Americans In Algiers: How Captivity Bridged The Atlantic And Ottoman Worlds

Sultanic Slaveholders: Orientalism as a Critique of American Slavery In July 1785, Algerian privateers captured the American merchant vessels Maria and Dauphin and brought the crewmembers back to Algiers for enslavement. Back in the United States, their imprisonment sparked outrage among the general public. Early abolitionists took advantage of Americans’ anger to critique their moral hypocrisy for denouncing Algiers while condoning race-based chattel slavery at home. These abolitionists argued that the U.S. was, in fact, no better than Algiers for its practice of slavery and participation in the slave trade. This paper argues that Algiers’s capture of Americans fostered a generation of antislavery literature that relied on a deeply embedded tradition of Orientalism to equate American slavery with “Islamic despotism” and undermine popular claims to national moral superiority. Examining this literature challenges Edward Said’s chronology of Orientalism in the United States and reveals the influence that Ottoman Algerian slavery exerted on the early abolition debate across the Atlantic. Captive Connections: James L. Cathcart’s Rise to Power in “Borderland” Algiers Among the Maria’s crewmembers captured by Algerian privateers in July 1785 was James Leander Cathcart. An average mariner, Cathcart worked his way through the Ottoman Algerian slave system over the course of eleven years to become the chief Christian secretary to the Dey of Algiers, and upon his redemption, the American consul to Tripoli and Tunis. This paper examines the two factors that enabled Cathcart’s promotions---networking and vacancy-filling---to demonstrate that Algiers was the ideal “borderlands” port city for creating strategic connections with foreign agents and captives that facilitated social mobility in slavery. It uses Cathcart’s story to make a larger point about Algiers’s geopolitical significance as a crucible for social and political processes in both the Atlantic and Ottoman worlds in the late eighteenth century.