The African Apprentice vs The Slave ship Lie: Black Europeans Britain, Cuba, and the American South Rebranded Slavery

Africans in the United States can't verify if they got here as a Slave or a hired Apprentice , Black Europeans are convinced they are Nigerians fooled by Fraud DNA test ...

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 created 800,000 “apprenticed labourers" 

Under this system, formerly enslaved people over the age of six were required to continue working for their former owners, for a set period, before receiving full emancipation in 1838. The act, which went into effect on August 1, 1834, also provided compensation to slave owners, but not to the formerly enslaved.

A Lie Wrapped in a Legal Word

When Britain “abolished” slavery in 1833, politicians congratulated themselves on ending a crime against humanity. But hidden inside that same law was a quiet betrayal: every man, woman, and child just “freed” was immediately reclassified as an apprentice.

They worked the same fields. They took the same lash. They were forbidden to leave the same plantations.

The British called it training for freedom. Africans called it what it was slavery renamed.

This was the birth of the African Apprenticeship System: a colonial legal mask that soon stretched across the Atlantic world, from London to Havana, from Havana to New Orleans, and finally into the backroads of Alabama and Louisiana.

  England’s Blueprint: “Freedom” on a Leash

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 created 800,000 “apprenticed labourers.” They worked without wages for up to six years. Britain declared it moral progress; planters called it business as usual.

When Parliament ended that scheme in 1838 under public outrage, empire administrators simply exported the model overseas! 

Captured Africans “rescued” by the Royal Navy were not returned home. They were bound out again in Sierra Leone, Mauritius, St. Helena, and Trinidad as “liberated apprentices.”

Government records show more than 45,000 Africans were forced into these contracts. The word slave had vanished; the chains had not.

Cuba: Britain’s Silent Partner

By the 1840s, Britain leaned on Spain to end the slave trade in its colony of Cuba. Spain agreed and also had an ally in the Secret Citizen President Andrew Jackson — on paper. In practice, it adopted the same “African Apprentice” loophole Britain had invented.

Between 1845 and 1859, U.S. and British diplomats reported that 70,000 to 100,000 Africans arrived in Cuba labeled aprendices africanos — African apprentices — under “British sanction.” They were chained, branded, and sold to sugar barons.

U.S. Consul William H. Robertson warned Washington in 1856:

“The renewal of the African apprenticeship scheme… for the introduction of from seventy to one hundred thousand African apprentices, by order of the home government and under the patronage of the British government.”

 — U.S. Executive Document No. 7, 36th Congress (1860)

60,000 Free Black Apprentices along with Mayan Yucatan Slaves sent to Cuba

Louisiana and the Gulf States: The American Back Door

While Britain and Spain perfected their paperwork, Southern planters were watching. Cotton was booming. The domestic slave supply was shrinking. Planters wanted Africans — and a legal excuse to get them.

The Legislative Plot

In 1858, the Louisiana legislature debated bills to import African apprentices under contracts of seven to fifteen years, claiming this would not violate the federal slave-trade ban of 1808. Governor Robert C. Wickliffe supported the idea if it mirrored the Cuban and Brazilian systems. Historian J.P. Hendrix Jr. confirms:

“Pro-slavery leaders defended the proposal on the grounds that African ‘apprentices’ could be legally introduced for term service under supervision, similar to the Cuban and Brazilian systems.”

 — Louisiana History 10 (1969): 11–13

The Commercial Propaganda

At the same time, New Orleans editor J.D.B. De Bow published essays urging Southerners to copy Cuba’s “civilized apprenticeship of African labor.” In Savannah, slave-trader Charles A.L. Lamar bragged in a 1858 letter:

“Apprentices bound for life will be landed at New Orleans as easily as Cuba brings hers.” — John R. Spears, The American Slave Trade (1900), Ch. 19

Lamar financed the slave ship Wanderer (1858); his rhetoric and money paved the way for the Clotilda (1860).

