For historians of the Black Atlantic in the last half century, accurately representing the humanity and resourcefulness of the millions of people pulled into the maelstrom of New World slavery might be described as the Holy Grail.Footnote ¹ Photographic evidence has formed a small part of this quest. For the last years of the slave trade when slave ships carrying thousands of captives were detained, photography provides unexpected insights for the many thousands of Liberated Africans, as the re-captives on board came to be known. This large group of people experienced a slow transition from the slave deck to a severely circumscribed form of freedom on land. Photographs from the period give us a view, however limited, into their experience.

Dispatches from naval officers to the Admiralty describing slave-trading activities in the Indian Ocean continued after the transatlantic traffic closed in 1867. The occasional report included photographs. For the Africans involved, conditions in the two oceans were almost identical. Figures 7.1 through 7.3 show enslaved people disembarked in 1868 (7.1 and 7.2) and 1883 (7.3). The standard slaver off East Africa both for coastal and trans-oceanic voyages was a dhow typically smaller than a transatlantic carrier. Naval commanders often transferred the enslaved to their own vessel, as happened with the HMS Daphne shown in Figure 7.1. This could make crowding just as severe as on the slave ship.Footnote ² Figure 7.2, also taken on HMS Daphne, shows the appalling physical condition of the Africans. The distended stomachs of the malnourished and dehydration-induced emaciation of dysentery are plain to see. We know that the captured dhow had been at sea for only three days when detained. Nevertheless, the image surely reflects the typical condition of those disembarking from the 40,000 or so transatlantic voyages in the preceding three-and-one-half-centuries.

Figure 7.1 Liberated Africans on board HMS Daphne, 1868. Source: BNA, FO84/1310, f. 192.

Reproduced with permission of the British National Archives, Kew.

Figure 7.2 Liberated African children on board HMS Daphne, 1868. Source: BNA, FO84/1310, f. 194.

Reproduced with the permission of the British National Archives, Kew.

Figure 7.3 Liberated Africans on board HMS Undine, 1883.

Source: Photo Lot 97 DOE: Africa: General: Unid: Artwork National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Figure 7.3 shows 100 individuals removed from a second dhow fifteen years later, off Ndzwani (then called Johanna), one of the Comoros Islands. They had embarked 200 miles to the south, in what is now Mozambique. The prize officer’s report identifies them as Makua people, speakers of Emakhuwa. This is not represented in the African-Origins database, but is the dominant language of modern Mozambique.Footnote ³ There, too, are the distended stomachs and emaciation on display in the front row, but the overall physical condition of the group seems better than its 1868 predecessor, possibly due to the artistic license of the engraver.Footnote ⁴ It should be noted that the naval report tells us that 20 percent of this group had already died in the interval between detention and the time of the photograph, probably a few short weeks later in Zanzibar. We know, too, that all but twenty of the Makua had been too ill to disembark unaided. A man and woman, likely parents, rest their arms on a child. The back row shows two crewmen, one of whom carries an African infant, possibly an orphan. This gives a human touch to the interaction of sailors and Africans, to be considered alongside evidence below of the occasional Liberated African rebellion against the prize crew as they sailed to the nearest court location. The high ratio of children and women, 77 percent in this instance, also obvious in these images, no doubt inhibited violent resistance.

These images are likely the closest we will get to representing the nearly 3 million African captives that were forced to leave Africa for the Americas in the sixty years after 1807. By that time Denmark, the United States, and Britain, in that order, had prohibited their citizens from engaging in the transatlantic slave trade. Three million is a surprisingly large number given that these same nations had withdrawn from the trade after financing almost two-thirds of total departures in the few years before 1807. It points to the inability of international law at the time to accommodate relatively sudden shifts in values, especially those relating to human rights, that enabled formal abolition of the traffic.Footnote ⁵ Though the British had been the leading transatlantic slave-trading nation at the end of the eighteenth century, they now led a campaign to capture hundreds of slave ships containing thousands of captives. Here we will first examine the structure of the post-1807 slave trade from West Africa with an emphasis on re-captives, in other words, those Africans for whom such naval intervention meant they never reached the slave markets of the Americas. We track the reactions, fate, and composition of the more than 200,000 Liberated Africans that the new British policy created, most of them released from slave vessels or rescued from coastal barracoons. We also draw comparisons with ex-slaves freed in parts of the British Empire by the 1833 abolition act, by the US Civil War, and to a lesser extent, libertos in the non-British Atlantic.Footnote ⁶ The main thrust of the chapter is evaluating how the Liberated Africans fared against the background of the broader struggles that were taking place over freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

But first we need to track the geography of this huge diaspora, or rather, these diasporas. In almost every instance, captives liberated from slave vessels passed through a legal process that formally proclaimed their new status. The best known such process was adjudication in the so-called Courts of Mixed Commission – international courts established by treaties between the British and, eventually, twenty other nations; the term “mixed” deriving from the involvement of more than one nation. Mixed Commissions operated at different times in Sierra Leone, Luanda, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Havana to adjudicate vessels suspected of slave trading. Together they declared 90,988 Africans as “Liberated.”Footnote ⁷ Additional courts existed in Paramaribo (Surinam), Kingston (Jamaica), and New York but none of these freed any slaves.

A second large group assumed Liberated African status via domestic proceedings, the most important of which were British Admiralty Courts – domestic tribunals that had jurisdiction over maritime matters. At least one of these existed in every British possession with a coastline. In the colonies, they were called Vice-Admiralty Courts with those in Freetown and St. Helena dominating this group. All told, they determined the fate of a further 80,024 Africans.Footnote ⁸ Domestic courts and administrative decisions of other nations created Liberated status for 27,000 Africans, though this figure is an approximation, given that research on this topic in some of these countries is still incomplete. Brazil and the United States formed the core of this group, but Portuguese courts in Africa and French courts on both sides of the Atlantic also contributed. The Haitian navy captured four slave vessels and Argentinian privateers another four in the 1825–1828 war with Brazil.Footnote ⁹ In addition, the British freed 2,300 other people without apparently going through any formal process, most of them having survived shipwreck on islands in the British Caribbean while bound for Cuba. In summary, approximately 216,000 enslaved people fell into the hands of various anti-slave trade forces operating in the Atlantic after 1807. As some 10 percent of these comprised the Brazilian and Cuban authorities, we should perhaps say “nominal” anti-slave trade forces.

A third group, called engagés (nominally contracted workers) receives less attention in what follows because those involved have received much less scholarly scrutiny. Between 1831 and 1870 the Dutch and French governments authorized the “recruitment” of Africans for in one case military service in Dutch Indonesia, and in the other labor service on the sugar plantations of French colonies in the Americas and the Indian Ocean. French and Dutch agents negotiated with slave merchants in various parts of East and West Africa for the purchase of enslaved people who were then declared nominally free prior to their forced embarkation on transoceanic voyages. Each engagé and prospective soldier was given a contract that specified a term of service: ten years for the 19,900 dispatched in this fashion to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane plus 34,258 sent to Réunion. The Dutch exacted fourteen years’ service from the 3,085 sent to the Dutch East Indies. Both nations added the promise of a return voyage to Africa at completion of service. The combined total of 57,243 people caught up in these French- and Dutch-forced migrations, made it easily the largest source of Liberated Africans in the nineteenth century after the Sierra Leone courts.Footnote ¹⁰ A final and not yet systematically investigated group are the tens of thousands taken off Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean, a few of whom are represented in Figures 7.1 to 7.3. Mixed Commission and Vice-Admiralty Courts from Cape Town to Bombay, and many points in between, assigned Liberated African status to an unknown number of Africans. The African names in the court registers of Zanzibar, Mombasa, Aden, Seychelles, the Mascarene Islands, and several Indian locations have yet to be analyzed. These mainly Indian Ocean sources could easily add a further 30,000 to the PAST enslaved database.

Of the overall total of more than a quarter-million Africans displaced by Atlantic voyages, we have personal details of fewer than half – 95,183 – mostly landing in Freetown and Havana. The PAST enslaved database on slavevoyages.org (formerly african-origins.org), gives readers access to this personal information. Some were liberated by the US Civil War a year or two after their slave ship arrived illegally late in the ante-bellum era.Footnote ¹¹ Overall we can trace 95,165 Africans after they left Africa. As with all the databases on slavevoyages, this number will continue to grow as new documentary evidence surfaces.Footnote ¹² Column 3 of Table 7.1 provides an overview of the initial location of Liberated Africans after their recapture or in some instances, last known location. Column 4 shows the net impact of their subsequent movements as far as we can tell. The plus sign indicates additional arrivals. The minus sign shows subsequent departures, insofar as these can be determined.

As discussed in Chapter 5, for many listed in the registers, we can also say something about their linguistic identities, and thereby their African homeland. Court proceedings typically involved government clerks helped by African interpreters, transcribing into large bound registers the names, age, height, and, for many, probable languages of each enslaved person on board the detained ship.Footnote ¹³ Unfortunately, in the Portuguese south Atlantic world clerks entered only the post-baptismal Christian names rather than the Indigenous African name. The labels and the bound registers were intended to provide protection against re-enslavement in an Atlantic world in which slave populations in several parts were still expanding, and where 7 million people of African descent remained enslaved as late as 1830. The registers, sometimes along with multiple copies, had an almost identical format.Footnote ¹⁴ In what was for most African languages a pre-orthographic era, the African names were taken down phonetically. Modern native speakers of English, Spanish, or French have recorded the names and users can listen to these recordings. Crowdsourcing enables the identification of their modern counterparts and thus the likely linguistic association of the name.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition to the registers, there are missionary commentaries and reports of occasional interventions by the British imperial government such as the “Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Africans in the West Indies,” who interviewed a selection of 886 Liberated Africans a decade or more after release from their slave ship.Footnote ¹⁶

Twelve years of crowd-sourcing the African names in the registers, primarily through the former African-Origins site have allowed researchers to link 35,300 African names with a specific language, or in the case of Islam, a religion. The Ethnologue website (www.ethnologue.com) provides a modern-day coordinate for almost every one of the identified languages. Given the geographic continuity of coastal populations over centuries of slave trading and colonial rule, this in turn provides an approximate indication of the original geographic location of the Liberated African.Footnote ¹⁷ Up to this point, scholars have focused on the wide range of languages and cultures of Liberated Africans. Sigismund Koelle listed more than 200 languages and dialects in Sierra Leone as the influx of Liberated Africans to the colony approached its end in the mid-1850s. He and subsequent scholars have made such identifications, and the captive narratives that often went with them, the core of their work.Footnote ¹⁸ Misevich, Nwokeji, and I have taken the analysis a step further by using the surviving registers to estimate the size and relative importance of those language groups and to estimate their diasporas.Footnote ¹⁹

