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

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.)