The Clotilda’s Shadow

When Timothy Meaher sent the Clotilda from Mobile in 1860, he boasted that he could smuggle Africans into Alabama “as easily as Cuba brings hers.” That single sentence, recorded by Emma Langdon Roche and later by Zora Neale Hurston, is proof that the Clotilda voyage was born from the Cuban Apprenticeship model.

Federal investigators later found that Meaher and his partners divided the captives among “friends under contracts and guardianship.” Those were the same euphemisms the Freedmen’s Bureau would confront a few years later when Southern courts illegally “bound out” Black children to white “guardians.”

The language never changed ...only the era.

The Clotilda was the American execution of a European-invented apprenticeship disguise.

J. P. Hendrix Jr., “The Efforts to Reopen the African Slave Trade in Louisiana, 1858–1860.”

Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter 1969), pp. 5–24.

Published by: Louisiana Historical Association / JSTOR Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4231056

Hendrix examines legislative and political movements in Louisiana during the late 1850s to reopen the African slave trade. 

Key points tied to the Clotilda-era “African Apprentice” framework:

• In 1858–1859, members of the Louisiana legislature introduced bills proposing to import Africans as “apprentices” rather than slaves. Hendrix notes: “A number of pro-slavery leaders defended the proposal on the grounds that African ‘apprentices’ could be legally introduced for term service under supervision, similar to the Cuban and Brazilian systems.” (p. 11)

• Governor Robert C. Wickliffe expressed conditional support, saying the measure might “supply the plantations with African laborers under contract, without violation of the federal law of 1808.” (p. 13)

• The proposed law mirrored Cuba’s apprenticeship policy—Africans would serve 7–15 years under “instruction,” then supposedly be freed.

• Hendrix concludes that this “apprenticeship fiction” was the South’s legal camouflage to reopen the African trade before the Civil War, linking it directly to the ideological environment of the Wanderer (1858) and Clotilda (1860) voyages.

Bound Out and Betrayed

After the Civil War, former Confederates revived the apprenticeship disguise at home. Across Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, courts seized thousands of Black children and bound them to their former enslavers “for education and training.”

Freedmen’s Bureau records document hundreds of mothers  like Martha Langston Brown of Caroline County, Maryland (1866)  fighting to reclaim their illegally apprenticed children.

 The Bureau called these practices “slavery in all but name.”

 Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, in In re Turner (1867), struck them down as unconstitutional involuntary servitude.

The Global Pattern and Its Modern Echo

From London’s Parliament to Havana’s docks, from New Orleans’ legislature to Maryland’s courthouses, the word “apprentice” became the colonial password that kept slavery alive. It is the reason thousands of people African, Indigenous, and mixed descendants disappeared from the record as “indentured,” “colored,” or “bound,” while their oppressors claimed legality.

Today, when we trace family lines through these eras, we find the paperwork of deceit: indenture papers, apprenticeship rolls, guardianship orders all masking what was truly forced bondage.

Truth Restored

History is not healed until the record is corrected. The African Apprenticeship System was not humanitarian reform; it was a global conspiracy to preserve slavery under a moral disguise. Britain wrote it. Cuba perfected it. Louisiana copied it. And America’s courts and counties extended it even after emancipation.

Every time a child was “bound out” without a mother’s consent, every time an African was “contracted” instead of chained, the same lie was repeated: “It isn’t slavery.”

But the descendants of those people from the Clotilda’s survivors to families of bound-out Freedmen are living proof that the truth endures beyond paperwork.

📚 Selected Citations

• Slavery Abolition Act (1833) 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73.

• U.S. Executive Document No. 7, 36th Cong., 2d Sess. (1860).

• J.P. Hendrix Jr., “Efforts to Reopen the African Slave Trade in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 10 (1969).

• John R. Spears, The American Slave Trade (1900).

