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  • Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett
  • Leigh Fought
Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade. By Sharla M. Fett. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 290. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3002-1.)

The interception of Middle Passage voyages after the legal suppression of the transatlantic slave trade did not liberate the traumatized victims but instead led to another stage in a series of incarcerations punctuating their seemingly endless displacement. In Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade, historian Sharla M. Fett follows the fates of African shipmates on four slaving vessels from their apprehension by United States forces in 1858 and 1860 through their holding in stateless limbo, as various parties sorted through jurisdictions and legal statuses, to their final deposit in Liberia. As the title suggests, recaptured Africans were more captive than free, and even the most well-meaning advocates sometimes failed to perceive them as more than problems to be solved or pawns in their agendas.

Fett situates these cases within the history of American efforts to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, addressing both legal and contemporary ethnographic developments. Federal control of slave trade suppression may have prevented southern planters from de facto participation in the trade, but the nation at large continued to profit indirectly from the business. Furthermore, suppression became a means of projecting U.S. power globally by using the American Colonization Society to advance white supremacist nationalism at home while experimenting with imperialism overseas. Fett discusses ethnologists who insisted that there were two separate lines of human descent in order to argue for [End Page 455] immutable biological difference among races, which provided the ideological grounding for federal policies regarding captives.

More immediately, these four cases took place after a two-decade-long dearth of similar cases, during which time came calls to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision. As a result, people of African descent who fell under U.S. jurisdiction were often treated as potential property rather than as victims of a crime. Held in camps in Key West, Florida, and at Fort Sumter, the recaptives in Fett's study lived like prisoners or zoological specimens. African American abolitionist and minister James W. C. Pennington alone seemed concerned about their humanity. Yet he, too, betrayed his own cultural prejudice when describing recaptives as savages who required Christianizing. His attitude informed his decision to support sending the recaptives to Liberia. There, they entered into apprenticeships and were expected to assimilate into the transplanted American culture. Once again, they were neither enslaved nor free; they were a buffer between the American colonial and indigenous African populations.

Throughout Fett emphasizes dislocation and adaptation as these shipmates forged their own communities onboard ships, in camps, and finally under the imposed designation of "Congo" in Liberia (p. 168). They prioritized their security and took advantage of limited freedom of movement and whatever space that they could claim. Still, Fett does not quite succeed in vividly portraying the experience of the recaptives, although notable exceptions do leap out. And most of the evidence of suffering and resilience feels as if it falls into the tell rather than the show category, with assertions standing in for examples. Yet, as Fett admits, that is a problem with which all historians of marginalized people struggle, and it should not interfere with the importance of this work. With Recaptured Africans, Fett has described a crucial link in the chain of the history of racism that stretches between the transatlantic slave trade and modern methods of viewing, controlling, incarcerating, and disposing of black lives.

Leigh Fought
Le Moyne College
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