The Amistad Rebellion is usually remembered as the only instance in which a US court sent re-captured slaves back to Africa. Yet as Sharla Fett shows in her new book Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), the Amistad case is not exactly unique. By using the stories of re-captured Africans in detention in places like Key West, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. Fett examines how pro-slavery and abolitionist factions used re-captives to argue their respective cases. She also examines the lives of re-captured slaves sent to “back” to Liberia, a place they had never been. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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