Maps 7.1 to 7.3 distribute the identified languages across three major African regions caught up in the African slave trade after 1807. The italicized number beside the language label in the maps is the total of Liberated Africans associated with that language, as of 2023. The maps therefore draw directly on the names taken from the registers maintained by the Vice-Admiralty and Mixed Commission Courts and subsequently identified on the African-Origins site. These are now displayed in the PAST interface of slavevoyages.Footnote ²⁰ For this large segment of West Africa, it is probable that the roughly 94,000 captives that naval forces detained after 1807 comprised a representative sample of the total traffic from West Africa.Footnote ²¹ Further, the Bights of Benin and Biafra and most of Upper Guinea accounted for 95 percent of the West African Atlantic slave trade after 1807. By calculating a ratio for each language in the maps and applying this to the total number of people estimated to have embarked in each region in the given years from the slavevoyages.org estimates page we can derive numbers of departures for each language group. Thus, we can posit that 232,500 Igbo speakers left the northern Bight of Biafra (from the Rio Nun to the Cameroons), of whom 200,000 survived the voyage. We can also say something about where they went. In addition to 30,600 diverted to Freetown, the rest were scattered across the Americas with the largest number (69,600) disembarking in Cuba.Footnote ²² The Igbo language map shows that they accounted for about two-thirds of departures from the northern Bight of Biafra ports comprising Bimbia, Bonny, Calabar, New Calabar, the River Brass, and the Cameroons.Footnote ²³ This is broadly consistent with data from 1821 to 1822 when the Sierra Leone Mixed Commission clerks briefly identified the “country of origin” of several hundred of the captives in the registers.Footnote ²⁴

Map 7.1 Locations of languages of Liberated Africans leaving northern Bight of Biafra ports, 1808–1847.

Source: Data from the African-Origins database. For 1808 selection see www.slavevoyages.org/enslaved/yYcoFdQ6.

Map 7.2 Locations of languages of Liberated Africans leaving the Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast, 1810–1848.

Source: Data from the African-Origins database. For selection see www.slavevoyages.org/enslaved/IxIfqr0C.

Map 7.3 Locations of languages of Liberated Africans leaving Upper Guinea, 1808–1847.

Source: Data from the African-Origins database. For selection see www.slavevoyages.org/enslaved/ybLOmhCN. https://www.slavevoyages.org/enslaved/69HG6ADC

The Efik, Ibibio, Moco, and other non-Igbo peoples leaving mainly from Calabar, and a second group leaving mainly from the Cameroons accounted collectively for a further 24 percent. Of course, the term “Igbo” covers a wide range of mutually intelligible dialects, but the relative linguistic homogeneity of the large exodus from western ports such as Bonny contrasts strongly with linguistic diversity of the regions to the east and to the west of Igboland. In the west multiple languages in the Niger Delta region today still makes the region something of a paradise for linguists. To the east diversity increases dramatically among those leaving from the Cross River and other points now in the Cameroun Republic. Captives arriving in Freetown from the northern Bight of Biafra had names that have been associated with no fewer than 107 unique languages. But seventy-seven of these were in the Cameroon Highlands and a further dozen among the just forty-four individuals that originated in the Niger Delta region.

The same procedure for the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin embarkation points reveals an even greater dominance of a single language group, this time for Yoruba speakers. The Gold Coast ports were largely closed in this period. Three-quarters of all captives left from just two ports in the Bight of Benin, Lagos, and Whydah. It appears that 261,500 enslaved Yoruba were carried off from the region, of whom 240,800 arrived, mostly in Brazil rather than Cuba. However, they formed the largest language group arriving at Freetown. It is not yet possible to break down the large Yoruba-speaking group into dialects. So far Yoruba-Ijebu were the most numerous, but sample sizes were too small to support generalization. This is particularly unfortunate because we know that unlike the Igbo, internecine warfare played a large role in the enslavement of the Yoruba. Thus, eighty-three of the 103 currently identified as Yoruba-Oyo left during the collapse of the Oyo empire between 1817 and 1835. Another sixty-three departed in the years 1832 to 1835 as the cataclysm of war faded with the abandonment of Old Oyo.Footnote ²⁵

Despite the Yoruba dominance, thirty-two other languages were spoken by enslaved people leaving the Bight of Benin. But the second largest group was not linguistic, but rather religious. Arabic and Islamic names are recorded in the registers for 8 percent of those embarking in the Bight of Benin. Of course, some with Islamic names were likely Yoruba as well as Islamic, suggesting that the Yoruba data may be upper bound and the Islamic ratio might be a lower-bound figure. Finally, as we might expect, the two most westerly embarkation sites, Keta and Little Popo, saw 328 Akan and a few Ewe embark, while in the east 137 Igbo and small numbers of Ijaw, Ijo, Urhobo and others from Delta region were carried away from the Rio Nun.

Map 7.3 presents the data on Upper Guinea, defined here as Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast. It shows that almost four out of five of the region’s captives passed through the Rio Pongo, Sherbro, and Galinhas, albeit places ranging over 300 miles of coastline. Nevertheless, captives also embarked from at least sixteen additional points along this stretch of coast, probably because mangrove swamps provided some cover from the attentions of naval vessels. The Mende language, famously spoken by the Amistad captives in their sojourn in the US in 1839–1841 was the most common of the twenty-four unique languages identified in the region. Mende accounted for one-third of the names with a unique linguistic link. This, too, is almost certainly a lower-bound estimate, given that Sherbro speakers share many names with their Mende neighbors. Grouping Mende and Sherbro together with Temne names, all from languages centered within 100 miles of the coast, accounts for half the sample of identified languages. The hundred or so names from outside the region, mainly Igbo, may point to individuals who fell into the hands of slave traders a second time after being resettled in one of the villages in the Freetown hinterland.Footnote ²⁶ Like the Yoruba and Igbo, and indeed, those with Islamic names, more than half the Mende-speakers went to Cuba, which was easily the dominant destination for enslaved Africans in the nineteenth-century North Atlantic. The Mende diaspora was only one-third the size of its Yoruba and Igbo counterparts, but there must have been Mende-speaking groups on most Cuban plantations. Nevertheless, as Map 7.3 shows, after 1807 Upper Guinea comprised a smaller regional source of captives relative to the rest of West Africa. Probably 70,300 Mende left from twenty embarkation points. Some 62,500 surviving the voyage. Yet Mende-speakers made up only one-third of all Upper Guinea deportees. The impact of this group on nineteenth-century Sierra Leone was no doubt lessened by the many Liberated Africans who spoke local languages and absconded to their nearby homelands, among whom the Mende would have been well represented.Footnote ²⁷

The insets in each of three maps show the extraordinary dominance of just three African languages spoken by those pulled into the transoceanic traffic. Overall, 63 percent of all linguistically linked Liberated Africans spoke dialects of Igbo, Yoruba, or Mende. This proportion runs counter not only to the work of Koelle and others for the nineteenth century, but to the dominant narrative for the pre-1800 slave trade where historians have typically argued that captives of diverse backgrounds were bundled together on slave decks without being able to speak to each other. Because the languages were so regionally specific, the great majority of vessels leaving from the Bights, especially, must have shared a language to the same extent as the Portuguese and Spanish crews that controlled the ship. Homogeneity in both language and culture among arrivals in the Americas was probably greater than at any other period of the slave trade except possibly for those expelled in the Kongo civil wars of the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁸

There are some wider implications to be drawn from this pattern. Many scholars see the influence of the St. Domingue Rebellion and Haitian independence on the age of revolution in the Black Atlantic as seminal. Perhaps just as important to the struggle of Blacks for freedom was the appearance of this less dramatic pattern of a widespread shared cultural and linguistic background among the tens of thousands of new arrivals in Cuba and Bahia suggested by the maps above. As the Bahia uprising in 1835 demonstrated, resistance and revolution were always more likely in such an environment.Footnote ²⁹ During the nineteenth century slave vessels leaving Africa contained people who shared a much greater cultural homogeneity than those in earlier centuries. Perhaps the armed resistance of people of African descent that characterized the nineteenth century was enabled and inspired not so much by Haiti as by a shared linguistic and cultural background among newly arriving Africans. One further broad point is that the analysis here would not be possible for free migrants travelling to the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is possibly the one area where the historical data is richer for Africans leaving the Old World than for Europeans.

For the Liberated African segments of these three diasporas (four if we were to include Islam) the quality of the subsequent lives depended heavily on where their slave vessel was first detained. As with modern commercial airliners, vessels were most at risk of calamity shortly after departure or shortly before arrival. Almost all captured slave vessels were intercepted near the beginning or the end of their voyage from Africa.

British detentions off Africa when the naval campaign was at its height in the late 1840s are shown in Map 186 of the Eltis-Richardson Atlas.Footnote ³⁰ On the western side of the ocean almost all detentions occurred in the Caribbean Sea or off major ports in South America. Capture locations are important because naval commanders would usually dispatch their prizes to the nearest “safe” port, one with a court that would condemn the vessel, to minimize loss of life and ensure Liberated African status.Footnote ³¹ They favored Sierra Leone or St. Helena in the east, and Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and the British Caribbean in the west. When the British began to detain slave vessels in 1808, slavery was present everywhere in the Americas south of the Mason-Dixon line. The single exception was Haiti. Abolitionist pressures, not least stemming from the success of the St. Domingue slave rebellion, meant that except possibly for Brazil, slaveholders would not easily accommodate the arrival of large numbers of free Blacks in their midst. There was no room in the hierarchy of most slave societies for such a group. From the Southern US states south to the Rio de la Plata, governments on the western Atlantic littoral, saw freed slaves as a threat. In the absence of court intervention, officials in Brazil, Cuba, and the Southern US imposed draconian “apprenticeship” terms on the newly arrived Africans that differed little from slavery. Governments also imposed apprenticeships on the eastern side of the Atlantic, especially where unoccupied land was available. But as in Sierra Leone, these were loosely administered societies, The restrictions were much less draconian and allowed for greater agency on the part of the re-captives.

In what follows we discuss the restrictions imposed on these Africans as they disembarked from their captured slave vessels. We try to locate such restraints on the nineteenth-century range of the terms of labor that linked full chattel slavery at one extreme with free labor at the other – what Clare Anderson has called a “continuum of labour exploitation.”Footnote ³² But then what do we mean by “free labor”? The mid nineteenth-century North Atlantic provides an obvious model. Millions of free European migrants were beginning to flood across the North Atlantic just as the slave trade was approaching its zenith. Three million of them were Irish.Footnote ³³ They, too, were crowded on to sailing ships, experienced shipboard mortality that reached a mean of 5 percent on vessels leaving Liverpool in the late 1840s, though averaged 1.0 to 1.5 percent on ships arriving in Quebec between 1833 and 1855.Footnote ³⁴ Many of the survivors arrived in poor health, without contacts or immediate prospects. Their situation was unenviable. But even the destitute Irish landing in New York and Quebec City had rights, options, and most important, a level of volition, that were not available to Africans stepping off a captured slave ship. In stark contrast, very few of the 215,700 people in the African re-captive diaspora were allowed to leave their slave decks with futures free of encumbrances, especially “apprenticeships.” And if they survived the apprenticeship obligations, most Liberated Africans chose to occupy smallholdings wherever land was available.

