Of the innumerable images published in American newspapers in the decades before the Civil War, few were as ubiquitous as those depicting a young Black man traveling on foot through a forest (represented by a single tree), his belongings wrapped in a sack attached to a pole slung over his shoulder. Instantly recognizable as a runaway slave, the image was usually accompanied by text providing a physical description of the fugitive, the offer of a reward for his capture, and a warning that anyone who assisted the runaway—or even refused to take part in his capture—risked serious legal consequences.
Thousands of these notices (including those for women1) appeared in print, testimony to American slaves’ intense desire for freedom and their willingness to risk their lives to obtain it. But this familiar depiction, argues the historian Marcus Rediker in his new book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, is misleading, encouraging historians to focus on overland flight, ignoring the fact that “a large proportion” of slaves escaped by boat. Moreover, these advertisements imply that most fugitive slaves were acting on their own, whereas many relied on assistance from sympathetic individuals or organizations such as the Vigilance Committees. Springing into existence in the 1830s and 1840s in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other northern cities, they sought to combat an epidemic of kidnapping of northern free Blacks for sale into slavery and to provide help to fugitives. Taken together, these local networks came to be known as the Underground Railroad.
Ironically, the rapid expansion of cotton production in the lower South beginning in the 1820s not only enriched slave owners, merchants, and bankers, North and South, but also established a web of maritime trading routes that greatly increased fugitives’ opportunities for escape by sea. Hundreds of ships each year carried the South’s “white gold” to the port cities of the Atlantic coast and on to textile factories in New England and Europe. Rediker presents some startling statistics that illustrate the growth of seaborne commerce. By the middle of the nineteenth century nearly 200,000 seamen sailed out of the major ports each year, the largest number to and from New York City, which dominated the cotton trade. Some 20,000 of the sailors were African Americans. In 1855 American shipyards produced over two thousand new vessels. That explosion in maritime commerce, a result of slavery’s widening role in the American economy, created more occasions to steal away on ships and rendered obsolete the idea that those who fled the South did so unassisted.
Laws punishing attempted escapes by sea proved difficult to enforce. Captains were supposed to search their ships for runaway slaves, but as the coastal trade expanded this became prohibitively time consuming. The accelerating sectional conflict over the future of slavery, moreover, meant that a growing number of northerners proved willing to abet fugitives. This was especially true of members of the free Black communities that spread after northern states enacted laws for the gradual abolition of slavery. Black men were well positioned to help fugitives hiding on sailing vessels. As sailors, longshoremen, sailmakers, carpenters, and other maritime laborers, Black workers were omnipresent on the docks and aboard ships. Many kept a lookout for fugitives and directed them to people who could help. The presence of Black seamen was especially important for stowaways. Sailors were known to stack the heavy bales of cotton in a way that created spaces where slaves could fit and to provide them with food and water during the voyage.
To be sure, escape by ship carried its own risks. It was easier to hide in the woods than on a small packet boat. If a runaway was discovered, the captain and crew might turn him in for a reward. Nonetheless, Rediker argues, the chances of getting away on one of the innumerable vessels plying the Atlantic trading routes were considerably higher than those of reaching freedom on land. In 1856 Virginia established a Port Police to search all ships heading north from the state, but the officers had only six vessels for patrolling the vast waters of Chesapeake Bay. They were “overwhelmed,” Rediker writes.
Proximity to the sea was crucial for the most celebrated fugitive in American history, Frederick Douglass, whose journey from Maryland to New York in 1838 was immortalized in his three autobiographies. Douglass’s escape from bondage required him to travel by ferry and steamboat as well as by train—all modes of transport much faster than running away on foot. Instead of days or even weeks, it took him less than twenty-four hours to cover the two hundred miles to freedom.
Douglass, Rediker writes, was “a man of the waterfront.” As a youth he spent several years in Baltimore, one of the nation’s leading port cities and home to its largest free Black community. Along with two uncles and two friends, Douglass devised a plan to escape by canoe into Chesapeake Bay and make their way northward. But someone who learned of their intentions betrayed them. Douglass was sent to jail and then to Baltimore by his owner to learn the maritime skill of caulking.
In his second, successful effort at escape, Douglass, in his words “rigged out in sailor style,” was aided by Anna Murray, the free woman he was planning to marry,2 and by a retired Black sailor who gave him his own “sailor’s protection” identifying him as free. Soon after he reached New York, however, Douglass encountered Jake, a runaway slave he had known in Baltimore, who warned him that slave catchers prowled the city’s streets. A “generous” Black sailor then directed him to David Ruggles, head of the city’s recently established Vigilance Committee. Ruggles arranged for Douglass to travel to New Bedford, Massachusetts, the nation’s whaling capital, whose free Black community had long assisted fugitives—the city was known in antislavery circles as the Fugitive’s Gibraltar.
