Identity, Mobility, and the Risks of Illegal Enslavement: Africans in the Old South

In the 1830s a free African merchant named Sack N’Jaie was kidnapped on the coast of Sierra Leone and sold into slavery in Mobile. Charles Smith, a free African sailor who had himself been illegally enslaved in Old Calabar and freed when British cruisers captured the Spanish slaver, wound up on that same Mobile plantation and heard Sack N’Jaie’s story. Eventually, Smith was freed, resumed his career as a sailor, and traveled to Sierra Leone to inform Sack N’Jaie father, Pharaoh  Moses, that his son was being held in Mobile. His case was brought before British officials in his native Sierra Leone, and they initiated an investigation. That investigation revealed that Pharoah Moses had been enslaved in Africa late in the 18^th Century, leaving Sack N’Jaie behind, and sold in Charleston. Moses managed to purchase himself and his family out of slavery and return them to Africa where he reunited with his African son, only to have him enslaved in Alabama. This case reveal the complexity of the African Atlantic World, the movement of Africans around it in ways that challenge our perceived notions of that experience, their shifting identities, their abilities to move through that world and the dangers that confronted them there. It also brings the history of the Black Atlantic into the 19^th Century and embeds it in Southern history.