We begin our analysis of the African response to their new and imperially imposed status with a review of the reactions of re-captives to detention of their slave vessel. Africans on board could at least hope that detention of their vessel would improve their prospects compared to those whose voyage was not interrupted. Uprisings against the prize crew during the several weeks’ journey to Freetown, St. Helena, or Simon’s Bay were not unknown. On the Ventura (ID 4031), detained off Quicombo in Angola en route to Rio de Janeiro, the original Brazilian cook – who was very likely himself a recently freed person and who spoke the language of some of the captives – persuaded the shortly-to-be-liberated men to revolt. Five of the prize crew were wounded and five captives were killed. Their motive, according to the naval officer in charge, was “an ardent desire to return to their own country,” a sentiment no doubt shared by almost all those found on detained vessels.Footnote ³⁵

Once before the court, however, captive people responded less predictably. The remarkable case of captives successfully questioning the court’s jurisdiction is described in Chapter 5. But the most startling evidence derives from L’Amélie (ID 34281), a slave vessel captured in the Caribbean and taken into Fort Royale, Martinique in 1822. The 214 survivors from Bonny were duly registered. Some of the disembarked refused or were too traumatized to speak at all, as was the case in all such tribunals.Footnote ³⁶ The document nevertheless allows us to come as close as will ever be possible to hearing the voice of Africans almost immediately after leaving their slave ship.

An Igbo scholar working with a native French-speaker has listened to the pronunciation of their responses to the clerk’s request for a name. He has found that some of the responses are not names at all, but rather segments of dialogue. These reflect the tensions between the colonial officials creating the record and the African subject, and perhaps more broadly in the Atlantic world context, between abolitionists and the people whose status the abolitionists were attempting to change. Thus, nearly 10 percent of the “names” taken down in Martinique in 1822 were not names but rather terms of anger, protest, and abuse. As translated by Chukwuma Azuonye, this segment of the mainly Igbo people on board responded with defiant challenges such as “whatever you write,” “do not oppress me” and “leave my name alone.” Then there were confrontational declarations like “abomination,” or “what are you talking about.” In Freetown, Africans sometimes responded with, “as you like” or the plea, “We beseech.”Footnote ³⁷ Another 300 refused to give any name at all. In the Martinique case there were common Igbo exclamatory metaphors of abuse such as “corpse” and “sheep,” as well as one vow of self-consolation, “cry no more.” Finally, in a startling two-century-old insight into the transatlantic slave system, which resonates today: one Igbo proclaimed, “undone by wealth.”Footnote ³⁸

Tribunals adjudicating captured slave vessels almost never granted those on board full and immediate freedom as we understand it today – except of course to the crew who were never punished. There were always compulsory terms of service attached to “Liberated African” status. These are discussed more fully below. Such “apprenticeships,” as they were termed, provided further indications of the re-captives’ relative agency. Initially, Liberated Africans were assigned to work or serve for a limited term or under a quasi-formal indenture. But most were eventually able to exercise some choice. Many exercised this choice before the expiry of the term. In Sierra Leone and Tortola, the colonial and imperial authorities initially attempted to keep track of apprentices. We know that many hundreds of re-captives absconded from their assigned masters.Footnote ³⁹ As already suggested, most such runaways would have boarded their slave vessel in regions adjacent to Sierra Leone and were attempting to return home.

Runaways probably explain the absence of communities in the colony associated with local Susu and Temne peoples (although there was a Krutown) – unlike most villages that were majority Igbo and Yoruba. The remoteness of the latters’ homelands helps to explain the dominance of the Yoruba and Igbo in Sierra Leone, especially the Yoruba. In addition, there is now a burgeoning field of study that explores the return of freed slaves to their point of origin, often after several decades. This literature focuses on the Iberian Americas, particularly Brazil and Cuba, but also on Sierra Leone where, by the 1830s, groups of Yoruba were able to contemplate returning to their homeland despite the risk of re-enslavement. Such individuals were clearly hoping to pick up the threads of their lives from which they had been summarily and violently torn. Yoruba people organized return ventures in both Brazil and Cuba, as well as Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁴⁰ As late as 1904 Cilucängy (aka Ward Lee, African ID 202544, Figure 7.10) then living in Trenton, South Carolina, and who had arrived on the Wanderer in 1858 (ID 4974) printed up and circulated a public appeal for funds that would enable his return to the Congo.Footnote ⁴¹

The policy of suppressing the traffic was meant to create freedom from slavery. So it is appropriate to evaluate how close the different streams of Liberated Africans came to experiencing full control over their own lives. We should take Frederick Douglass’ view of the effects of slavery as a starting point. After a rhetorically powerful indictment of the material impact of slave status on a man, Douglass zeroed in on the loss of freedom of action as by far the most important evil. Slavery, he argued, “leaves him to grope his way from time to eternity in the dark, under the arbitrary and despotic control of a frail, depraved and sinful fellow-man.”Footnote ⁴² In its immediate effects therefore the Liberated African and apprenticeship statuses imposed on former slaves in so many jurisdictions as part of abolition appeared no different to slavery from Douglass’ perspective. But there were nevertheless different levels of disabilities imposed. The discussion that follows here begins with the most restrictive outcomes, for example an enslaved person purchased by a Cuban sugar estate owner, through to the least restrictive: perhaps the options open to say a successful runaway.

As Table 7.1 shows, about one-third of the re-captive Africans were detained in coastal waters in the Americas, and most subsequently disembarked in the slave societies of the New World. Africans released from slave ships into Cuba and the early nineteenth-century US came closest to experiencing full chattel slavery. Their prospects were particularly bleak. Release from a slave ship meant little change in their circumstances.Footnote ⁴³ Their subsequent lives were not much different from what they would have been if sold into the slave markets of the Americas. Indeed, many of the re-captive people in Cuba were auctioned off. Thus, several hundred slaves detained by the US coastguards off the Florida and Georgia coasts in the late 1810s quickly became part of the burgeoning US slave population. The single exception was the case of the Phoebe [ID 36992], detained in August 1800, shortly after the second US slave trade abolition act of that year, with 118 Africans on board.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Phoebe was taken into Philadelphia by a naval officer, who happened to be an abolitionist. In accordance with the 1780 Pennsylvania Abolition of Slavery Act, all Africans on board would have been apprenticed to residents of the city. They were not re-enslaved, but the terms of their apprenticeship are unknown.Footnote ⁴⁵

The 27,538 re-captives landed in Cuba, after detention by either the British navy or the Cuban authorities, were assigned the promising title of negros emancipados. After British abolition of slavery took effect in 1834, 3,700 of them were dispatched from Cuba to British Caribbean colonies within months of disembarkation. There, they were subject to two- or three-year apprenticeships that, in accordance with the British Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, could not to be served on sugar estates. However, the unfortunate 24,000 who remained in Cuba found that their emancipado status was not only involuntary, but it was also subject to continuous renewal. Nor did it prevent the emancipados from being traded on the open market just like slaves. Thus, captives found on the first vessel brought before the Havana Court of Mixed Commission in 1824 were not freed in Douglass’ sense until 1869. Until 1835 these emancipados were employed in the Havana region and worked largely as domestics. But after this date many were sold to sugar estates. The 1835 changes thus eliminated the last remaining practical difference between emancipado and slave status.Footnote ⁴⁶

In Brazil, a similar scenario played out whereby fourteen-year apprenticeships that turned out to be renewable, eventually with no term limits whatsoever, despite Africans in this predicament frequently and unavailingly applying for “full freedom.” Brazilian re-captives were typically sold to private individuals and public institutions in and around Rio de Janeiro. However, unlike in Cuba, very few worked in the main export sector – coffee in Brazil’s case. They toiled, nonetheless, alongside enslaved people and their lives differed little from those of their workmates. Moreover, any children born to them had the same ambiguous status as their parents. In both Cuba and Brazil conditions for emancipados worsened over time. Cuban and Brazilian tribunals replaced the Mixed Commission Courts from the mid 1840s. Those adjudicated by the Mixed Commission Courts in the quarter-century after 1819 were more likely to be released from apprenticeship than anyone adjudicated later. The major difference between the Brazilian and Cuban administration of re-captives emerged in late 1853, when pressures from the British and the re-captives themselves resulted in a Brazilian decree allowing those who had served private hirers for fourteen years to petition for their “full freedom.” But for the next ten years there were no guarantees of the success of such petitions. Not until 1864 did the Brazilian government grant unconditional emancipation to Liberated Africans.Footnote ⁴⁷ Modest and hesitant as these measures were, it would be hard to imagine the Cuban slaveocracy instituting a similar policy. In summary, about 37,000 “Liberated” Africans (23,853 in Cuba, 10,833 in Brazil, and 2,500 in the US and Liberia), or about 15 percent of the overall total in Table 7.1, found that rescue from a slave ship gave them no more control over the balance of their lives than their compatriots had as enslaved people on plantations.

