144. Thank you to Lisa Lindsay for this insight. See O’Hear, “Enslavement of Yoruba,” and Lovejoy, “Yoruba Factor.”
145. Peel, Religious Encounter, 36–37.
146. Stewart to Gurley, 18 September 1863, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 303–4.
147. Allen, “Liberia and the Atlantic World,” 27–28.
148. Sawyer, Emergence of Autocracy, 115–16.
149. Clegg, Price of Liberty, 98, eloquently discusses the transition of recaptives through multiple identities over the course of their captivity, enslavement, and recaptivity. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between external imposition and internal identification, see Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers, 218–23.
150. Curtin and Vansina, “Sources of the Nineteenth Century Slave Trade,” map 6, 203; Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 347–69. See Voyages search discussed in n. 89 above.
151. “Kentucky State Colonization Society,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 10, no. 7 (September 1834): 209–10; J. Mechlin to Rev. R. R. Gurley, African Repository and Colonial Journal 8, no. 7 (September 1832): 200–201.
152. Some of the more knowledgeable Liberians, perhaps attuned to missionary ethnographies produced in Sierra Leone, demonstrated awareness of diverse origins among West Central African recaptives. In Sierra Leone, the liberated African and Anglican bishop Samuel Crowther had applied the term “Yoruba” (in use by Hausa speakers to designate members of the Oyo Empire) to all Yoruba speakers. However, Crowther also used the term “Yoruba proper,” giving primacy to residents of Oyo over Egba and other Yoruba speakers. See Peel, Religious Encounter, 284–85. Perhaps drawing on Crowther’s distinction, a Liberian Herald editor in 1862 sought to sift the nuanced linguistic and geographic distinctions between the various groups of West Central Africans embarking from the Congo River. Thus, the editor praised the rapid assimilation of “the CONGO (Congo proper) people, and such other tribes as come from the country adjacent to Congo” (“From Liberia,” African Repository 38, no. 12 [December 1862]: 377).
153. For an anecdote about a Liberian emigrant woman who demanded her husband live with her and not in his household of apprenticeship, see Crummell, “Address of Rev. Alexander Crummell,” 277.
154. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 219–65.
155. Ibid., 262, 263.
156. See Table 5 in this chapter.
157. John Seys to Jacob Thompson, 31 October 1860, reel 10, RSI.
158. John Seys, “The Recaptured Africans in Liberia,” African Repository 41, no. 1 (January 1865): 16.
159. “Kentucky State Colonization Society,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 10, no. 7 (September 1834): 209; “The Recaptured Africans,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 10, no. 3 (May 1834): 90.
160. Nesbit, “Four Months in Liberia,” 107; Crummell, “Address of Rev. Alexander Crummell,” 277; Crummell, “Rev. Mr. Crummell on the Congo Recaptives”; “Kentucky State Colonization Society,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 10 no. 7 (September 1834): 209–10. Elder Samuel Ball concluded that “amalgamation” between colonists and natives very rarely took place due to the “prejudice existing between them” (Ball, Report on the Condition and Prospect, 11). William E. Allen discusses intermarriage and intergroup sexual unions but focuses largely on relations between elite Americo-Liberian men and indigenous women; see Allen, “Liberia and the Atlantic World,” 39–41.
161. John Seys to Jacob Thompson, 31 October 1860, reel 10, RSI.
162. Northrup, “Becoming African,” 6.
163. Crowther, “Narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” 299.
164. “African Missions,” African Repository 37, no. 10 (October 1861): 317.
165. “Report of the Preacher to Recaptive Africans,” African Repository 39, no. 10 (October 1863): 294–95.
166. “A Conjurer and Conjuration,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 23, no. 1 (January 1847): 20–21.
167. See discussion of medicated incisions (nsamba) in Chapter 5.
168. For a conversion narrative relayed in first person from a Pons youth for a missionary audience, see J. W. Lugenbeel, “Religion among the Congoes by the Pons,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 24, no. 2 (February 1848): 37–39. Other missionary descriptions of apprenticed recaptives include M. A. Ricks, “Letters from Liberia,” African Repository 39, no. 1 (January 1863): 29–30; J. L. Mackey, “Intelligence,” African Repository 38, no. 1 (January 1862): 24; and Washington McDonogh, “Scholars at Settra Kroo—Progress since 1843,” African Repository 38, no. 3 (March 1862): 92.
