1 - Precedents: The “Captured Negroes” of Tortola, 1807–22

Summary

Ali was born in the Senegal River Valley sometime around 1800. While still a boy, he was sold into Atlantic slavery and placed aboard a brig bound for Charleston, South Carolina. But Ali never reached North America. As the vessel approached the West Indies, it was captured by the HMS Cerberus and the hired schooner Hell Hound and escorted into the nearest British port as a prize of war. Because Ali was landed after the passage of the 1807 Abolition Act, he was not sold as a slave but rather was “apprenticed” to a local politician for the use of his daughter, along with three “countrymen” from the Nancy, John Henry, Angella, and Thomas. Ali was thus among the first of tens of thousands of people who, over the course of the nineteenth century, would be placed into the category of “liberated Africans.”

According to the best available information, “prize negroes” and “captured negroes,” were the first terms used to refer to “liberated Africans” in various locales across the globe. This new identification given to people taken from slave ships during the era of abolition was first used not in a major plantation colony like Jamaica or in a colony founded on antislavery principles like Sierra Leone, but in Tortola, a small island with a marginal and declining slave-based cotton and sugar economy located in the British Virgin Islands. And, at a time when Portugal (and lately Great Britain) dominated the slave trade, the first “captured negroes” were taken not off one of their vessels but off a US-based vessel, the Nancy, which carried seventy captives across the Atlantic. Unlikely as these beginnings may seem, the Tortola episode reveals that many of the questions regarding liberated Africans—of legal status, labor, rights, and integration into society—were initially asked and answered at Tortola in the years between 1807 and 1815. In some areas, important precedents with wide-ranging applications were set.

It would be a mistake, however, to fetishize Tortola's first-mover status. Most of the decisions taken at Tortola were predictable responses to policies emanating from Westminster. Officials in other British possessions, such as Sierra Leone, responded to the same directives in ways that were broadly similar to the actions taken at Tortola.