Freedom, Abduction, and the Problem of Policing

This paper presents research from my book manuscript in progress, Freedom’s Ensemble, which looks at the abduction of free people into slavery across imperial boundaries. Over the past fifteen years a robust literature on the international processes of emancipation has taken shape. Yet most of it looks at enslaved people who seek out international free soil, or international struggles for emancipation during national liberation campaigns (such as in Latin American in the 1820s). My work looks at the lines of influence running in the other direction: at free people taken abroad and into slavery. Centered on the late 1850s and early 1860s, the paper looks at instances of black dock workers kidnapped out of Montego Bay Jamaica and sold into slavery in the United States, in places such as Norfolk, Virginia. By importing enslaved people into the United States, ship captains violated slave trade suppression laws, but they were not subject to any of the international slave trade regulations that existed, because the United States refused to sign treaties making its citizens liable to prosecution. Instead, these international crimes played out in local admiralty courts, meaning the national courts had to become an arbiter of international rights. A handful of prosecutions in the late 1850s proved to be a test of the politics of slavery both within the United States as civil war approached, and in the wider Atlantic world as British officials pressed the U.S. secretary of state to return their kidnapped citizens. Drawing on sources from the U.S., Great Britian, and Jamaica, this paper explores how kidnapped people could lay claim an international right to freedom, even though only a local admiralty court heard their appeals.