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<beepsie@worldnet.att.net> It is worth noting that on occasion when kings or other aristocrats were enslaved, there was a serious effort to recover them, for example, King Pedro II of Kongo corresponded with both the Spansh king and the Pope to recover some aristocrats and even people enslaved by the Portuguese governor Joao Correa de Sousa, and succeeded in getting some 1,200 people returned from Brazil. On the other side, it seems quite clear that the Fulbe prince of Terry Alford's book, "A Prince Among Slaves" was both aristocratic and enslaved, and for that very reason was also freed in the US and returned to Africa. The slave trade brought a long standing and complex set of relations between Africans and Europeans, sometimes of mutual hostility and emnity, sometimes of cooperation, and the sense of class was an important part of all this. Hence people could be and were ransomed. There are many examples of people being treated by other slaves in America as royalty, one of the first such people in North America was a woman enslaved on an island in Boston harbor in 1633, who was treated with great deference, and even her master respected this rank. John Thornton Boston University
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