Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett (review)

This study examines the recapture, detention, and removal from U.S. soil of approximately 2,000 people, most of them children, who had survived passage on four slave ships—Echo, Wildfire, William and Bogota. It is primarily concerned with the newly liberated Africans’ confinement in camps at the Florida Keys and Charleston and their shipment to, and arrival in, Liberia between 1858 and 1861. Instead of issues of legality, diplomacy, and naval supremacy, Fett centers her discussion on the human dimension of transatlantic slave-trading in its illegal phase, confronting a familiar problem for historians working in this field, “[t]he absence of any reliable first-person evidence” (7). The solution is a careful parsing of eyewitness documentation, including records of naval officers, marshals, and agents of the American Colonization Society, which Fett compares to recent research of “liberated Africans” throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. She also draws upon anthropological studies to interpret social and cultural rites as practiced in the dislocated environments of the detention camp and the ship—for example, “the duality of continuity and innovation” in improvised acts of cicatrization among women bound for Liberia (152).

Recaptured Africans is a nuanced analysis of the paradoxical concept of “recaptivity” as the precarious existence in various “transit zones” between liberty and coercion, redemption and potential re-enslavement (8). Fett’s work builds upon others in this area, siding with works that, following Brown’s, highlight survival and adaptation in spite of the “social death” of slavery.¹ Ending with life in Liberia under the ethnonym of “Congoes,” Recaptured Africans points to new geographical and historical contexts for the study of Atlantic-world enslavement, including connections to the “ongoing traffic in young people that extended beyond the Atlantic and continues today” (191).

Similar to that in such related works as Marcus Rediker’s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2012), Fett’s exploration of the biases expressed in primary sources leads to discussion of the cultural construction of enslaved peoples as objects of ethnographic spectacle. The discussion of “slave trade ethnography” (18), as Fett styles it, begins with an innovative, if small-scale, comparison of two contrasting sources from the 1850s—the memoirs of Theodor Canot, a slave-ship captain, and of Andrew H. Foote, an anti-slave-trade naval officer (30–39). Yet the book’s turn toward “cultural politics” is less fully realized than is its social analysis of recaptivity (13). References to older sources, such as Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, 1964), reveal that cultural studies in this field have not flourished to the same extent as social histories. Fett never entirely decides whether “slave trade ethnography” required “respectab[ility]” and “purported ethnographic expertise” (34, 35), or whether it was more casually deployed as “popular amusement” (62), with little expertise claimed, especially in pro-slavery texts.

Having established that racialized objectification was common across the political spectrum and throughout popular culture, Fett does not regard sources that offer more sympathetic or progressive representations as “slave trade ethnography.” She quotes the reminiscences of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba liberated African, for example, as evidence of familial disorientation with no reflection on their “ethnographic” properties. Perhaps a fuller consideration of the many faces of “slave trade ethnography” might have helped to justify the length of Fett’s chapter-long discussion of James W. C. Pennington, a Brooklyn-based minister, and his interest in the recaptives. Although it reveals the overlap between slave-trade debates and late antebellum African- American protests, it digresses from the book’s compelling main story and motifs.