• Harvey Wish, “Revival of the African Slave Trade in the U.S., 1856–1860,” AHR 44 (1939).

• Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama (Oxford UP, 2007).

• In re Turner, 24 F. Cas. 337 (C.C.D. Md. 1867).

• Freedmen’s Bureau Records (Maryland Field Office, 1866).

The oppressors changed their words; they never changed their will.

It is on us the descendants of the bound and the mislabeled to name it for what it was: slavery, repackaged as apprenticeship, sold as civilization, remembered as deceit.

Freedmen Letter requesting Freedom for the illegally Enslaved

Baltimore July 2nd 1866

Mr. John T. Langston Denton, Caroline County, Md.

Sir,

The Asst. Commissioner directs me to inform you that Mrs. Martha Langston Brown (Col.) has entered complaint at this Office of you having two of her children illegally bound to you contrary to the wish and without the consent of said Martha L. Brown the mother, who further states that she is fully able to take care of these children, namely Henry Clay Brown and Alexander Brown, now in your keeping.

In order to obtain a clear understanding of the case at this office you are requested to furnish at any earliest statement regarding it, and to enclose Martha L. Brown’s statement corrected or uncorrected, as the case may be, requesting a prompt compliance with the above request.

I remain, your obedient servant, 🧾 Summary of Meaning

This letter is an official notice from the U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau in Baltimore to John T. Langston in Maryland. It informs him that a freedwoman, Martha Langston Brown, has accused him of illegally taking her two sons and binding them out as apprentices without her permission.

The Bureau is asking Langston to submit a written explanation and include the mother’s statement so they can investigate and possibly order the children’s return to her care.

In practice, there was virtually no difference between an “apprentice” and a slave — especially in the years surrounding the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and even earlier in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The word “apprentice” was often a legal disguise for continued enslavement or forced labor, particularly when it came to Black and Indigenous children and adults who were supposed to be “free.”

⚖️ 1. The “Apprenticeship” Loophole After Emancipation

When slavery was abolished (1865), Southern states and some border states like Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky immediately tried to re-create slavery under a new name. They used “apprenticeship laws” — claiming to be teaching freed people or their children a trade — but these contracts:

• Were forced, not voluntary.

• Bound Black children to their former enslavers, often without parental consent (like in your Freedmen’s Bureau letter).

• Paid little or no wages.

• Allowed whipping and forced labor, and prohibited leaving the property.

In essence: “Apprentice” was just a different legal term for the same servitude.

2. What Federal Officials Said at the Time

Even U.S. government reports from the 1860s admitted this outright.

✦ U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau Report (1866)

“The so-called ‘apprenticeship system’ in the border states is slavery in all but name. Colored children are bound out without the consent of their parents and are subject to cruel treatment and uncompensated labor.”

(Source: U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Annual Report, 1866–67)

✦ General O. O. Howard ( Namesake of Howard University) , Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau

Howard described the Maryland and Virginia apprenticeship laws as:

“Nothing but an attempt to re-enslave freed children under a pretense of industrial training.”

3. Legal Examples of “Apprentice = Slave”

Example	Year	What Happened	Outcome
Martha Langston Brown case (your document)	1866	Two children illegally bound as “apprentices”	Bureau ordered their release
Mississippi Black Codes	1865	“Freed minors” could be bound to white “guardians” until age 21	Struck down by U.S. military government
Louisiana Freedmen’s Code	1865	Allowed “contracts of apprenticeship” for any Black person “needing direction”	Labeled unconstitutional
Maryland Apprentice Laws	1864–1867	Permitted judges to bind Black children to former enslavers “for their own benefit”	Repealed after Freedmen’s Bureau protests

4. The Same Pattern Outside the U.S.

The identical tactic was used in other parts of the Atlantic world:

• British West Indies (1834–1838): When Britain “abolished slavery,” 800,000 freed Africans were kept as “apprentices” for four years forced to labor on plantations with no freedom of movement or wages.

