July 1860.
106. “What Shall Be Done with the Recaptured Africans?,” World, 16 July 1860. On African American legal challenges to segregated streetcars and the development of “minority-rights advocacy” (133), see Volk, Moral Minorities, 132–66.
107. “The Captured Africans,” World, 14 July 1860.
108. “What Shall Be Done with the Darkies?,” Liberator, 31 August 1860, 138.
109. J. L. D., “Africa for the Africans,” World, 16 July 1860.
110. Voyages, ID #4356. The William R. Kibby embarked 724 African captives and disembarked only 600. Other newspaper reports indicated 400 disembarked in Cuba but did not mention the original number of captives.
111. Log of United States Steamer Crusader, Commanded by Lieut J. N. Maffitt, 23 July–30 July 1860, LNS; “The Slaver Kibby and Her Captain,” Times-Picayune, 8 August 1860.
112. Jacob Thompson to Isaiah Rynders, 24 August, 3, 17 September, 17 October 1860, reel 1, RSI. Thompson mistakenly calls Rynders “Josiah.”
113. “The Slave-Trade,” NYT, 16 August 1860; “The Slavers in Port—Visit to the Three Captive Africans in Eldridge-Street Jail,” NYT, 17 August 1860; “The Three African Boys—Further Efforts to Converse with Them,” NYT, 30 August 1860.
114. In addition to Pennington, Fugitive Blacksmith, 9–11, 21–22, see also the attention given to the space of the jail as a “place of punishment,” rather than a “place of detention,” in Pennington, Narrative of the Events from the Life of J. H. Banks, 81. I use “carceral spaces” here to mean formal jails and prisons, but Pennington’s experiences would have alerted him to the broader “remaking of space as discipline” discussed by Walter Johnson in his analysis of the Lower Mississippi’s “carceral landscape,” in River of Dark Dreams, 209–43.
115. Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 122–51. Rediker places the Amistad shipmates’ jailing within a broader context of the “transatlantic chain of incarceration” that accompanied the slave trade. See also Christopher, Pybus, and Rediker, Many Middle Passages, 2. My work shows the relevance of this “chain of incarceration” to recaptive experience. See Fett, “Middle Passages and Forced Migrations.”
116. Dudley (alias James Snowden) had been found a fugitive slave and given a two-year sentence in New York for theft. Jay and Pennington secured a pardon twenty-four hours before slaveowner Allen Thomas returned to claim Dudley as a fugitive at the end of his sentence. For details, see “Escape of a Slave,” Liberator, 18 May 1852; “Gov. Hunt and the Fugitive Slave Nicholas Dudley,” Liberator, 28 May 1852, 1–2; “Slave Case,” North Star, 13 June 1850; “James P. Snowden,” Anti-Slavery Standard, 3 June 1852; and Henry Bibb, “Slave Hunters Baffled,” Voice of the Fugitive, 17 June 1852. See also Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 138.
117. “The Slavers in Port—Visit to the Three Captive Africans in Eldridge-Street Jail,” NYT, 17 August 1860. Beyond probabilities known from the West Central African slaving routes at thi
s time, the boys’ words for cardinal numerals 1 through 10 reprinted in the New York Times align closely with Kikongo dictionaries. See Laman, Grammar of the Kongo Language.
118. “The Three African Boys—Further Efforts to Converse with Them,” NYT, 30 August 1860. The 1850 U.S. Federal Census lists Henry Carter, born in Africa, a fifty-two-year-old whitewasher who lived in the First Ward of New York; see Ancestry Library database. Carter brought a “paper of candy” to give the boys.
119. The William R. Kibby was condemned by the Southern District of New York Court and sold as a prize ship, but it is not clear whether the boys ever served as witnesses in these proceedings. See Howard, Americans Slavers and the Federal Law, 221.
120. Advocacy on behalf of children of color in New York reached back to the 1830s, when Elizur Wright Jr., Arthur Tappan, William Goodell, and a group of black New York residents worked on behalf of black children kidnapped from New York’s streets and condemned to southern enslavement. See Hodges’s discussion of the 1834 Henry Scott case, David Ruggles, 61–62.
