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

For a number of years a growing body of literature, buttressed in particular by the explosion of Black Atlantic scholarship, has challenged simplistic understandings of emancipation as a straightforward progression from enslavement to freedom. Sharla Fett's Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade is a worthy addition to this literature that invites its readers to probe the contours of "freedom" through the experiences of Africans "liberated" from vessels intercepted by the United States Navy after the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807. Unfortunately, the act did not provide specifics regarding the status of those individuals found aboard these now-illegal slave ships and the federal government initially hoped to leave the matter to those individual states where authorities deposited these individuals. Those "liberated" Africans arriving in slave states were typically auctioned into domestic slavery. Pressure from the American Colonization Society eventually led to a shift in federal policy in 1819; thereafter, any Africans intercepted would be relocated to the society's West African colony in Liberia, regardless of their actual points of origin. There, these slave ship survivors were called "Congoes"—so-named by conflating a primary slave exporting region in central Africa as the homeland for all Africans ensnared within the Atlantic slave trade—and were indentured to African American settlers living in the colony. By using their official designation as "recaptured" Africans, a stark descriptor of their status, Fett echoes nineteenth-century commentators like Frederick Douglass who noted the contradiction of the United States upholding slavery on land while functioning as an abolitionist state on the ocean. Uneasy liberators, the federal government continued to bind recaptives in "the bleak spaces adjacent, but not identical, to enslaved captivity" (p. 15).

Chapter one provides the history of federal policy regarding recaptives and early case studies of captured vessels. Significantly, Fett points to the publication in the 1850s of several popular memoirs of slave trading activities in West Africa, in particular naval officer Andrew H. Foote's Africa and the American Flag and slave trader Theophilus Conneau's Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver. Fett argues that these accounts created a "slave trade ethnography" which allowed armchair experts in the states to claim the need for both African depravity and white rescue. Focusing exclusively on the 1850s handicaps Fett by preventing her from bringing in earlier evidence, such as Horatio Bridge's Journal of an African Cruiser, but her argument is important and compelling; slave trade literature and printed representations of recaptive African bodies fostered an ethnographical impulse that helped construct American notions of race through a framework of international engagement with Africa and the Atlantic world.

Chapters two and three turn to the principal case studies upon which Fett relies: roughly 1,800 recaptured Africans, many of them children, taken from four vessels captured in 1858 and 1860. The second chapter focuses on the recaptives of the Echo, brought to Charleston, South Carolina in 1858, and housed at Fort Sumter before their dispatch to Liberia. As they attempted to survive physical and social trauma, nearby South Carolinians organized sightseeing tours and turned an ethnographic gaze onto suffering people and transformed them into spectacle. The recaptive shipmates of the Wildfire, William, and Bogota that arrived in Key West in 1860 serve as the focus of chapter three. While their more isolated location largely protected these recaptives from the immediate gaze of white eyes, the popular illustrated magazines of the day, such as Harper's Weekly, published images of the shipmates that invited all to peer with an ethnographic gaze regardless of their actual physical proximity to Key West. Chapter four turns to James Pennington and other African American activists in New York who responded to slave trade ethnography by developing...