• Spanish Cuba (1840s–1860s): Imported “African apprentices” from West Africa under British “humanitarian supervision,” but they were worked and sold as slaves.

• U.S. South (1850s–1870s): Copied both models justifying labor coercion as “training,” “guardianship,” or “apprenticeship.”

Criteria	Slave	“Apprentice” (in practice)
Consent	None	None (parents coerced or ignored)
Wages	None	Often none or symbolic
Duration	For life	Until 18–25 (but often extended)
Legal ownership	“Property”	“Custody” under contract
Punishment	Whipping, confinement	Whipping, confinement
Movement	Restricted	Restricted
Family separation	Common	Common

Legally, one was called “property,” the other “ward” or “bound laborer” but in daily life there was no meaningful difference for the person being held.

6. Why the Word “Apprentice” Was Used

• It sounded legal under the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery “except as punishment for crime.”

• It made whites and politicians feel morally justified: “We are training them for self-sufficiency.”

• It created deniability: officials could claim emancipation was honored while maintaining the same economic system.

In short: It was slavery repackaged.

1. In re Turner (C.C.D. Md. 1867)

   • Citation: In re Turner, 24 F. Cas. 337 (C.C.D. Md. 1867). Federal Judicial Center

   • Summary: Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase held that a Maryland apprenticeship statute (which bound Black children without parental consent) violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude.

   • Why relevant: It legally affirms that what was called “apprenticeship” was in effect slavery for Black children.

   • Use in your work: Provide this case as a definitive legal condemnation of apprenticeship law in the U.S.

2. Records of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s “Illegal Apprenticeship Complaints” (Maryland, Caroline County)

   • Example record: Parent/Relative: Martha Brown; Children taken: 2; Captor: John Sangston; County: Caroline; Settled? Yes – Released. Enduring Connections

   • Summary: This shows concrete complaint records were freed Black mothers accused whites of binding their children as “apprentices” without consent.

   • Why relevant: Illustrates the operational side of the system — actual cases investigated by the Bureau.

Use in your work: Use as micro-evidence of the pattern you describe in your book/white paper.

3. Legislative and archival evidence of apprenticeship disputes and oversight by the Freedmen’s Bureau

   • Example: “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Illegal Apprenticeships on Maryland’s Eastern Shore” (article summarising records). Enduring Connections

   • Also: “The Freedmen’s Bureau: Selected Documents” includes numerous field office letters on apprenticeship issues. Freedmen and Southern Society Project

   • Why relevant: These show internal federal agency awareness and intervention in apprenticeship abuses.

   • Use in your work: Good support for your argument that the federal government recognized these as effectively slavery under another name.

4. Apprenticeship law and labor contract evidence post-Emancipation (Maryland border state example)

   • Example: Yale Law School paper “The Freedmen’s Bureau in Maryland” by Laura Savarese (2019) summarises how Maryland laws allowed binding of Black children and how courts challenged them. OpenYLS

   • Why relevant: Provides state-level legal context for how apprenticeship laws were structured and challenged.

   • Use in your work: Use to show that the mechanics of “apprenticeship” mirrored slavery (term length, lack of consent, control by white master).

The “African Apprentice” system’s main source and origin was England and Western Europe.

It began as Britain’s post-emancipation labor policy and then spread through European colonial and diplomatic networks into Cuba, Brazil, and finally into U.S. Southern debates as a model to rebrand slavery under a legal disguise of “contract labor.”

TIMELINE: The Global Spread of the “African Apprentice” System, 1833–1865

1833–1838 — Britain Creates the Model

Event: The British Parliament passes the Slavery Abolition Act (3 & 4 William IV c.73) in 1833. Policy: All formerly enslaved Africans in the British West Indies become “apprentices” for 4–6 years instead of immediately free. Purpose: To “train” freedpeople for independence — in reality, to force continued plantation labor.