In addition to the US South, Cuba, and Brazil, a fourth region to receive re-captives who subsequently experienced severely encumbered terms of labor was South Africa’s Cape Colony. A total of 5,598 Liberated Africans arrived there after 1807, 2,100 down to 1816 and the rest after 1838, with the second group including some transferred from St. Helena. On the Cape, we see the familiar pattern of renewable fourteen-year apprenticeships, sale on open markets, and work alongside the legally enslaved. This was the only Old-World site where a Cuban-style pattern emerged.Footnote ⁴⁸

Faring only slightly better than those falling under the authority of plantation regimes were the 1,437 re-captives removed from Brazilian slave vessels by Argentinian privateers during the Brazil–Argentine War, 1825–1828. Independence for the Rio de la Plata region had brought with it abolition of the slave trade and a free womb law of 1813, which freed newly born children, but also created a liberto status that ensured obligations to former masters that were not abolished until 1853. All this group disembarked at Carmen de Patagones, in the modern province of Buenos Aires at the northern edge of Patagonia. Some were conscripted into the army on the spot and remained in Patagonia, but most were transferred north to the city of Buenos Aires. All were required to serve as “apprentices” for ten years. Despite the slave trade having been abolished, the privateers were able to sell their prizes on an open market. Moreover, apprenticeship terms were extended in some cases to 1853. Survivors of this long-drawn-out process were eventually able to embrace a fuller version of freedom than was possible in, say, Cuba, very likely because neither sugar nor coffee did well in Argentina.Footnote ⁴⁹

Liberated Africans detained by the French navy between 1814 and the 1838, and US cruisers in the late 1850s were similarly discharged to plantations. They found themselves in the plantation colonies of French Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, some of them working on sugar estates – in Guadeloupe on the plantations Grand Marigot, Petit-Marigot, Basse-Terre, and Pointe-à-Pitre. When the Igbo on board the L’Amelie (ID 34281) arrived in Martinique in 1822, two abandoned sugar refineries, Rivière-Monsieur and Morne Vanier, came back into production.Footnote ⁵⁰ A recent study tracks the fate of re-captives on two voyages taken into Guadeloupe in the mid 1820s showing the same pattern. The 207 on the Jeune Adèle (ID 2768) and another 100 on L’Anémone were first declared “released” before the decree was changed to require un engagement de travail forcé for seven years, which was then renewed upon expiry. Freedom for survivors was delayed until 1838. As the study’s author succinctly states, “ce group est dupé.”Footnote ⁵¹

The US began sustained efforts to capture slaving vessels later than other nations, but the outcome for Africans was no different. The detention of four large slave ships in the late 1850s, all bound for Cuba, resulted in the disembarkation of 1,541 re-captives in Florida’s Key West. Within weeks and in accordance with the 1820 Slave Trade Piracy Act, the survivors were returned to Africa. For Americans, “Africa” meant Liberia, but here, too, after a second transatlantic passage with further mortality, many re-captives found themselves apprenticed for seven to fourteen years to Liberian settlers, most of whom were former US slaves. In Sharla Fett’s words, “apprenticeships, agricultural and industrial labor, militia service, and Christian proselytization exposed re-captives to new forms of exploitation.” In a great double irony, some of the “apprentices” were put to work on estates in the small Liberian sugar-growing sector, with formerly enslaved persons being among the probable owners.Footnote ⁵²

The next step down in the severity ranking of encumbrances that Liberated Africans faced is a group that scholars typically ignore in this context and are not to be found in Table 7.1. The Dutch recruits for the East Indies and the 65,000 engagés that the French sent to their tropical colonies endured years of hard labor after their supposed liberation as explained earlier. The parallels with slave trading are obvious, yet the eventual outcome for survivors was significantly less onerous than for those serving out time as emancipados in Cuba and Brazil. Perhaps because the Dutch and the French had become sensitive to international criticism that the engagé system sustained a slave trade within Africa, the term limits of the service were respected in both jurisdictions. Significantly, 54 percent of Africans taken to Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyane elected to remain in their respective colonies at decision time, even though return voyages were available.Footnote ⁵³ These additional degrees of freedom available to engagés clearly separated them off from their counterparts in Brazil and Cuba, and those arriving in Guadeloupe in the 1820s.

Liberated Africans arriving in the British Caribbean colonies might plausibly be assigned to the next category closer to freedom in our range of outcomes. Table 7.1 reveals that British possessions received more re-captives than any other jurisdiction in the Americas. But this is not surprising, since British sugar colonies experienced the greatest declines in output because of imperial antislavery policies. Liberated Africans arrived in three ways. Column 3 of the table shows a total of 23,700 disembarking because of shipwreck or capture and then adjudication in one of the islands’ Vice-Admiralty Courts, mainly in the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Tortola.Footnote ⁵⁴ To these should be added the secondary arrivals in column 4 who were sent to the British Caribbean after first disembarking in other jurisdictions. Finally, fifteen thousand came in from Sierra Leone and St. Helena, and a further influx of four thousand from Cuba and Brazil as those slave societies rid themselves of unwanted “free” Blacks after the Mixed Commission Courts there had assigned them Liberated African status. All told, 51,000 re-captives came into the British Americas from a wide variety of locations in the North and South Atlantic after 1807, when the slave trade with Africa was no longer an option. Most joined the labor forces of Trinidad, Grenada, British Guiana, and Jamaica after the original enslaved laborers had abandoned their sugar estates in the wake of British abolition of slavery.

Almost all the re-captives involved in these secondary movements from Sierra Leone, St. Helena, Brazil, and Cuba, shown in column 4 of Table 7.1 arrived after the premature termination of the apprenticeship phase of British abolition of slavery itself in 1838. The crucial question is what choice did they have in making this move? A definitive answer is not possible, but as with the choice of master in the assignment of apprenticeship, volition was no doubt a rarity.Footnote ⁵⁵ Their situation was little different from the engagés that the French bought between 1853 and 1870, if not worse, given that no return passages were offered.Footnote ⁵⁶ While they were sent to the British colonies experiencing the worst labor shortages, such as Guiana, Trinidad, Grenada, and Jamaica, their contracts were usually for one year, though sometimes up to three, much shorter than in the French and Dutch cases, although 5,475 were forcibly recruited into the British military for longer terms.Footnote ⁵⁷ British policy toward the post-emancipation labor problems of its sugar colonies was usually aimed at increasing the colonial populations and thus putting downward pressure on wages, rather than overt coercion of individuals. On balance, those Liberated Africans sent to the British colonies were subjected to the second lightest post-emancipation set of labor encumbrances.

Was this apparently concerted movement of potential laborers to the British Caribbean an imperial government plot designed to offset the crippling effects of abolition of first the slave trade and then slavery in the British islands? To some extent, of course, it was. However, compared to the millions of enslaved people pouring into Brazil and Cuba, the Liberated African inflows into the British Caribbean after 1807 were numerically trivial and never came close to meeting the needs of British planters. The pre-1820 arrivals in Tortola and Trinidad did face fourteen-year apprenticeship terms and employers did attempt with limited success to renew these terms as expiry approached. But the stipulations in the 1807 abolition act and the March 1808 Order in Council that they should not work on sugar estates were largely respected. Most of the early arrivals began their new lives in colonies that lacked sugar plantations, such as Tortola and the Bahamas. They were able to form communities with obvious parallels to the villages in the Freetown hinterland. Given the severe labor shortages on the sugar estates, it is surprising not that so many Liberated Africans were dispatched across the Atlantic, but rather that the imperial government sent so few. In a counterfactual world, the British could have diverted all 125,000 Africans discharged from slave vessels at Sierra Leone and St. Helena to these colonies and subjected them to, say, a ten-year apprenticeship, thus emulating French policy toward engagés. Instead, they inaugurated what turned out to be a much larger and more expensive influx of more than a million indentured Asian laborers to Trinidad, Jamaica, Guiana, South Africa, and Mauritius that endured to 1918. Nevertheless, this inflow of indentured labor never allowed British planters to match the output of Cuban sugar plantations.Footnote ⁵⁸

Those emancipated in the Americas with the fewest restrictions were probably the more than 1,000 captives on four slave vessels disembarking in Haiti after shipwreck or capture by the Haitian navy between 1811 and 1820. But we cannot yet be certain given that we know nothing of their subsequent fates. It is entirely possible that they, too, found themselves apprenticed, but at least we can be reasonably certain that they would not have been employed on sugar estates as these had largely disappeared in the aftermath of independence in 1804.Footnote ⁵⁹ Haiti apart, not only were the Liberated Africans who first disembarked in the Americas not immediately freed, but many thousands died before they were allowed to claim the “full freedom” that appears in so many of their petitions to the authorities, particularly in Brazil. “Full freedom” may have come most quickly in Haiti, or in the marginal British colonies that lacked a sugar sector, but the typical experience was a delay in reaching this status that was measured in decades rather than years.

In the Old World, for those who were not dispatched to another continent or to the Cape Colony, prospects were somewhat brighter. Table 7.1 shows that 60 percent of the Africans found on slave ships disembarked in just two centers, Sierra Leone, and St. Helena, with Freetown the main recipient. In Sierra Leone and St. Helena most of the Liberated Africans who were not summarily dispatched to the British sugar colonies settled in villages in the Freetown hinterland, and in a community that evolved in Rupert’s Valley, St. Helena. The St. Helena government exacted corvée labor on the island for public works, comprising buildings and roads, or more accurately, trails. The British effectively evacuated most of the African occupants of this barren outpost between 1841 and 1867. Government-funded compulsory emigration to the British Caribbean and Cape Town occurred between 1841 and 1872, with terms limited to mostly one year and never more than three. The Rupert’s Valley settlement survived this policy with 500 inhabitants in 1875, but they could not sustain a permanent community. As the island’s economy declined, the re-captives voluntarily emigrated to Natal, the Cape, and Lagos. The side effect of these relocations was that no permanent Liberated African settlement took hold in St. Helena. The last surviving African re-captive died in 1929 and no African descent group exists today to take ownership of the recently excavated burial grounds.Footnote ⁶⁰

In the early days of African disembarkations in Sierra Leone the apprenticeships to which the colonial officials assigned the new arrivals reflected British expectations that they would learn skills that would prepare them for the labor market. The Freetown registers show that between 1808 and 1810, 519 mainly male Liberated Africans were assigned to masters with a wide range of occupations such as carpentry, fishing, masonry, and husbandry. But there were simply not enough skilled tradesmen in the small colonial economy to absorb the large number of arrivals. Within two years officials no longer even listed the occupation of the master. Children continued to be apprenticed or, in a rudimentary sense, educated, but for adults the “Disposal” column in the registers usually listed the armed forces or settlement in villages with the provision of rations for a limited term without specifying an occupation.Footnote ⁶¹ Peace in 1815 shut down army recruitment and left settlement in villages as the only long-run option. Similar patterns of village settlement occurred in the Bahamas with the encouragement of the colonial authorities at least after the early years. In Trinidad and Grenada, too, villages rapidly emerged once the required one-to-three-year term of service was complete. The options for Liberated Africans in most British possessions were absconding, the choice of many in Sierra Leone, or self-sufficiency through smallholding and some casual labor.

A small minority who became merchants in Freetown or clerics in churches or missions prospered, though some might consider them to have been “Bridgeheads of Empire,” a phrase John Darwin used to describe sub-imperial agents in the expansion of the British Empire.Footnote ⁶² Merchants buying and selling the trade goods auctioned off from captured slave ships were able to obtain property in Freetown. The 1853 assessment list of a new property tax reveals that well over half the wealthiest 194 owners were Liberated Africans.Footnote ⁶³ Emmanuel Cline, a Hausa, and Igbo, James Godfrey Wilhelm, had the eighth and ninth largest assessments. James Will, with the Yoruba name Kealoo, was both a successful shopkeeper and a Wesleyan preacher who left behind his own memoir.Footnote ⁶⁴ Examples of those who did very well are shown in Figure 7.4 and Figure 7.5, as well as the marble memorials in Freetown churches in Figure 7.6.Footnote ⁶⁵ Missionaries were sent as far afield as the Cameroons with the most famous, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, shown in Figure 7.4, an 1874 photograph taken on one of his visits to London.Footnote ⁶⁶ Equally well documented is Catherine Zimmerman Mulgrave, a Basel missionary, shown in Figure 7.5. Catherine was apprenticed out as a child to the Basel mission in Kingston after surviving a shipwreck and spent most of her adult life in Africa. The headstones, the expensively dressed principals, and the elegant furniture suggest a prosperity far beyond what their compatriots in the villages could have hoped for and, more important, has no parallel uncovered so far in the Liberated African communities that evolved in the Americas. This small group certainly came closest to meeting Douglass’ idea of freedom.

