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White Slaves, African Masters

An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

Edited by Paul Baepler

With an Introduction by Paul Baepler

White Slaves, African Masters

An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

Edited by Paul Baepler

With an Introduction by Paul Baepler

A remarkable collection of hard-to-find primary source accounts of nineteenth-century American captivity narratives

Some of the most popular stories in nineteenth-century America were sensational tales of whites captured and enslaved in North Africa. White Slaves, African Masters for the first time gathers together a selection of these Barbary captivity narratives, which significantly influenced early American attitudes toward race, slavery, and nationalism.

Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America’s first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery.

The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson’s administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat.

Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative.

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African Studies

History: American History

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Travel and Tourism: Tourism and History

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Reviews

“Baepler has done American literary and cultural historians a service by collecting these long-out-of-print Barbary captivity narratives . . . . Baepler’s excellent introduction and full bibliography of primary and secondary sources greatly enhance our knowledge of this fascinating genre.”

Library Journal

“In a time when slave narratives and tales of Indian captivity have moved to center stage in Americanist scholarship, Paul Baepler brings much-needed attention to a hitherto largely neglected kind of captivity narrative, in which white Christians are enslaved by Barbary pirates. His well-edited and informatively introduced collection of these fascinating
role-reversal tales—most of them barely accessible until now—will prove highly useful to literary scholars and cultural historians.”

David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography

"With an illuminating introduction, this resurrection of nine captivity narratives makes accessible one of the main ways that Americans first
learned, if in lurid form, about North Africa. Except for the account of the African American Robert Adams, these handsomely edited narratives tell the stories of enslaved white Americans—the famous Barbary coast captives whose plight became fodder for both pro- and anti-slavery writers.”

Gary B. Nash, author of Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America

"This anthology of nine accounts published from 1703 to 1904 brings the little-known form of the American Barbary captivity narrative into the literary fold. Paul Baepler has performed an important service by recovering and making available these fascinating accounts of the capture and enslavement of Europeans by North Africans and by writing such an illuminating introduction informed by current scholarship.”

Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, editor of Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives

“A fascinating collection of memoirs and journals. Paul Baepler’s imaginative editorial work and thoughtful introduction enrich our understanding of many citizens’ experience of the foreign relations of the early republic. These texts take us to ‘the shores of Tripoli’ and else- where in North Africa, challenging us to reconsider the genre of the captivity narrative.”

Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

Table of Contents

Introduction
Cotton Mather: The Glory of Goodness
John D. Foss: A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss
James Leander Cathcart: The Captives, Eleven Years in Algiers
Maria Martin: History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin
Jonathan Cowdery: American Captives in Tripoli
William Ray: Horrors of Slavery
Robert Adams: The Narrative of Robert Adams
Eliza Bradley: An Authentic Narrative
Ion H. Perdicaris: In Raissuli’s Hands
Appendix: Publishing History of the American Barbary Captive Narrative