White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (review)

Surviving for over three centuries in America, the Barbary captivity narrative has filtered through religious and popular literature, reaching millions of readers in various forms of nonfiction, fiction, drama, and film. The figure of the white slave in Africa not only produced a mirror image of the black slave in America, it both rationalized and critiqued slavery in the United States and produced some of the first and longest-lasting images of Africans for an American audience.

—Paul Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters, 1999

Paul Baepler's important anthology, White Slaves, African Masters, introduces one of the most significant and one of the most overlooked genres of early American print culture, the Barbary captivity narrative. During the early national period, hundreds of Americans were held captive in the north African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Most were captured off American ships that had been seized by Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean, and most—but not all—were ransomed back to the United States after a captivity that lasted anywhere from a few months to more than a decade. For centuries Europeans and north African Muslims had been capturing, enslaving, and ransoming each other, and according to some estimates Algiers alone had well over 20,000 Christian captives during the seventeenth century. By comparison, the number of captive Americans was small, yet their experiences had a profound impact on the American psyche. From the 1780s up to the Civil War, a surprising number of Barbary captivity narratives were published (and quite often constantly republished), and they not only were among the most popular of all captivity narratives but also provided Americans with powerful images of slavery and Africans. The ironic correspondences between Americans enslaved in Africa and Africans enslaved in America were unavoidable.

Despite their enormous popularity and impact, Barbary captivity narratives are generally unknown to readers of early American print culture. Although excellent work has been done recently in Indian captivity narratives, slave narratives, Revolutionary prisoner-of-war narratives, and even criminal narratives, the narratives of north African captivity have been left unread. Few readers know of their existence, and fewer still have had access to them. Paul Baepler is to be congratulated for realizing the singular importance of these overlooked texts and attempting to bring attention to them by putting together his unique anthology. With its insightful introduction, useful notes, and careful selection of texts, White Slaves, African Masters not only opens up new literary territory but also offers a reliable analysis of the texts' significance.

In his introduction, Baepler sets the genre within its specific historical context, explaining how American experiences fit into a much larger set of political, national, and theological conditions that had developed between Christians and Muslims since the Crusades. Readers will likely be surprised to learn that "the history of Barbary captivity coevolved with, if not predated, that of Indian captivity" (3). Yet as long as the major European powers paid a tribute to the Barbary states, and as long as American ships fell under the umbrella protection of England, few Americans were held captive in north Africa during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The one notable exception was Joshua Gee, a Bostonian who was kept as a slave in Algiers from 1680 to 1687. Although Gee's narrative was not published until 1943, his captivity story was fairly well known in the Boston area during the late seventeenth century. Cotton Mather, who shared the North Church pulpit with Gee's son, was concerned enough about the plight of Christian captives in north Africa to publish both A Pastoral Letter (1698) and The Glory of Goodness (1703), urging all captives to resist "the Impostor Mahomet, and his accursed Alcoran" (64).

Significantly, it was American liberty that prompted a sudden rise in the number of Americans in captivity. As soon as the United States had gained its independence, its merchant ships in the Mediterranean began to fall prey to Barbary corsairs. Throughout...