Regions: Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, St. Vincent, Grenada, St. Lucia, Antigua, etc. Numbers:

• About 800,000 Africans reclassified as “apprentices.”

• Worked 40+ hours/week without wages.

• System abolished in 1838 after public outcry over abuse.

📜 Sources: British Parliamentary Papers, Emancipation Act 1833; British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Reports, 1835–1838.

1835–1848 — “Liberated Africans” Under British Control

Event: Britain’s navy begins seizing slave ships under the 1807 ban; Africans “rescued” from slave ships are sent to British colonies. Policy: These “Liberated Africans” are bound out as “apprentices” or “indentured servants.” Regions: Sierra Leone, St. Helena, Mauritius, Trinidad, Cape Colony. Numbers:

• ~26,000 in Sierra Leone (1835–1850)

• ~9,000 in St. Helena

• ~3,000 in Mauritius

• ~7,000 in Trinidad & British Guiana Total: ≈ 45,000–50,000 Africans under British “liberated” apprenticeship.

📜 Sources: Parliamentary Papers, African Slave Trade Class A (Correspondence with Foreign Powers, 1845–1850); FO 84/1089–1093.

1845–1856 — The System Exported to Spain and Cuba

Event: Britain and Spain sign the 1845 Anglo-Spanish Treaty on the Slave Trade. Policy: Spain agrees to import “liberated Africans” to Cuba as “apprentices” under British supervision. Reality: Africans are bought and sold to planters in Cuba, labeled aprendices africanos. Numbers:

• British and U.S. consular records report 70,000–100,000 “African apprentices” imported to Cuba 1845–1859.

• Mortality extremely high; few survived their contracts.

📜 Sources:

• U.S. Executive Document No. 7 (36th Cong., 2d Sess., 1860): Letter of William H. Robertson, U.S. Consul, Havana.

• British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Report, 1856.

1848–1858 — French and Portuguese Variants

France: Abolishes slavery in 1848, immediately imports Africans and Indians to colonies (Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique) as apprentis libres (“free apprentices”). Portugal: In Angola and Mozambique, “free Africans” (libertos) bound to colonial employers for 14 years. Numbers:

• French colonies: ≈ 25,000 Africans and 30,000 Indians (1848–1862).

• Portuguese colonies: ≈ 10,000–12,000 Africans bound 1836–1858.

📜 Sources: French Colonial Office Rapport sur l’introduction des Africains libres, 1854; Portuguese Colonial Archives, Lisbon.

1855–1860 — American Planters Attempt to Copy It

Event: Southern planters, inspired by Cuba and Britain, propose the same scheme under U.S. law. Policy: Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi politicians suggest importing “African apprentices” or “contract laborers.” Evidence:

• De Bow’s Review (New Orleans, 1858–59): series of essays citing the “British and French apprenticeship systems.”

• Louisiana legislature debates a bill to admit African “apprentices” in 1858.

• Slave trader Charles A. Lamar (of Wanderer fame) proposes landing “African apprentices” at New Orleans (1858). Numbers:

Sources: Harvey Wish, “The Revival of the African Slave Trade in the United States, 1856–1860,” AHR 44 (1939): 564–570; U.S. Senate Exec. Docs., 1860.

The term “apprentice” was actively used in 1856–1860 by American slave traders (including some connected to the Clotilda network) to disguise illegal importations of Africans as “contracts of apprenticeship.”

The same individuals, ships, and financing circles behind the Clotilda were involved in schemes and rhetoric explicitly referring to “African apprentices.”

Federal investigations and correspondence after the Clotilda’s arrival mention that the traders claimed to have “freed” or “bound out” the Africans, i.e., using the same apprentice language seen in Louisiana and Georgia just before.

The Traders Behind the Clotilda Were Part of the “Apprentice” Ideology

✦ Timothy Meaher (ship’s owner, Mobile, Alabama)

• He financed the Clotilda in 1859–1860 to test federal enforcement of the slave-trade ban.