Figure 7.4 Catherine Zimmerman Mulgrave, seated third from the left. Photograph, 1873. Disembarked (shipwrecked) in 1833 from the Heroina (ID 41890) in Jamaica.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the Basel Mission Archives, QS-30.002.0237.02.

Figure 7.5 Samuel Ajayi Crowther (center) visiting the “Wilberforce Oak” (Keston, Kent) in 1873, along with leading members of the Church Missionary Society in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Crowther probably disembarked at Freetown, Sierra Leone, from the Esperanza Feliz (ID 2919) in 1822. Unknown photographer, Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries, UK/ © Wilberforce House Museum.

Reproduced with permission of Bridgeman Images.

Figure 7.6 Headstones of a prominent Liberated African in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Reproduced with the permission of Richard Anderson.

No images of the Sierra Leone villages or of their inhabitants survive, but for St. Helena we have a photograph of five who arrived on the island in 1850 on the Aventureiro (ID 4031) shown in Figure 7.7. They had embarked in Nova Redondo, a remote location lying between Luanda and Benguela. Traffickers tended to avoid what had been the major Portuguese slave-trading centers in the last years of the Brazilian slave trade.Footnote ⁶⁷ These Africans remained on St. Helena after the forced relocation of their shipmates and were photographed fifty years later. In the absence of images of Sierra Leonian villagers, we might take the St. Helena residents as surrogates. To these we can add a range of photographs of survivors of the last two voyages to disembark slaves in the US, freed by Union forces in the Civil War. They disembarked from the Wanderer (ID 4974) in 1858 and the Clotilda (ID 36990) in 1860. While they did not have formal Liberated African status, they are included here because they faced the same challenges as other formerly enslaved Africans.Footnote ⁶⁸

Figure 7.7 Liberated Africans in St. Helena fifty years on from their arrival on the Aventureiro (ID 4031) in 1850: www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/LS5GY4QR.

Image from Emma L. Jackson, St. Helena: The Historic Island from Its Discovery to the Present Date (New York, 1903), facing p. 264.

The gulf between Figure 7.4 through Figure 7.6 showing on the one hand, evidence of a bourgeois family and friends, and on the others, ranging from Figure 7.7 to Figure 7.13, needs no explication. It is what we would expect. More interesting are the differences between the former US slaves and the five in St. Helena. Several of the Wanderer survivors still lived on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River near Augusta, Georgia, at the beginning of the twentieth century, where they had disembarked from the steamer that had transported them from the Atlantic coast in 1858. The Africans in the US wear Sunday-best suits and dresses, neckties, eyeglasses, a watch and chain, and furnishings in Kossola’s (aka Cudjo) house that could not have been found in the average village hut and canvas-covered dwellings in Sierra Leone and St. Helena. Most freed in the US South were widely distributed, in the Wanderer’s case on plantations in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi, and after the Civil War some still lived on the plantations of Senator Ben Tillman, one of the instigators of the new 1895 Alabama constitution that effectively disenfranchised Black voters. The fate of the Clotilda Africans is better known, thanks to Sylviane Diouf’s careful work. Their purchase of land to build a house and grow produce followed on from their realization that returning to Africa was beyond their means. This group comprised not sharecroppers, but day workers at mills and shipyards in the Mobile area. The women sold produce grown on one- or two-acre lots.Footnote ⁶⁹ Income from these activities was modest, but as the photographs suggest it would have been greater than what was possible in either St. Helena or the infertile hinterland of Freetown.

Figure 7.8 Survivors of the Wanderer (ID 4974) photographed in 1908: Kacãngy (Ward Lee), Pucka Geata (Tucker Henderson), and Tabro (Romeo). Arrived at Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1858.

Source: Charles J. Montgomery, “Survivors from the Cargo of the Negro Slave Yacht Wanderer,” American Anthropologist, 10 (1908): 614.

Figure 7.9 A further survivor of the Wanderer (ID 4974) in 1908, disembarked at Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1858: Manchuella (Katie Noble).

Source: Charles J. Montgomery, “Survivors from the Cargo of the Negro Slave Yacht Wanderer,” American Anthropologist, 10 (1908): 612, 614.

Figure 7.10 Survivor of the Clotilde (ID 36990): Oluale (Charlie Lewis) disembarked at Twelvemile Island, Alabama, in 1860; photographed in 1900.

Source: The Erik Overbey Collection, University of South Alabama Archives, the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library. C-17165.

Figure 7.11 Survivors of the Clotilde (ID 36990): Abache (Clara Turner) and Kossola (Cudjo Lewis) disembarked at Twelvemile Island, Alabama, in 1860; photographed in 1912.

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Figure 7.12 Survivor of the Clotilde (ID 36990): Pollee Allen disembarked at Twelvemile Island, Alabama, in 1860; shown in c. 1912.

Source: Emma Langdon Roche Historic Sketches of the South (New York, 1914) facing p. 72.

Figure 7.13 Survivor of the Clotilde (ID 36990): Kossola (Cudjo Lewis) disembarked at Twelvemile Island, Alabama, in 1860; shown at home c. 1927.

Source: Erik Overbey Collection, University of South Alabama Archives, the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Other evidence of the relative well-being of peoples in the Old and New Worlds supports this assessment. Anthropometric data on heights of recruits in the Revolutionary Wars have shown that those born in the Americas had a close to 2-inch advantage in terminal height over their European-born adversaries that can only be attributed to better nutrition. The recent upload of the Oceans of Kinfolk database drawing on the maritime shipment of enslaved people from the Old South to New Orleans in the nineteenth century, along with the expansion of the African-Origins database allows us to make similar comparisons of African American men with Old-World Africans. Selecting only those males aged 25–40 measured between 1838 and 1860 (to eliminate the African-born from the New World group) produces substantial samples of 4,906 Africans and 3,027 African Americans. African Americans turn out to have been 2.4 inches taller than their African counterparts.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus the Old-New World difference for Europeans observed as far back as the US Revolutionary War, also held for African-born and African-descent peoples separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Given the fact that both groups came from the same regions of Africa and that they shared the same gene pool, the difference is likely explained by a higher-protein diet and perhaps the pathogen-killing winter on the North American mainland. The ex-captives in Sierra Leone and St. Helena did not have to endure the horrifying violence of US slavery and the somewhat less systemic violence and disenfranchisements of the post-reconstruction era. But this cannot alter the fact that African Americans were more nutritionally secure and probably better off materially than their African counterparts.

The striking, indeed, fascinating paradox to emerge from the foregoing is that the formerly enslaved facing the most long-run hardships in the form of systemic racism and denial of opportunities were those in the US South. Those with the fewest obstacles, given the disintegration of the apprenticeship system discussed below, were probably the inhabitants of the Sierra Leone villages. Yet materially, African Americans were clearly ahead.

Perhaps the more important point is that the anti-Black attitudes that enabled the onset of the transatlantic slave trade referred to in Chapter 1 and elaborated in my Rise of African Slavery book, continued into the nineteenth-century Atlantic and beyond. Emancipation did not change that. Even in the Caribbean, brown elites emerged over the largely Black non-elite. How, other than racism, can one explain that no ex-slave had the freedom of, say, the Irish immigrant fresh off the boat in New York or Quebec City, who were themselves hemmed in by the poverty common to immigrant communities?Footnote ⁷¹ Though they became full citizens of the US, African Americans were denied the rights that could be routinely claimed by European immigrants. In Eric Foner’s words, they had Nothing but Freedom and even that freedom was severely delayed.Footnote ⁷² Racist officials and lack of capital prevented Black people taking significant advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act and its giveaway of 500 million acres of land between 1862 and 1904.Footnote ⁷³ Nor could they move out of the South in significant numbers until the US land frontier had closed and European immigration was severely curtailed by World War I. Poor Whites in contrast could migrate to London, Quebec City, and New York, even in the teeth of anti-immigrant attitudes. Throughout the Americas, the huddled masses of Europeans were acceptable. The huddled masses of Africans shown in Figures 7.1 to 7.6 were certainly not. Migration to the more prosperous parts of the Atlantic world where slavery did not exist was an option for Irish and Jews, but not for Africans. Africans and African Americans were liable to expulsion from Brazil and massacre in Cuba, and in the US, subjected to systematic attempts to persuade them to move to Liberia. For this last group, the lack of equal opportunities could only have reinforced the desire of many to return to Africa.Footnote ⁷⁴

Like their counterparts in the Americas, Liberated Africans in the Old World had to navigate a wide range of encumbering terms of labor before exercising the options of a fully free person. The stipulations of the 1807 Act and the accompanying Orders-in-Council may have in theory applied equally to British territories and vessels across the Atlantic world. Nevertheless, the average experience of a re-captive disembarking in the Old World was markedly closer to authentic liberation than the options open to their counterparts in the Americas. While the Civil War did bring full freedom briefly in the US, post Reconstruction, and the virulent racism thereafter largely demolished it. The four recently published foundational works on slavery and re-captives in Sierra Leone and St. Helena by Richard Anderson, Philip Misevich, Maeve Ryan, and Andrew Pearson contain extensive discussions on the volition of Liberated Africans and, though written quite independently they come to remarkably similar conclusions, with which this author is in broad agreement. The kind of volition enjoyed by the Irish immigrant, however constrained, scarcely existed for Black people.Footnote ⁷⁵

To the British naval officers who took possession of crowded slave ships, the people below deck were effectively like children – wards of the state, the capture of whom would nevertheless earn the crew a bounty. Indeed, to a greater extent than at any point in the slave trade the occupants of a transatlantic slave deck were children, given that after 1807 42 percent of re-captives were under the age of 17.Footnote ⁷⁶ The analogy here is with the barges full of destitute and abandoned children that London Poor Law commissioners and magistrates dispatched to the Lancashire cotton mills in the late eighteenth century, or the Dr. Barnardo’s children that as late as the 1970s were deported from Britain to Australia or Canada in numbers comparable to African re-captives, and with a similar absence of consultation.Footnote ⁷⁷ We can assume that no representative of the British state asked any of these groups to which port, colony, or to which mill they would like to be sent, much less whether they wanted to be sent anywhere. Certainly, when African re-captives stepped off their vessel, none of them were consulted about what should happen next.Footnote ⁷⁸ An estimated 25,000 of those passing through the Liberated African yard in Freetown were females over 14 years of age. Colonial officials resorted to arranged marriages to reduce expenses. For a fee Sierra Leonians could effectively buy a spouse.Footnote ⁷⁹