169. Map titled “North west Part of Montserrado County, Liberia: in ten square miles,” http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g8883m.lm000018 (accessed 19 February 2016). The Muhlenberg Mission, built in 1860, provides a rough date for this undated map. More such Congo Town settlements may have existed in the southern counties not included on the map. The Congo Town located near Congo Creek appears on the map “St. Pauls River, Liberia at its mouth,” http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g8882s.lm000005 (accessed 15 May 2015). Both maps are from Maps of Liberia, 1830–1870, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See also Sawyer, Emergence of Autocracy, 188. Numerous references to Congo Towns and Congo settlements in Liberia appear in the African Repository well into the 1880s. One of these near Caldwell was called by the 1880s Gardnerville.
170. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 71.
171. On Congo/Kongo in diaspora, see Young, Rituals of Resistance; Childs, 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 98, 101, 109–15; and Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers, 161–68. Vos, “‘Without the Slave Trade,’” 59, notes that among twentieth-century Sundi of Central Africa, people with enslaved ancestors were known as Kongo, a reflection of their origins through internal slave trade networks from the south. See also “Congo” as surname in Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 80–133 and passim; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 62, 254; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 123, 203–10; Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations; and Cooksey, Poynor, and Vanhee, Kongo across the Waters.
172. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers, 32 (emphasis in original).
173. John Seys to Jacob Thompson, 31 October 1860, reel 10, RSI.
174. Everill, Abolition and Empire, 13. For a scathing critique of “Congos” as agents of Americo-Liberian imperialism, see Akingbade, “Liberian Settlers and the Campaign,” 366–68.
175. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 180–93.
176. Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women, 1–2, 9, 21; Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering,” 88–91.
Conclusion
1. Scott, “Paper Thin,” 1086; Scott, Was Freedom Portable?
2. Camp, Closer to Freedom; Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free.
3. The concept of liminality appears in several discussions of recaptivity. See DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows, 304–5; Conrad, “Neither Slave nor Free”; Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil,” 4–5; and Fernández, “Havana Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission,” 214.
4. Domingues da Silva, Eltis, Misevich, and Ojo, “Diaspora of Africans,” 366.
5. Kerber, “The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other,” 14.
6. Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom”; Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 45–52; Coghe, “Problem of Freedom,” 482–83; Fernández, “Havana Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission.”
7. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles; Roberts, Freedom as Marronage.
8. Poignant, Professional Savages; Blanchard et al., Human Zoos; Sharpley and Stone, Darker Side of Travel; Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism; Hartnell, “Katrina Tourism.”
9. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 6, 268, 271.
10. Sweet, “Defying Social Death”; Mason, Social Death and Resurrection; Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family.’”
11. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans, 34.
12. Miller, “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering,” 81.
13. Harris, “New York Merchants and the Illegal Slave Trade”; Zeuske, Amistad; Marques, “United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.”
14. Vos, “‘Without the Slave Trade’”; Yun, Coolie Speaks; Lai, Indentured Labor; Hoefte, In Place of Slavery; Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery.
15. Lovejoy, “Children of Slavery,” table 2, 201; Allen, “Traffic Repugnant to Humanity”; Morton, “Small Change”; Allen, “Children and European Slave Trading.”
16. Lawrance powerfully argues that the “age of abolition” be understood instead as an “age of child enslavement” (Amistad’s Orphans, 7, 266–71). For modern-day slavery, see Bales, Disposable People, and Quirk, “Ending Slavery in All Its Forms.”
17. Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa,” 206.
18. Ibid., 204, 213.
19. Gann and Duignan, Rulers of Belgian Africa, 101. Born in a Croatian town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Lerman worked in Belgian civil administration from 1888 until 1894. During his Liberian stay, he visited Edward Blyden and recorded his admiration of Blyden as an “educated African.”
20. “Liberia as a Civilizer on the Congo,” African Repository 63, no. 4 (April 1889): 61–63. The anonymous author attributes the quote to Lerman’s government report on Congo migrants at Boma.
21. See Adderley’s critical discussion of the idea of an African “homeland,” in “New Negroes from Africa,” 209, 213.
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