• In his own statements (recorded in Emma Langdon Roche’s Historic Sketches of the South, 1914), Meaher said he wanted to prove he could bring Africans into Alabama “as easily as Cuba brings in hers.”

  • Cuba’s “hers” = African apprentices.

• That phrase is a direct ideological reference to the Cuban apprenticeship model, not standard slave-trade language.

📜 Source: Emma Langdon Roche, Historic Sketches of the South (Birmingham, 1914), p. 149. Also quoted in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (written 1931, pub. 2018).

So: Meaher’s language shows he was copying Cuba’s so-called African apprentice system.

 2. The Legal Template Came from the “African Apprenticeship” Debate

Between 1855 and 1859, U.S. pro-slavery media and Louisiana legislators proposed re-opening the trade using “African apprentices.”

• In De Bow’s Review (New Orleans, July 1858), editor J. D. B. DeBow published an essay praising the “Cuban and British apprenticeship systems” as a lawful way to import Africans.

• The Wanderer ship (1858) was financed by Charles A. L. Lamar, who openly called his proposed Africans “apprentices bound for life.”

• Lamar corresponded with Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb in 1858 asking for permission to land “African apprentices.”

📜 Primary Sources:

• Charles Lamar’s letter (Savannah, May 1858) in John R. Spears, The American Slave Trade (1900), pp. 361–363.

• DeBow’s Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (July 1858): “The African Slave Trade Considered in Its Social and Political Aspects.”

By 1860 — the exact year the Clotilda sailed this language and logic were standard among Gulf-Coast traders.

Thus, even if the Clotilda crew avoided writing the word “apprentice,” the legal fiction they invoked (“Africans imported under special contract, not as slaves”) was identical.

3. Federal Investigation References “Contracts” and “Training”

After the Clotilda was discovered and burned (1860):

• U.S. District Attorney John Forsyth reported to the Treasury and Navy that Meaher’s Africans had been “divided among friends under pretense of guardianship and contracts.”

• The Mobile Register (Aug. 1860) reported locals claiming the Africans “were to be trained and sent back to Africa,” mimicking the Cuban “apprentice repatriation” excuse.

📜 Primary Sources:

• U.S. National Archives, RG 36, Customs Service, Port of Mobile: “Deposition of Captain William Foster,” Aug. 1860.

• Mobile Register and Montgomery Advertiser newspaper series, July–August 1860, on the “illegal importation case.”

• U.S. v. Meaher et al., Federal District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, 1861 (case dismissed, Feb. 1861).

These documents show that the accused used “contracts” and “guardianship” language — the same legal disguises used for apprenticeship cases in Maryland and Louisiana.

📚 4. Scholarly Corroboration

✦ Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama (Oxford University Press, 2007)

“The Clotilda episode did not occur in isolation. It grew out of a national debate about reopening the African trade, often cloaked in the rhetoric of ‘African apprenticeships’ and ‘civilizing contracts.’” — pp. 35–39

✦ Harvey Wish, “The Revival of the African Slave Trade in the United States, 1856–1860,” AHR 44 (1939): 564–570.

“Schemes for importing ‘African apprentices’ formed the intellectual atmosphere in which both the Wanderer and the Clotilda were launched.”

Element	Wanderer (1858)	Clotilda (1860)	Connection to “Apprentice” System
Funding	Charles Lamar	Timothy Meaher	Same Gulf Coast network
Public justification	“African apprentices”	“Training Africans to return to Africa”	Same euphemism
Legal defense	Claimed contracts, not slaves	Claimed experiment / guardianship	Identical disguise
Inspiration	Cuban and British “apprentices”	“Cuba brings hers easily”	Direct acknowledgment

Louisiana’s Cuban “Back Door” to the African Trade

By the mid-1850s, Louisiana planters were suffering a labor shortage and wanted new African workers. Since the U.S. Act of 1808 outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans, they sought legal camouflage—and found it in Cuba’s so-called “African Apprentice” system, which was already sanctioned by Spain and tolerated by Britain.