121. Jacob Thompson to Josiah [Isaiah] Rynders, 24 August, 17 September, 17 October 1860, reel 1, RSI.
122. On Rynders’s political career, see Anbinder, “Isaiah Rynders,” 31–53, quote on 32.
123. New York courts later dismissed Tappan’s charges of assault against Rynders. See “The Three Negroes and Marshal Rynders. Beauty, Philanthropy and Ruffianism” and “A Question Answered,” Anti-Slavery Bugle, 10 November 1860.
124. C. C. Hoffman, “From the Rev. C. C. Hoffman,” African Repository 37, no. 5 (May 1861): 132–34.
125. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 78, 79, 84; Webber, American to the Backbone, 505–57.
126. Pennington, “Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of the World,” 314.
127. Hodges mentions increasing illegal slave trade activity from New York as one of the factors motivating David Ruggles in the direction of a more confrontational politics; see David Ruggles, 4.
128. Sinha, “Coming of Age.”
129. Equiano, Interesting Narrative.
130. “Edward Jordan,” Weekly Anglo-African, 24 November 1860 (emphasis added).
Chapter 5
1. Young Ship Log, 17 August 1860. If the woman were six or seven months pregnant, as Young guessed, she would have conceived before embarking on the Wildfire from the Congo/northern Angola region.
2. Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” 1246.
3. Benjamin Lawrance discusses the tensions between scholarship that emphasizes “re-creation” of Africa and his own focus on “the mechanics of survival in the context of trauma and distress” (Amistad’s Orphans, 30).
4. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering.”
5. Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family,’” 63.
6. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 6, 34.
7. Young Ship Log, 17 June 1860. On the back of the sketch Young wrote, “This red plaid shirt was sent to the wash at Cape Mount, Liberia, and never returned. Nigger stole it.” Interestingly, Captain Canot mentioned that Canot’s “well-known cruising dress” included a red flannel shirt. Another depiction of a plaid shirt as a hallmark of the tropical explorer is featured in Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863), in Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 22.
8. “The Returning Africans. Letter from the Ship Castilian, of the Colonization Society’s Expedition,” NYT, 17 October 1860; “The Captured Negroes Homeward Bound,” Herald, 24 November 1860.
9. McCalla Journal, 1 August 1860. On the idea of tropicality in the Western imagination, see Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature.
10. J. M. Grymes to Col. B. A. Payne, 18 December 1860, Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder 1860 “Liberated Slaves,” ACSR.
11. Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 352–53; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 23–91; Schuler, Alas! Alas! Kongo, 17–52; Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation.
12. Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 103–9.
13. Peterson, Province of Freedom, 182–84; Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 101.
14. Pearson, Distant Freedom, 14–17, 32.
15. John Seys to Isaac Toucey, 24 August 1860, Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder 1860 “Liberated Slaves,” ACSR; Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 137–38; Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” 424, 442.
16. “Despatches from Liberia,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 22, no. 4 (April 1846): 112.
17. Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 33–34.
18. On second slavery and the emergence of multilateral slave trade suppression treaties, see Chapter 1.
19. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 89; Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom,” 43. Robert Burroughs shows how political opposition forces in Britain applied middle passage rhetoric to recaptive experiences to undercut the moral claims of British suppression policies; see Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize.”
20. Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom,” 43. For a triple Atlantic crossing by recaptives caught in a case of contested jurisdiction, see the 1833 voyage of the Maria de Gloria, in which only 150 of 430 in the original group of captives survived; see Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize,” 110.
21. Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation; Schuler, Alas! Alas! Kongo; Schuler, “Recruitment of African Indentured Labourers”; Pearson, Distant Freedom.
22. Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, 31–32; Schuler, Alas! Alas! Kongo, 25.
23. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 73–82.
24. Ibid. 19, 68, 73–75.
25. Pearson, Distant Freedom, chap. 6; Schuler, Alas! Alas! Kongo, 17–28. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 66–69, notes that liberated Africans brought to the Bahamas arrived in entire shipmate groups, whereas liberated Africans brought to Trinidad as migrant laborers had been separated into gender-balanced groups that disrupted some, but not all, shipmate bonds. Schuler also discusses the role of fearful rumors in building resistance to labor recruiters among recaptives; see Schuler, “Enslavement, the Slave Voyage, and Astral and Aquatic Journeys,” 187, 202.
