Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (review)

In November 1841, nineteen enslaved people successfully revolted aboard the Creole as the vessel from Richmond, Virginia, plied the waters of the Bahamas Channel. Benjamin Johnson, Elijah Morris, Doctor Ruffin, and Madison Washington led the revolt. The rebels directed first mate Zephaniah C. Gifford and crew to pilot the Creole to the British port at Nassau. British colonial officials imprisoned the Creole’s captives at Nassau, and United States consul John Bacon aided an armed attempt to remove them from the Bahamas. The captives and rebels were protected from seizure by the free black troops of the British Army’s Second West India Regiment and by local black Bahamians. Ultimately, Bahamas colonial governor Francis Cockburn and the colonial council determined that the rebels be freed according to a British imperial law that, in 1833, ended slavery in the British colonies. In December 1841, the Creole called at port in New Orleans, absent its original captain, one passenger, and all but five of the original 139 captives.

Historian Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade revisits this liberation story in an ambitious attempt to explain the lessons found in a deep range of U.S. federal, state, and British imperial sources. Scholars have often featured Madison Washington as the hero of the Creole revolt. Through careful research of the Creole’s manifest and bills of lading, Kerr-Ritchie astutely demonstrates that the vessel’s captives were drawn from a wide range of enslaved Virginians. Recent histories of the U.S. domestic and coastwise slave trades have made clear the ubiquity of slave trading among American southerners. Here, too, Kerr-Ritchie demonstrates convincingly that no fewer than eight merchants and consignees invested in the Creole’s fateful voyage, among them the infamous slave traders Robert Lumpkin and Thomas McCargo. Kerr-Ritchie’s research also pushes beyond previous scholarship to bring extant records held in the Aberdeen Papers at the British Library to bear, including the diplomatic correspondence between British special envoy Lord Ashburton, U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster, and British foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen. To trace the postrevolt settlement patterns of the Creole captives in the Bahamas, Kerr-Ritchie employs, among other sources, local histories, oral interviews, and land grant records.

Rebellious Passage is particularly unique in how it foregrounds the U.S. coastwise slave trade as the subject of major contests of U.S.-British diplomacy. Here, Kerr-Ritchie demonstrates that politicians, abolitionists, diplomats, and newspaper editors closely followed the antebellum legal proceedings that affirmed freedom for the Creole rebels in British and American courts. Previous scholarship had cast the revolt as an affair or mutiny, minimizing it as an episode in the history of antislavery diplomacy. Turning this older work on its head, Kerr-Ritchie describes in impressive detail the revolt’s social, legal, and diplomatic consequences using British Colonial Office and Foreign Office records; the 1842 U.S. Senate dossier of official correspondence; officer and crew depositions and protests that were collected at Nassau and at New Orleans; and the 1856 U.S. Senate report on the proceedings of the Anglo-American Commission charged with deciding a wide range of maritime and terrestrial civil claims and property disputes dating to the War of 1812. Kerr-Ritchie brings fresh eyes to these sources to argue in detail that the revolt was, for the Creole captives, not freedom gained retroactively through the benevolence of British colonial officials but an active process of self-liberation.

The historian’s breath of fresh air, Rebellious Passage masterfully demonstrates the utility of placing the Creole revolt at the center of the long history of diplomacy between two expanding nineteenth-century domains—a post-emancipation antislavery empire and a rapidly strengthening slaveholding republic.