To fully understand the plight of Liberated Africans we need to reckon with what freedom meant in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world and to consider the aspirations of both British officialdom and the Africans that fell at least temporarily within officialdom’s remit. We also need to recognize the difference between decisions made in London and how local circumstances determined how those decisions were implemented. The vast resources that the British, especially, and eventually other nations committed to suppressing the slave trade were comparable to what the British spent to free the slaves in their large empire in 1833. As already noted, famously the British paid out £20 million to slaveholders as compensation for the loss of their human property. They paid nothing at all to the slaves themselves despite the labor that had been forcibly extracted from both them and their ancestors.Footnote ⁸⁰

Of the two British policies, compensating former owners to free slaves and “freeing” people from slave ships, there can be no doubt which was most successful, even though both were detestable from the standpoint of modern values. Abolition of slavery was much the easier policy to implement because it did not require any international agreements. But what most modern commentary on the subject ignores is that property rights were central to the British economy. Without legislation that respected property rights – in other words paying the slave owners – abolition could not have become law when it did.Footnote ⁸¹ In the US case slaves were freed after a war that cost an estimated $12.74 billion in 1860 dollars plus three-quarters of a million deaths.Footnote ⁸² If, instead of war, the US had fully compensated slave owners, costs would not have exceeded $4 billion in 1861, assuming 4 million slaves valued at $1,000 each. Thus, the costs of “buying” the freedom of nearly 4 million people in 1861 would have been far less than the costs of the Civil War to both sides. While there was no serious question of war between Caribbean slave owners and the British state in 1833, the British House of Lords would not have passed the abolition bill without compensating the slave owners and thus respecting the cornerstone of capitalism. British slaves were required to work for their former owners as unpaid “apprentices” for six years, thereby paying for part of their freedom via unremunerated labor. This term was later reduced to four, and 667,000 enslaved persons in the British Empire (excluding India) became free in 1838.Footnote ⁸³

The long campaign to suppress the slave trade by comparison must be judged a failure. The British navy captured nearly sixteen hundred slave ships and the warships of other countries another 100, but after more than a half-century of naval patrols and blockades, slave ships in the single year of 1859 were still able to carry off 36,000 people from Africa. Worse, many thousands more were forcibly removed to Indian Ocean destinations in the four decades after the transatlantic traffic ended in 1867. Moreover, while the costs of the anti-slave trade campaign were nominally somewhat lower than the £20 million compensation to former slave owners, they were comparable. As already noted in Chapter 4, direct costs for the African squadron and payments to other countries in return for their cooperation amounted to £12.4 million.

But this figure does not include the thousands of lives lost. Liberated Africans drafted into the navy were among those killed in attempts to detain slave ships. Slave ship crews frequently resisted capture and both African captives and naval personnel were also victims in the resulting conflicts. Even after detention several instances occurred of captive slaver crews re-taking possession of their vessel and murdering the prize crews on the voyage to Sierra Leone or St. Helena. But the greatest source of mortality for both Africans and Europeans was undoubtedly disease. At one point in the 1840s the African squadron absorbed 15 percent of the navy’s ships and 10 percent of its personnel. Overall, about 50,000 seamen served off Africa in the nineteenth century, far more than if the only object had been to protect the small British commodity trade with the sub-continent. About 5 percent of them died each year, given that mortality was greater than on any other naval station. Enslaved people obviously suffered most, but among those opposed to the slave trade they were not alone.Footnote ⁸⁴ Also excluded from this and most other cost assessments are the heavy subsidies that the colony of Sierra Leone received from the British government, especially in the first two decades of its existence.Footnote ⁸⁵ Overall, suppressing the slave trade may well have been as costly as compensating British slave owners in 1833.

As with slavery itself, the traffic ended only when citizens in the receiving countries of the Americas decided it should: Brazil in 1851, the US at the outset of the Civil War, and Cuba (or at least metropolitan Spain) in 1867.Footnote ⁸⁶ Overall, the captured slaving vessels and raided barracoons contained an estimated 215,700 Africans, or approximately one in twelve of those embarked on the African coast for the Americas between 1809 and 1866.Footnote ⁸⁷ Even if all 215,700 had achieved freeperson status, and as we have seen most did not, the British anti-slave trade initiatives did not constitute an efficient way of spreading freedom, however defined, around the Atlantic world. The British could not suppress the Atlantic slave trade and historians have never recognized the full costs of their attempt to do so. Perhaps compensating British slave owners cost more than the largely unsuccessful attack on the slave trade, but possibly not after full allowance of lives lost.Footnote ⁸⁸

British anti-slavery policies, naval suppression, and abolition of slavery, together nominally freed 667,000 people on land and 215,700 on board slave ships and in barracoons. Two competing visions of what the nearly 900,000 people of African descent freed by these two British policies should be doing with their new lives were at play in the first half of the nineteenth century. Both visions, as we shall see, appear fundamentally flawed to modern readers. Further, both were internally inconsistent. Neither British officialdom, nor for the most part the newly freed, got what they wanted. However, both sides might have agreed that what was achieved was worth something given that 90 percent of those granted qualified liberation were able to avoid spending the balance of their lives working without pay and under duress on coffee or sugar plantations in the Americas. Such a fate would have been the inevitable consequence of a nineteenth-century world with no abolitionist intervention.

The official British position was broadly aligned with British public opinion, but was conceived by a few senior permanent officials in the Colonial Office and their abolitionist associates, albeit under pressure from the enslaved in the British Americas.Footnote ⁸⁹ Key figures were James Stephen the elder, his son, also James Stephen, and the latter’s associate, Henry Taylor. The first was a Member of Parliament, a lawyer, and widely believed to be the author of the Slave Trade Abolition Act, while the other two were permanent officials of the Colonial Office.Footnote ⁹⁰ On the other side lay the hopes and expectations of the formerly enslaved people who were directly affected by these policies. For the most part, their aspirations were expressed not via position papers and publications, but rather via their reactions to colonial policies as we have seen already in those absconding from apprenticeship obligations. Abolitionists expected the suppression of the slave trade to lead to improved treatment of the enslaved – as owners could no longer access Africa for replacement labor – and their eventual peaceful transition to free laborer status. In one important sense the failure of the abolition of the slave trade to achieve these aims precipitated the abolition of slavery itself. The British, as with all colonial powers, wished to see their colonies prosper, which for them meant at least maintaining colonial exports after abolition, and for this a labor force was essential. Most abolitionists, along with Enlightenment luminaries such as Adam Smith, believed free labor to be more productive than slavery. The nearly 900,000 formerly enslaved people impacted by the British, on the other hand, generally wished to avoid plantation labor, whatever the terms of labor. The only element common to both visions was that slavery, and the slave trade should disappear.

There can be no doubt that the authors of the 1807 Slave Trade Abolition Bill had no idea that, along with subsequent international treaties, abolition would bring more than 200,000 Africans into the British orbit, at least temporarily. Section VII of the British Slave Trade Abolition Act required that re-captives either enlist in the armed forces or be bound “whether of full Age or not, as Apprentices, for any Term not exceeding Fourteen Years.” Further, this arrangement should have “the same Force and Effect as if the party thereby bound voluntarily so enlisted or entered [the apprenticeship].” As its author made clear, the clause was intended to protect Africans; it nevertheless empowered the Government to establish ‘Regulations for the future Disposal and Support of such Negroes as shall have been bound Apprentices … after the term of their Apprenticeship shall have expired … as may prevent such Negroes from becoming at any Time chargeable’ to the public purse.”Footnote ⁹¹ An Order in Council issued in March 1808 laid out the guidelines. Masters and mistresses should be “prudent and humane” and should impart “trades, handicrafts or employment” that would enable the apprentices “to gain their livelihood … when their apprenticeship should expire.”Footnote ⁹² Military recruitment was to have priority, however, perhaps because the Act was passed in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Females could not be employed in plantation agriculture. Above all, re-captives should in “no case be liable to be sold, disposed of, treated or dealt with as Slaves.”

At a deeper level the motives behind Section VII were the same as those behind first, the British poor law; second, the truncated apprenticeship scheme that followed slavery in British territories; and third, various devices such as head taxes and restrictions on land use that were to evolve in the non-settler parts of all European empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Section VII of the Act was both a harbinger of and a direct link between domestic and overseas policies toward labor. The intention in all cases was to extract more labor service from people than they would have been prepared to offer voluntarily.

To understand this point, a brief digression on the evolution of free labor in this period is necessary. Much of literature on Liberated Africans has focused, appropriately enough, on the denial of freedoms after disembarkation. The first part of this chapter has shown that there is an abundance of evidence to support this approach.Footnote ⁹³ But there is a broader context, rarely considered, that provides some new insights. Between the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth centuries British elite attitudes to free labor had undergone a revolution that was fully reflected in the economic literature of the time. In the preindustrial era mercantilist intellectuals assumed that low wages were essential to the growth of exports, and that any increase in wages would reduce the supply of labor as workers found they were able to cover their basic needs with fewer hours of work. This phenomenon, termed “satisficing,” was famously illustrated half a century ago in Marshall Sahlins’ essay on the San people of the Kalahari entitled the “The Original Affluent Society.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The San, said Sahlins, were able to meet their basic needs in a few hours of work each day: their affluence was enjoyed via relaxation, not consumption. Accordingly, for the British elite, poor houses, vagrancy laws (including the whipping of vagrants), parish apprenticeships for children, and even slavery on occasion were deemed necessary to extract labor from the poorest segments of English society.

In the eighteenth century, elite attitudes began to shift toward approval of a high-wage economy as a culture emerged in which, as wages increased, consumers substituted merchandise, some of which was tropical produce, for leisure.Footnote ⁹⁵ Higher wages now elicited more labor, not less. Scarcely surprising, then, that British elites became convinced of the superiority of free over slave labor and that this helped enable abolition. Instead of slave owners and slaves, they now wanted employers and a contented though subservient laboring population that would supply the labor that the new economy needed. Consumption of consumer goods instead of leisure on the part of workers now made higher wages tolerable for the elite.

