Recaptured Africans from Illegal Slave Ships: U.S. Government Report Documenting 142 African Survivors and Their Removal to Liberia, 1828

Recaptured Africans Illegal Slave Ships

First Edition

[African American] [Slavery] [Military] Southard, Samuel L., Secretary of the Navy. Recaptured Africans: Letter From the Secretary of the Navy, Transmitting the Information Required by a Resolution of the House of Representatives…in Relation to the Present Condition and Probable Annual Expense of the United States Agency for Recaptured Africans on the Coast of Africa. Washington: Gales & Seaton, March 12, 1828. 20th Congress, First Session, House Document No. 193. First edition. 15 pages. Approximately 5.5 x 8.75 inches.

Important early U.S. government document concerning the fate of Africans seized from vessels engaged in the illegal transatlantic slave trade, including detailed tabular information accounting for 142 individual “recaptured Africans.” Issued less than two decades after the United States prohibited the importation of enslaved people in 1808, the report documents the federal government's developing system for taking custody of Africans found aboard intercepted slave ships, supporting them under government authority, and transporting or settling survivors on the West African coast.

The report opens with a two-page letter from Secretary of the Navy Samuel L. Southard responding to a House resolution requesting information concerning the condition and anticipated expense of the United States Agency for Recaptured Africans in Africa. It is followed by five communications from Jehudi Ashmun at Cape Mesurado, Liberia, providing detailed information about the agency and the Africans placed under its supervision. Of particular significance are tables accounting for 142 recaptured Africans and recording the status of individuals as of September 1827. These administrative records transform a congressional report on government expenditures into a documentary record of people who had survived capture, forced transportation aboard slave ships, interception, detention, and further displacement under American authority. The report also provides descriptions of the facilities and arrangements established for their custody and support.

The document emerged from an unusual consequence of the federal prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade. Although slavery itself remained legal throughout much of the United States, Congress had prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans beginning in 1808. Africans discovered aboard vessels engaged in the illegal trade therefore presented the federal government with a complex legal and humanitarian problem: they had been trafficked toward enslavement but could not legally be imported and sold in the United States. Federal authorities developed mechanisms for taking custody of these survivors, temporarily housing them—including in facilities associated with Key West and Charleston—and ultimately transporting many to the West African coast, particularly Liberia.

The report consequently documents an important intersection of American slavery, naval enforcement, federal policy, and the early history of Liberia. Its repeated bureaucratic designation of survivors as “recaptured Africans” reflects the terminology through which the United States government administered people liberated from illegal slave ships while slavery continued within the country itself. The individual accounting contained here provides unusually concrete evidence of how this policy operated in practice. The history of these individuals and the larger American recaptive system has received renewed scholarly attention, notably in Sharla M. Fett's Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade, which examines the experiences of Africans subjected to slave-ship trafficking, American detention, and forced relocation during the nineteenth century.

Original government printing, referred to the Committee of Ways and Means. Printed wrappers with minor age-related foxing. Unbound but remaining together; interior text clean and well preserved. Overall very good condition. Uncommon in institutional holdings; OCLC WorldCat records only a small number of copies, 8 at the time of this writing.

Item #20467

Price: $750.00