Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade

by Sharla M. Fett

Overview

In the years just before the Civil War, during the most intensive phase of American slave-trade suppression, the U.S. Navy seized roughly 2,000 enslaved Africans from illegal slave ships and brought them into temporary camps at Key West and Charleston. In this study, Sharla Fett reconstructs the social world of these "recaptives" and recounts the relationships they built to survive the holds of slave ships, American detention camps, and, ultimately, a second transatlantic voyage to Liberia. Fett also demonstrates how the presence of slave-trade refugees in southern ports accelerated heated arguments between divergent antebellum political movements—from abolitionist human rights campaigns to slave-trade revivalism—that used recaptives to support their claims about slavery, slave trading, and race.

By focusing on shipmate relations rather than naval exploits or legal trials, and by analyzing the experiences of both children and adults of varying African origins, Fett provides the first history of U.S. slave-trade suppression centered on recaptive Africans themselves. In so doing, she examines the state of "recaptivity" as a distinctive variant of slave-trade captivity and situates the recaptives' story within the broader diaspora of "Liberated Africans" throughout the Atlantic world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469645513
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/01/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Sharla M. Fett is professor of history at Occidental College.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This book addresses a little-researched subject: the plight of recaptives who found themselves in the United States after the Navy removed them from four illegal slave ships in the mid-nineteenth century. With great historical imagination and a tremendous grasp of scholarship focused on both sides of the Atlantic, Fett makes the most of limited data to tell a story about the enslaved themselves—their strategies, their desires, and their suffering.—Walter Hawthorne, Michigan State University

Recaptured Africans is our first real chance to explore in depth the cultural and political meaning of African recaptives in the American context. At the same time, Fett also foregrounds the experience of the recaptives who were penned up in American camps and stockades, farmed out to American enslavers, and shipped off to Liberia and other places very different from those that they had left. The tragedy of the disruption, suffering, and, often, death undergone by the thousands of (mostly young) recaptives is nowhere explored with the same kind of subtle but powerful emotional depth we see here."—Edward E. Baptist, Cornell University

Editorial Reviews

Provide[s] telling accounts and analysis of the ways that Americans were forced to move from abstractions to actions regarding the slave trade and issues of race. In that, it speaks to our own day.—Library Journal

Presents a revealing view of the debates over slavery, race, and empire in the years immediately preceding a war to which these issues were central. . . . Emphasizes the suffering and resilience of the recaptives, restoring agency to people whose experiences are too often seen as abstractions.—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Riveting narrative of untold story of slavery. . . . Groundbreaking and firmly places itself in the category of entirely new information.—Civil War News

Describe[s] a crucial link in the chain of the history of racism that stretches between the transatlantic slave trade and modern methods of viewing, controlling, incarcerating, and disposing of black lives.—The Journal of Southern History

From the Publisher

★ 05/22/2017
In this brief but illuminating book, Fett, professor of history at Occidental College, focuses on the experiences of roughly 1,800 “recaptured Africans” whom the U.S. Navy seized from four ships bound for Cuba. They were among the million-plus African captives who were illegally taken aboard American vessels between 1807 and the outbreak of the Civil War. These captives were brought temporarily to Charleston, S.C., and then to Key West, Fla., before being returned to the free black nation of Liberia in 1860. Fett vividly depicts the involuntary American sojourn of these men, women, and children; she argues that their experience, and the public responses they engendered, “provides an instructive example of early U.S. imperialism.” Fett’s study presents a revealing view of the debates over slavery, race, and empire in the years immediately preceding a war to which these issues were central. It also sheds light on the previously little-studied category of the “recaptive,” a historical figure that, Fett contends, further complicates the history of slavery in the antebellum U.S. and locates it in a wider Atlantic world of trade and diplomacy. Fett emphasizes the suffering and resilience of the recaptives, restoring agency to people whose experiences are too often seen as abstractions. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

10/15/2016
Fett (history, Occidental Coll.) details a remarkable story about the last years of the slave trade, when the United States captured four slavers in 1858 and 1860 and struggled to decide the fate of the enslaved people aboard those ships. The federal government detained the enslaved people in Charleston, SC, and Key West, FL, where they became "objects" of interest to sightseers and the subject of arguments about African character and race. Proslavery advocates sought to keep them as chattel while abolitionists fought for their freedom. Eventually, those who survived the detention were sent to Liberia, another "middle passage," and to lives largely unknown. The author uses this experience to explore ideas about race, slavery, abolition, and African American identity with insight and sensitivity. She shows great creativity in using sparse sources to re-create the lives of the recaptured Africans during their transits and transition from a twice-captured people to a supposedly liberated one in Africa. VERDICT Fett's work does not rewrite the history of slavery and antislavery or redirect the historiography, but it does provide telling accounts and analysis of the ways that Americans were forced to move from abstractions to actions regarding the slave trade and issues of race. In that, it speaks to our own day.—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Library Journal