The experiences of former slaves in the nineteenth century Atlantic world need to be placed in this broader spectrum of relations between capital and labor. We must first recognize that from a global history perspective the concept of free labor was of recent origin and in the sense that we understand the term today, it was largely confined to parts of Western Europe. Within Africa, in particular, kinship ties defined an individual in economic as well as social terms, and to be free of such ties meant marginal status and increased risk of enslavement.Footnote ⁹⁶ Thus newly disembarked re-captives in Freetown quickly formed communities and kin groups that attempted to recreate such ties, though not always around their own ethnolinguistic groups. The possessive individualism, to use Macpherson’s terminology, that had evolved in parts of Western Europe was not part of the experience of the rest of the world.Footnote ⁹⁷ In Africa and elsewhere to be a full member of society meant having strong kinship and other communal ties, in other words to belong and to a degree be dependent on others. For British observers like Arthur Young, Patrick Colqhoun, and their contemporaries on the other hand, freedom meant the absence of such ties, leaving the individual free to enter European-style labor markets and respond to wage signals. This was why Young could claim that the 95 percent of the world’s population outside Europe and North America was unfree though, as this discussion suggests, that does not mean that he saw them all as enslaved.

The British state’s position was captured by mercantilist Sir James Steuart’s aphorism in 1767 that to increase national product people should “be slaves to others or slaves to want” with, in the latter case, an increase in consumption leading to a greater work effort and more hours offered in the labor market.Footnote ⁹⁸ By the early nineteenth century being “slaves to others” was becoming increasingly unacceptable, which meant that the state had to fall back on other measures to ensure adequate “voluntary” labor. These included attempting to limit access to land in those colonies that had an open land frontier, including several slave colonies in the Americas. In summary, for those at the low end of society. elites wanted an environment where, in another epigram – this one by an abolitionist – “fear of want had replaced dread of the lash.”Footnote ⁹⁹

At root this view was internally inconsistent in that while it diverted people from slavery, the freedom it offered was predicated on freed people behaving in ways most of them had little interest in adopting. It allowed people to avoid plantation labor, but it also systematically attempted to restrict their freedom to choose alternatives. In fact, British anti-slave trade policy was shot through with contradictions. In addition to restricting the freedom of Liberated Africans, it was inconsistent with the emerging international law of the seas. The British detained and convicted many slave vessels in violation of that law given that the Palmerston and Aberdeen Acts of the 1840s allowed British warships to detain slave vessels belonging to Portugal and Brazil on the high seas. Such actions would have been casus belli if the detained ships had belonged to the US or the French.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Before addressing the inconsistencies of the Liberated African standpoint, it is worth asking whether the “modernization” of the British labor force (substituting the purchase and consumption of goods for leisure) was as complete as Arthur Young believed. The largest early mass movement for domestic reform in Britain was Chartism, the goal of which was working-class suffrage. But Chartism also embraced a Land Cooperative scheme to settle workers on small plots of land and reduce their dependence on waged labor. In the US the land frontier remained open until the 1890s, but until the Homestead Act of 1862 the terms on which free land was made available were very restrictive. Nevertheless, Eric Foner has argued that working-class support of the Republican Party was based in part on the expectation that Republicans would reduce these restrictions and make land more accessible. In effect members of the working class saw their waged work in the eastern US as a stepping stone to accessing this “free” western land.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Jeffersonian vision of a nation of small farmers also comes to mind.

There are obvious parallels here with aspirations of the formerly enslaved, though historians have failed to make them. The well-known – and never widely implemented – forty acres and a mule policy that emerged from a meeting in January 1865 between Black ministers and the Union leaders General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton certainly reflected like-minded aspirations.Footnote ¹⁰² Like many formerly enslaved people, the survivors of the Clotilda, the last slaving vessel to disembark captives from Africa in the US, sought to buy small landholdings in Mobile when they were freed in 1865 five years and six months after their arrival. Kossola (aka Cudjoe Lewis), interviewed between 1927 and 1931, explained how his community felt in 1865. “We ain in de Affica soil no mo’ we ain’ gottee no lan.” Consequently, he continued, “We workee hard and save, and eat molasse and bread and buy de land from de Meaher (their former part-owner, Timothy Meaher). Kossola himself received 1.5 acres. Almost a century earlier, a captive called Broteer Furro, better known as Venture Smith, purchased his first 26-acre parcel of land in Connecticut and owned a hundred acres at his death in 1805. After buying his freedom he became one of the most successful Africans in the ante-bellum US but in no sense could he be considered wealthy.Footnote ¹⁰³

A further example of the desire for land by the newly liberated is labor’s large-scale abandonment of plantations in the British Caribbean when the forced apprenticeship period ended prematurely in 1838. Wherever possible former slaves opted to set up smallholdings on unoccupied land rather than work for wages on sugar estates. In Sierra Leone the economic base of the numerous villages established by Liberated Africans was also smallholding, with any modest surplus being sold in Freetown or the export market that lay beyond.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A similar drive for land in Europe generated poverty in rural Ireland, and a peasant economy in rural France that inhibited industrialization until late in the nineteenth century. Across many cultures and societies in the wider Atlantic world, workers saw possession of smallholdings as a bulwark against waged labor and a guarantee of a measure of independence. But of course former slaves always had far fewer options than the rising number of free-labor factory workers in North America and Western Europe. Nevertheless, an examination of the goals of the two groups does reveal some unexpected similarities.

Haiti was a smaller version of Ireland in the Americas, though crucially without the migration option. Its 1805 constitution may have banned slavery and racial discrimination, but it unfortunately provides the best-known example of autarkic tendencies among those pushing back against the drive to create a “contented though subservient laboring population” in the era of abolition. The Haitian elite attempted to revive the plantation economy in the early years of independence. In the aftermath of the revolution, sugar output nevertheless almost disappeared, and production of coffee, indigo, and other tropical exports plummeted. The refusal of France to engage with the new state until its former colony paid out crushing reparations to former slave owners of course greatly exacerbated the situation. Yet the pattern was set before the reparation payments began in 1826. In the absence of a bigger land frontier, average plot sizes in Haiti rapidly diminished as the population grew, and by any measure of human welfare, living standards steadily declined.

Over the same period Sierra Leone also fared badly. Two thousand formerly enslaved migrants arrived in Sierra Leone from Britain, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia between 1787 and 1800, followed by nearly 100,000 from other parts of Africa after 1807. Nearly all who stayed pursued the smallholding option, though in contrast to Haiti this first British African colony, established in 1807, began with significant imperial subsidies, rather than crippling reparation claims imposed by their former exploiters. Also relevant here is that the West African settlement began life with a much weaker natural resource base than Haiti. Nevertheless, in Sierra Leone, as in Haiti, population grew more rapidly than output. These patterns probably have something to do with modern income levels. In 2020, GDP per capita in current prices was $509 in Sierra Leone, and $1,272 in Haiti.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Consistent with the argument earlier in this chapter, jurisdictions where the smallholding option was difficult to establish have done better in generating welfare gains for their populations over the years. By 1807 Antigua, Barbuda, and Barbados had no unoccupied land available for former slaves. While we must be careful about any backward projection from contemporary data, it cannot be completely irrelevant that modern per capita GDP averages $14,500 in these islands. Jamaica was the major British Caribbean case that combined significant unoccupied land that would support a peasant economy with only minor inflows of Asian labor to former slave plantations. That island’s modern per capita GDP of $4,665 is closer to Haiti/Sierra Leone levels than to those of Antigua/Barbuda and Barbados.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In short, smallholding has not provided a path to development anywhere in the world. If in the 1865 US South the policy of forty acres and a mule had been implemented, it may have done wonders for Black people in terms of social justice, political power, and, just maybe, the racist attitudes they faced during Reconstruction and beyond, but it would not likely have provided a route to higher incomes.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of small independent landowners was always likely to be a developmental dead end.

Was there a homesteading option for the British and the eastern US working classes? For the former, Australia, Canada, and the American West certainly provided opportunities to abandon or curtail their engagement with the wage economy. The 1862 Homestead Act allowed for 160 acres per individual (Black or White) under strict provisions on occupancy and improvement. In the bigger picture, even a limited and distant homesteading option has typically acted as a safety valve en route to increasing incomes. For developed countries, including the UK, US, and in the EU, agriculture has experienced dramatic productivity gains, but these advances have occurred behind complex systems of protective subsidies, quotas, and tariffs that have inflated the size of their agricultural sectors and raised farm incomes at the expense of non-farmers. Such barriers should not prevent us from recognizing that a universal underlying feature of sustained long-run economic development has been the movement of labor out of the agricultural sector.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Hence the central tension in the aspirations of Liberated Africans. The contradiction was as striking as for the English Chartists’ land-bank lottery, and those Irish immigrants that returned to Ireland to buy a cow or a piece of land.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Except for the Mende, Susu, Temne, and other Upper Guinea peoples, returning home was not possible in West Africa, at least initially. Vibrant communities sprang up in the Freetown hinterland, as well as Grenada, Trinidad, and the Bahamas in the Americas. In each location, individuals forged new ethnolinguistic identities. Nevertheless, the aspirations of ex-slaves were as internally inconsistent as were the Liberated African policies of Western, and especially British, governments. As the winners of the Chartist land lottery and the returning Irish immigrants discovered, smallholding allowed them to avoid the labor market, but it was not the road to prosperity.

Faced with the prospect of large numbers of former slaves of African descent, the question for the British state, however misguided, was whether ex-slaves would behave like contemporary British workers, or even the poorest elements of preindustrial society. Maeve Ryan has pointed out that none of the Wilberforce generation of abolitionists – the Clapham Sect luminaries, together with Henry Brougham, Stephen Lushington, and the Quakers who initiated the 1783 Anti-Slavery Committee – believed that “uncivilized” Africans could not be given the same rights as, say, the European poor.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Nevertheless, the position papers in BNA CO318/117 referred to earlier are strikingly free of the overt racist attitudes that were shortly to re-emerge in the mid-century scientific racism literature, the best-known public face of which were the noxious writings of Thomas Carlyle.Footnote ¹¹¹ But the specter of the backward-bending supply curve for labor certainly hovers over the discussions in the Colonial Office of 1832–1833 as the British prepared to abolish slavery. While astonishing to modern eyes in its naivete and injustice, the Colonial Office and the domestic and international courts saw apprenticeship primarily as a way of making the former slave pay for at least part of his or her own freedom. But it was also conceived as a way of repairing the perceived damage that slavery had inflicted on the individual’s work ethic and thus it somehow prepared the apprentice for wage earning. Most slave owners, of course, were more likely to see apprenticeship as a way of prolonging, or even reinstituting slavery.Footnote ¹¹²

British policy toward Liberated Africans and emancipated laborers was a success only in that it prevented tens of thousands of Africans from working on plantations in the Americas. Its broader aim of shaping a quiescent wage-seeking labor force was a failure. Padraic Scanlan describes the “liberal empire” that emerged from emancipation as “built on the same greed that made the slave empire” that had preceded it.Footnote ¹¹³ But if greed was so dominant, why did the British spend an unnecessary £32 million on destroying slavery and the slave trade? Why did the British destroy their own plantation colonies and those of other nations – instead of absorbing them into their own empire as they had done throughout the previous century and a half? And why did David Brion Davis spend a lifetime of brilliant scholarship wrestling with such issues? Does singling out profit maximization even get us out of the starting gate of historiographical explanations? “Greed” alone would have meant the continuing involvement of all Atlantic powers in slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century, a much simpler and less expensive British foreign policy, booming tropical colonies in the British Empire, and in the US, of course, no Civil War.

