Recaptured Africans

Sharla M. Fett's Recaptured Africans contributes significantly to scholarship on the transatlantic trade, focusing especially on four slave ships that the U.S. Navy intercepted en route to Cuba between 1858 and 1860. Once captured, each vessel was escorted to the United States—Charleston in one case and Key West in the others—where the recaptives were suspended “between enslavement and emancipation” (p. 4). The story begins with the 1819 federal law that established national jurisdiction over captured slavers and directed the removal of their human cargoes beyond U.S. borders. The founding of Liberia soon thereafter created an ideal destination. Fett's case studies illuminate the domestic and international implications of U.S. intervention. The recaptives held in Charleston became “exotic ethnographic subjects” at precisely the time that Deep South firebrands promoted the legal reauthorization of the trade (p. 62). On the sands of Key West, recaptives endured overcrowded barracks and shortages of water, food, and medical attention. Three of the four voyages had embarked from the Congo River region where children predominated among the captives. Snatched from their home societies prior to initiation into adulthood, the youngsters overcame the lost sense of “social belonging” by cultivating “shipmate bonds” that persisted through their arrival in Liberia (pp. 88, 99

Emancipation · Jurisdiction · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law