Recaptured Africans makes a critical intervention into scholarly debates on the illegal slave trade, the United States slave trade suppression policy, the politics of Atlantic emancipation, and the social history of Liberian recaptives. In this book, Sharla Fett reframes the conversation by moving away from maritime and legal history to examine the meaning of ‘recaptivity’ for survivors of the middle passage (4–5). As individuals captured and enslaved aboard illegal slavers, then seized by the U.S. Navy, and subsequently held in federal custody prior to removal, Fett shines a light on what it meant for recaptives to endure a ‘dangerous liminal space between enslavement and an uncertain future’ (15).

Documentary evidence about the illegal slave trade articulates the perspective of slavers, naval officials, plantation owners, lawmakers, pro-slavery advocates, and abolitionists rather than that of the enslaved. Fett analyzes racialized representations in print culture which she identifies as ‘slavery tourism’ and which was produced by curious observers who wrote about the arrival of Africans to Charleston, South Carolina aboard the illegal slave ship the Echo (1858), and in Key West, Florida aboard the ships Wildfire, William, and Bogota (1860). The author demonstrates that pro-slavery advocates used the presence of recaptives to argue for the continuation of the slave trade and unfettered access to African slave labor for the expansion of the plantation economy in the U.S. south.

Fett broadens this analysis of the illegal slave trade and the perspectives of slavers and government officials by examining the mass distribution of illustrated weeklies in the Anglo-American press of the 1950s. National publications disseminated racialized and exoticized caricatures of Africans ‘in need of white rescue’ (15). These images, she suggests, relegated recaptives to human commodities in the American mind, while they also solidified the notion that native-born Africans had to be removed from the U.S. body politic. In Chapter Four, Fett contrasts the depiction of recaptives in illustrated newspapers with African American activists’ arguments and actions on behalf of recaptives. Unlike the proslavery rhetoric that circulated in Charleston, African American abolitionists like Frederick Douglass argued against the illegal slave trade. In August 1860, Presbyterian minister James W.C. Pennington met with the three young recaptives from West-Central Africa who were detained in a Manhattan jail. His advocacy on behalf of recaptives in Manhattan and Key West, Fett argues, countered the narrative promoted by slave trade revisionists that called for the removal of enslaved people in the United States to Liberia through the American Colonization Society. In analyzing the African American response, Fett makes the case that protest against the illegal slave trade shaped the African American concept of human rights in the mid-nineteenth century.

In taking up renewed interest in emancipation in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, Fett distinguishes the condition of recaptivity from that of liberated Africans. Unlike liberated Africans, recaptives went through the middle passage only to again experience death, loss, suffering, containment, and racialization in federal detention camps in southern U.S. ports. Fett builds on interpretations of the middle passage and saltwater slavery by Vincent Brown (2008) and Stephanie Smallwood (2007), as well as sociologist Orlando Patterson's concept of slavery as social death (1985). Fett agrees with Brown's assessment that enslavement did not serve as the end point but rather the point of departure for generating a ‘politics of struggle’ for slave ship survivors (10). The author, however, suggests that recaptives faced the reality of death and loss as they struggled to stay alive in U.S. detention camps, through the return travel to West Africa, and as apprentices in Americo-Liberian households. Chapter Five provides key data on place of embarkation, seizure of slave ships, mortality rates, and recaptive transport to Liberia that illustrates the reality of death, separation, dislocation, and alienation for recaptives along each phase in the journey.

Fett also emphasizes the role of age over ethnic origin in forging shipmate bonds. Her analysis of demographic data and naval records demonstrates the relative youth of the majority of the recaptive population and the way in which the few elder women and men became caretakers of the young. The story of ‘the headwoman Bomba’, who led other girls and women aboard the Castilian in organizing burial rites for a young girl who perished en route to Monrovia, offers evidence of African funerary practices whereas little other documentation of such practices exists for the middle passage (143). Recaptured Africans thus offers new insight into the nature of shipmate relations as they developed during the passage from America to Africa.

Africanists will find particularly useful the last chapter of Recaptured Africans, which treats the nature of the recaptive experience and the making of Congo identity in the Liberian colony. Recaptive identity solidified in Liberia under the ethnonym ‘Liberian Congoes’. Fett asserts that this identity emerged as a result of the struggle between dependency and autonomy as U.S. policy relegated recaptives to agricultural or industrial labor or militia service, or placed them as the wards of Christian missionaries, while free and manumitted black Americans used the presence of this group to distinguish themselves and establish their assimilation. At the same time, Fett contends, recaptives consolidated their own bonds around the category of Liberian Congoes as a strategy for survival in a new and unfamiliar land. Fett relates an American Colonization Society (ACS) report of the wedding between shipmates Kandah and Kabendah. Married four months after their arrival in Monrovia in a ceremony attended by their shipmates, the U.S. agent for recaptured Africans and the Methodist clergy who officiated the ceremony introduced the couple by their newly acquired English names, which symbolized the promise of Liberia's civilizing mission. This chapter also illuminates how apprenticeship operated as a strategy for shifting relations between former slave owners and slaves in European colonial towns of nineteenth-century Africa. Fett's focus on Liberian Congo, moreover, shifts attention away from the elite subjects of Africa's Atlantic towns such as the métis of Senegal or the Krios of Freetown and shines needed light on the subaltern populations who played key roles in establishing West Africa's colonial towns at the moment when the Atlantic slave trade came to an end and as western imperialism expanded.

In sum, this work delves into critical issues for students and scholars of comparative slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, emancipation in the Atlantic World, and the slave trade in U.S. History. Although key chapters focus on the African experience in captivity and in U.S. detention, most of the study is dedicated to the position of U.S. policy makers and debates between slave trade revisionists and abolitionists in the U.S. Readers of this journal may wish for more in-depth analysis of the Liberian context. Nevertheless, Fett makes the most of available sources to offer new ways of thinking about shipmate relations, the experience of receptivity for enslaved Africans, the making of new African identities through the recaptive experience, and how the recaptive condition influenced the making of colonial Liberian society. For these reasons, Recaptured Africans stands out as a major contribution to knowledge about Africa and the U.S. in the nineteenth century.