The result was a shadow partnership between Gulf-Coast planters (especially in Louisiana) and Cuban traders, who acted as intermediaries in the illegal continuation of the African trade.

Step	Description	Supporting Source
1. Legal Cover	Louisiana elites proposed importing Africans under “apprenticeship” contracts modeled on Cuba’s system, arguing this did not violate the 1808 federal ban because the laborers were “free” or “indentured.”	J.P. Hendrix Jr., “Efforts to Reopen the African Slave Trade in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 10 (1969): 11–13.
2. Cuban Intermediaries	Cuban dealers already received thousands of Africans from West Africa under the “African Apprentice” disguise offered to supply the Gulf states. Some U.S. ships and financiers (from New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah) had direct Cuban ties.	William H. Robertson, U.S. Consul, Havana to Sec. of State Marcy, 26 Jan 1856, in U.S. Exec. Doc. No. 7 (36th Cong., 2d Sess., 1860) pp. 27-28.
3. Trans-shipment	Africans were landed in Cuba, “registered” as libertos or aprendices, then quietly re-exported aboard smaller Gulf-bound vessels to Louisiana, Florida, or Alabama.	U.S. Navy and State Dept. correspondence in African Slave Trade: Message from the President, 1860.
4. Dispersal in Louisiana	Once in the state, Africans were placed under “contracts” or “guardianships” with planters—terms identical to those used for apprenticeships of freed children in Maryland and Virginia.	Federal depositions in U.S. v. Meaher et al., S.D. Ala., 1861; Freedmen’s Bureau parallels (1865-67).

Confirmed Evidence of Cuban–Louisiana Collaboration

✦ 1. U.S. Consular Dispatch, Havana (Robertson → Marcy, Jan 1856)

“The renewal of the African apprenticeship scheme… for the introduction of from seventy to one hundred thousand African apprentices, by order of the home government and under the sanction and patronage of the British government.” — U.S. Executive Document No. 7 (1860), p. 27.

🡒 This is the official record alerting Washington that Cuba’s “apprentice” trade was flooding the Caribbean and Gulf interests were preparing to join it.

✦ 2. Louisiana Legislative Debates (1858–1859)

“A bill was introduced to authorize the importation of African apprentices under term service, similar to the Cuban and Brazilian systems, for periods of seven to fifteen years.” — Hendrix, Louisiana History 10 (1969): 11–13.

🡒 Legislators used Cuba’s policy as their legal model, claiming “contract labor” was distinct from “slavery.”

✦ 3. Charles A. L. Lamar’s Correspondence (Savannah → New Orleans, 1858)

“Apprentices bound for life will be landed at New Orleans as easily as Cuba brings hers.” — Lamar in John R. Spears, The American Slave-Trade (1900), Ch. 19.

🡒 Lamar financed both the Wanderer and indirectly influenced the Clotilda; his letter shows that Cuba’s trade served as the working example.

✦ 4. DeBow’s Review (New Orleans, 1858–59)

“Cuba and Brazil have found the means of civilizing African labor by apprenticeship… The South must not be left behind.” — DeBow’s Review, Vol. 25 (1858), p. 48.

🡒 This was Louisiana’s leading commercial journal openly encouraging the Cuban-style system.

Louisiana functioned as the American extension of the Cuban “African Apprentice” system.

 Cuban traders received Africans under the guise of “apprenticeship.” Louisiana planters and investors then purchased or arranged the transfer of some of those Africans sometimes directly from Cuban ports, sometimes through shared networks to supply Gulf plantations while maintaining the façade of legality.

In other words:

Cuba was the pipeline. Louisiana was the destination. The word “apprentice” was the disguise.

Foundational Confusion Which are you? The slave or the employee? PROVE IT!!