Slave Cargo - Kidnapped Africans on Board Ship

This drawing - entitled Africans on Board the Slave Bark Wildfire, April 30, 1860 - was published in Harper's Weekly on the 2nd of June, 1860. Click on the image to examine it further.

An exhibit at the Library of Congress - African American Odyssey - provides this shortened description of the events behind the illustration:

"The first captives came to the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s. Twenty African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. A series of complex colonial laws began to relegate the status of Africans and their descendants to slavery. The United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, but the domestic slave trade and illegal importation continued for several decades.

"This image depicts the miserable, cramped conditions of 510 Africans on board the bark Wildfire, who, while being smuggled into the United States in 1860, were captured by an anti-slaving vessel. The slaves were taken to Key West, Florida, and from there were sent to Liberia where the United States regularly repatriated recaptured Africans after 1808."