On the side of the exploited, Africans and people of African descent were the only group with ready access to the smallholding option, even though as we have seen Europeans also had an interest in avoiding wage labor. Unfortunately, the lands available to former slaves, whether Liberated Africans or those freed in the Americas as slavery came to an end, were not available in large enough units, nor were they of the best quality. Within the British sphere, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, and Guiana saw the best land remain in the hands of Whites and free Coloreds.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Sierra Leone simply had poor natural resources.

The failure of British policy did not stop officials blaming the newly liberated. A stipendiary magistrate sent out from Britain to oversee the apprenticeship system between 1834 and 1838 in Grenada summed up the British standpoint toward its mid-century tropical Atlantic possessions. Africans, he said, sought to avoid the “control of authority and to work at their own pleasure.” A few years later, with scientific racism on the rise the lieutenant-governor of Grenada wrote:

Outside the British possessions, Haiti came to face the then contemporary Irish problem of the diminishing size of landholdings. The freed population of the US South were forced to deal with the end of reconstruction, though as already noted forty acres and a mule was not likely to have led to prosperity. European labor was tried in the tropical empire – Cornish miners were sent to the Gold Coast, workers from villages on the English estates of aristocratic planters were persuaded to labor in Jamaica in the 1840s, Canary Islanders were shipped to Cuba in the post-abolition years. But in the British sphere, at least, it was only indentured Asian labor that prevented the complete collapse of the plantation sector in the face of Cuban and Brazilian competition. In the early twentieth century, in another great irony, the poverty of autarky and the diminishing size of smallholdings drove Haitians to return to work on sugar, and eventually coffee plantations, a century after their predecessors had liberated themselves from the hell of St. Domingue’s cane fields. The workers were seasonal and this time the plantations were Cuban, not French.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Conclusion

As the above quotes of officialdom indicate, identifying the differing and internally inconsistent worldviews of both the European state and the masses of Black, White, and Asian migrants on the move in the post-1800 world, will only get us so far in understanding the outcome of suppressing slave trading and slavery. The missing element is racism. To return to Figure 1.1, a sense of difference from others seems as innate to humanity as the need to reproduce and the pursuit of self-interest. The sense of difference from others shaped much of the premodern world discussed in the opening chapter of this book. Today, difference between insiders and outsiders in the form of bloodlines and religion are no longer the basis of citizenship in the developed world. Difference is no longer enshrined in laws and constitutions, except in the case of Israel, some Islamic states, and increasingly India. But in the nineteenth century constructions of racial difference and the discrimination based on these determined the fate of Liberated Africans and, for many, continue at the informal level to mold our social interactions in both developed and developing worlds.

No one got all they wanted from the freeing of enslaved people that perhaps constituted the major social revolution of the nineteenth century Atlantic world. Governments, plantocracies, and captains of industry faced wage rates higher than would have been the case if all potential workers had been able to move freely, without anti-Black prejudice. Cuba drew on slave labor until 1886, Brazil until 1888, and British plantation owners were unable to compete. The combined sugar output of Trinidad, and British Guiana, colonies now forced to draw on Asian contract workers, amounted to no more than 40 percent of Cuban output at mid-century. Jamaica’s sugar exports did not recover to pre-abolition levels of output until the 1930s, and today buffeted by EU protective policy on sugar beets, it is once more in serious decline.

In the US, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 finally abolished most restrictions on the origins of immigrants. In the following half-century, the African-born component of the US population increased by 2.1 million, or five-times total arrivals in the 189-year-long era of the slave trade to the US. As already noted, the Irish and eventually poor Eastern European Jews were acceptable, but destitute Liberated Africans were not, and until 1920, nor were significant numbers of African Americans. The fifteen hundred occupants of the slave ships disembarked in Key West in 1860 were returned to Africa as quickly as possible. None of the other numerous and relatively prosperous countries offered to take in the people that the US rejected. On this score African immigrants were in the same situation as Haitians. Millions of Germans and Eastern Europe emigrants boarded ship in Bremen, headed for ports in the United States. Given that the distance from Sierra Leone to New York City was only slightly greater than from Bremen to New York, the influx of high-achieving African and Caribbean immigrants into the US that has occurred recently could have got underway long before 1965 if economics alone had been the only determinant of immigration policy. Euro-American conceptions of race that permitted this form of intensely discriminatory behavior toward migrants from Africa were present at the inception of Atlantic slavery. But four centuries later at a time when aliens arriving from a wide range of European countries were automatically and unthinkingly accorded free status, severe anti-Black attitudes clearly remained in place long after the abolition of slavery. Such attitudes reflect a near-universal pattern observed by Orlando Patterson when he pointed out that in very few slave societies in history has emancipation brought full freedom to the formerly enslaved people. In most instances, the former master continued to hold residual rights and the stigma of descent from slave status persisted for several generations. In this respect, societies in the Americas are no different to those in modern Africa.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Opportunities open to black and white migrants after 1800 were not the same, and nor were those open to migrant Asian workers. Between the independence of Haiti in 1804 and the ending of slavery in Brazil in 1886 about 9 million people of African descent had to find some way of supporting themselves independently of their former owners. Meanwhile, approximately 13 million Europeans and 0.5 million Asians arrived in the Americas after extensive transoceanic journeys. Labor markets in the Americas (plus some in African enclaves such as Sierra Leone and the Cape of Good Hope) could have been thereby inundated with millions of potential laborers at a time when most polities in the Atlantic world still had an open land frontier. Such a resource frontier offered the possibility of a landholding alternative to waged labor, but the reality was that the good land was open only to White people.

If land-labor ratios and transportation costs had constituted the only shaping influence over the decisions of these 22 million Black and White people on the move, then the Atlantic world would have looked very different in 1880 from the historical reality. A large segment of the 4 million freed slaves in the US would have taken advantage of the Homestead Act and moved west, instead of delaying their exodus from the South until World War I, by which time the land frontier in the US had been closed for two decades. Very few Liberated Africans would have chosen to relocate in the subtropical Americas, the Mascarene Islands, and Dutch Indonesia, much less Patagonia. The population of Sierra Leone would have been two or three times larger in 1880 if the 50,000 re-captives forced to leave for the Americas had remained in the colony and the disastrous satellite settlement in the Gambia, launched from Freetown, had never occurred.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The reason these relatively benign patterns remained as mere counterfactuals leads us to the second shaping influence over the decisions of 9 million people of African descent: the failure of societies to accept Liberated Africans and other formerly enslaved as full citizens.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Initially for some it did seem that full freedom might happen. Reconstruction in the US moved former slaves closer to full membership of society than anywhere else in the Americas, but was soon superseded by the Jim Crow laws and two or three thousand lynchings, 95 percent of which killed Black people. In Cuba, likewise, the status of former slaves improved after abolition in 1886, and racial discrimination was barred in the 1902 constitution, but several thousand Blacks were nevertheless massacred ten years later, an event that “damages forever the myth of Cuban racial equality.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The many thousands of libertos freed gradually in Portuguese Angola experienced first disenfranchisement and eventually the imposition of forced-labor systems later in the nineteenth century. Only Blacks in Brazil escaped direct violence. Such problematic transitioning from slavery to freedom was clearly not confined to the early nineteenth century.

The above discussion leaves us with a paradox. Full citizenship, at least in terms of voting rights and equal economic opportunity existed nowhere in the mid nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Nevertheless, the 13 million European emigrants enjoyed more legal protections and experienced far less overt discrimination than did the 9 million formerly enslaved people, or the 1 million or so Asian migrant workers. Not all the 24 million (13 million White migrants, 9 million former slaves, 2 million Asians) affected by uprooting or changes in status might have opted for forty acres and a mule if offered, but perhaps the majority had reservations about competing for wages in a labor market. The paradox is simply that, as the Irish and Haitian cases suggest, small landholdings or tenancies might have brought a measure of independence, but they could not bring enduring, much less increasing, prosperity. Imperial elites, for their part could not get the labor they needed without shutting down, or at least restricting access to alternatives to the free labor market – chief of which was land on which to settle.

Clearly, then, neither of the two visions of post-slavery society came to predominate. Exports in most of the sugar-producing colonies collapsed in the aftermath of abolition, and very few Africans released from slave ships or emancipated worked as contract laborers on sugar estates for more than three years. Most managed to avoid even that. It can be argued that the 900,000 people of African descent perhaps did more to shape the post-emancipation economic and social environment of the tropical colonies than did abolitionists and the British state. But freed people still faced considerable hardships and huge disruptions to their lives. They got little help from the colonial powers that had enforced their new status.

I have drawn here on Winthrop Jordan’s idea of an “unthinking decision” on the part of the English to buy slaves in Africa and put them to work in the Americas. If economics alone had shaped the search of European imperialists for labor at the outset of their respective conquests of the Americas, then the enslaved would have comprised European outcasts – condemned criminals, heretics, sexual deviants, and prisoners of civil and possibly international wars. The cost advantages of enslaving and dispatching this group over the expensive alternative of going to Africa are obvious. Instead, Europeans limited their coercion of other Europeans to indentured servitude. This, then, was far from a perfect labor market where wages reflected productivity and people responded to wage signals. Racism against those with Black skin informed the “unthinking decision” at the onset of transatlantic slavery. That same racism also shaped the policies of European imperialists and North American policymakers in the aftermath of the dismantling of Atlantic slavery nearly four centuries later. The erosion of such explicit discrimination gathered pace in the twentieth century. Since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the anti-Black manifestations that restricted opportunities for freedmen are no longer central to immigration policy. Voting rights appear to be surviving attempts to impose racially driven restrictions, and the minority component of the various societal elites is slowly growing. Nevertheless, racism is still manifest in the various indicators of well-being such as income, life-expectancy, prison populations, and educational opportunities. Major Black–White discrepancies in these vital social measurements live on and, given that we should all have access to the same opportunities share the genetic base of Homo sapiens, what other explanation can there be apart from racism?Footnote ¹²¹ Frederick Douglass’ idea of freedom as expressed in 1845 implicitly assumed equality of opportunity. Even though, as argued in Chapter 1, we must all be descended from Black people, that has not yet happened.