Recaptured Africans

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

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