26. After Brazilian independence and during the 1831 senate and assembly debates over slave trade abolition, both Brazilian legislative bodies approved a “re-exportation” law that would send recaptives from Brazil to Africa. This law was never implemented, however. See Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 21–22.
27. “What Is to Be Done with the Negro,” Mercury, 4 October 1858. Interestingly, this article was attributed originally to the Liverpool Post, a sign of the international interest in the Charleston story and of British postemancipation racial discourse on black labor.
28. A sampling of public opinion on the issue includes the following: “What’s to Be Done?,” Courier, 2 September 1858; “What to Do with Them,” Courier, 1 September 1858; “What Shall Be Done with the Recaptured Africans?,” World, 16 July 1860; A.F.R., “What Shall Be Done with the Darkies?,” Liberator, 31 August 1860, 138; “The Echo’s Cargo—What Shall Be Done with It?,” National Era, 9 September 1858. One of the valid objections to simply disembarking recaptives anywhere in West Africa was the risk of reenslavement, especially for unprotected children. See Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 36.
29. Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” 426–29, 438–41. Lawyers for the Charleston sheriff Carew argued that state regulatory laws should allow South Carolina to take possession of Echo recaptives to prevent the “discontent and disturbance” caused among Carolina’s enslaved population by the presence of free people of color. See Levien, Case of the Slaver Echo, 11; Burin, “Slave Trade Act of 1819”; and Finkelman, “Regulating the Slave Trade,” 403–5.
30. Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 215–17, Kinna’s letter to Tappan quoted on 216.
31. C. C. Hoffman, “From Rev. C. C. Hoffman,”
African Repository 37, no. 5 (May 1861): 132.
32. Jacob Thompson to Daniel H. Hamilton, 10 September 1858, M160, reel 1, RSI. On the USS Niagara, see Canney, Old Steam Navy, 52–58.
33. “The Frigate Niagara and Her New Mission,” NYT, 8 September 1858. For contrasting, hostile responses to the Niagara, see F.A.P., “Who Are the Pirates?,” Mercury, 21, 23 September 1858, and “The Exportation of the Africans,” Mercury, 20 September 1858. In the same article, the Mercury praised U.S. agent Thomas Rainey for supplying the newspaper with information on the Niagara after Mercury editor Rhett had been denied a tour. The restriction of the public from the Niagara in Charleston may have stung all the more because when the Niagara had been docked at the navy yard in New York, “thousands” of sightseers had been allowed to tour the interior of the ship recently returned from its Atlantic cable mission. See “The Frigate Niagara and Her New Mission,” NYT, 8 September 1858.
34. “From Liberia—Return of the Niagara,” African Repository 35, no. 1 (January 1859): 2.
35. “The Recaptured Africans,” Mercury, 4 October 1858.
36. “Personal,” Mercury, 15 September 1858; “The African Agent,” Courier, 13 September 1858; Rainey, Ocean Steam Navigation. Rainey studied medicine in Missouri but never graduated from medical school. In his later life in New York, he became known as an avid promoter of the Queensborough Bridge. See “Dr. Rainey, ‘Father of Bridge,’ Glad Life-Work Is Completed,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 12 June 1909, 38.
37. A detailed list of sailors by rank appears in Log of United States Naval Ship Niagara, 10–12 September 1858, LNS. See also “The Exportation of the Africans,” Mercury, 20 September 1858.
38. Jacob Thompson to President Buchanan, 16 [May], 21 May 1860, and to Isaac Toucey, 30 May 1860, reel 1, RSI. A 7 June 1860 letter from Thompson to Commander Bruse in the New York Navy Yards, reel 1, RSI, rejects the South Side as an “A2” vessel not meeting the “A1” criteria. However, a certificate from Marine Inspector E. Davis in Boston gives the South Shore his “full confidence” to ship to “any part of the navigable world” (5 June 1860, Series 1.E, Miscellaneous Incoming Correspondence, folder 1860 “Liberated Slaves,” ACSR). If both records refer to the same ship, there may have been disagreement over the quality of the South Shore before it was accepted for the Liberian voyage.
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