Douglass’s experience drives home the point that escape was not a solo project and that assistance came from both organized networks and strokes of luck, such as Douglass’s encounter with Jake. Rediker also emphasizes the importance of Black (and not a few white) sailors who secretly distributed antislavery documents in southern ports, especially copies of Walker’s Appeal by David Walker, a free person of color from North Carolina who published his powerful condemnation of slavery and racism in 1829. Southern state governments outlawed its circulation and tried to restrict the presence of seamen who might distribute it, requiring Black sailors who arrived on ships from the North to be imprisoned while their vessels were in port.
Rediker is especially interested in multiethnic patterns of resistance uniting sailors and dockworkers, including the New York Conspiracy of 1741, which involved Irish, Hispanic, and African participants, and the Knowles Riot in Boston, in which free sailors and slaves fought the press-gangs rounding up seamen for the Royal Navy. The waterfront, he writes, may well have been the most racially and ethnically diverse workplace in the world. Many ships based in the British Isles and North America picked up sailors while in Europe, the Caribbean, and even the Pacific to replace men who had died, been disabled, or deserted.
Over the course of a long and influential scholarly career, Rediker has established himself as a pioneering chronicler of working-class life in the early modern Atlantic world, with an emphasis on those working at sea or on turbulent waterfronts. He has urged historians to include sailors in their accounts of the era’s labor history, rather than slighting them in favor of much-studied early factory workers. He knows the ships, maritime workers, and commercial routes intimately. Rediker brings to life the cacophonous soundscape of the waterfront, with merchants and captains crying out work orders as ships were loaded and unloaded and women, slave and free, loudly hawking baked goods, eggs, and other food to sailors and dockworkers. He identifies an ethos of solidarity among maritime workers, contrasting it with the dog-eat-dog outlook of emerging capitalism. He pays considerable attention to the importance of the suppression of piracy in the emergence of Britain’s seaborne empire and the imposition of discipline on an unruly working class. “Pirate ships,” he has written, were “democratic in an undemocratic age,” offering an example of multiracial accord that helps explain why many white sailors and waterfront workers were willing to assist fugitive slaves.
The titles of Rediker’s previous books suggest these historical preoccupations. They include Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Perhaps his most widely known work is The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, coauthored with the scholar of British working-class history Peter Linebaugh. The myth of the Hydra—each time Hercules lopped off one of its numerous heads, two new ones took its place—became a commonly employed metaphor for the difficulties authorities encountered in attempting to suppress a recalcitrant working class. Resistance somehow kept springing back to life.
Within this overarching story of capitalist development and working-class struggle, Rediker takes the reader on a tour of port cities in British North America, from Savannah to Boston. In each locale he surveys the activities of free Blacks, slaves, and white abolitionists in assisting fugitives and presents a compendium of dramatic escapes. Unavoidably the book’s structure produces repetition, but Rediker keeps his eye on the main subject—escapes by sea. A few chapters focus on well-known runaways, notably, in addition to Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a memoir that describes the sexual abuse to which she was subjected by her owner in North Carolina and her eventual escape to the North. Jacobs came from a seagoing family. Three of her uncles were sailors, two of whom escaped by sea. One uncle worked as a steward on a packet ship that sailed regularly between North Carolina and New York City. Jacobs managed to hide for seven years in a small crawl space in the house of her free grandmother. Her wait for a ship to transport her to freedom was excruciating, but many runaways had to remain in hiding before being able to depart on a coastal vessel. In June 1842 one of Jacobs’s uncles succeeded in locating what she calls a “friendly captain,” who transported her on the ten-day voyage to Philadelphia.
Unlike Douglass and Jacobs, most of the individuals whose experiences Rediker relates will be unfamiliar even to the most diligent historians. There’s George (surname unknown), for example, a youth owned by a New Orleans merchant. George must have set some kind of record by stowing away on a ship departing from Louisiana for Boston, a distance of two thousand miles by sea. George had heard people in the Crescent City talk about Boston as an antislavery stronghold, and in August 1846, when he saw the city’s name painted on a ship, he decided to hide on board amid the cargo. One week into the voyage the captain discovered him. It was too late to turn around, so the skipper continued to head for Boston. After the vessel reached the city he contacted his ship’s owner, who agreed to a plan to send George back to New Orleans. Abolitionists tried some innovative legal maneuvers in an effort to free him, some sailors ran interference as they could, and George temporarily slipped his captivity. But efforts to have the fugitive released via a writ of habeas corpus failed, and he was sent back to New Orleans. A subsequent attempt to persuade a grand jury to indict the captain for kidnapping on the grounds that he had unlawfully imprisoned George on his ship also foundered, and the captain was soon back at the helm.
No one knows exactly how many slaves managed to escape bondage. Rediker offers a “conservative estimate” of 15,000 to 20,000 arriving by sea in all ports during the thirty years preceding the Civil War, when the Underground Railroad and cotton shipping were both at their peak. Other historians have proposed figures for escapes of all kinds reaching up to 100,000. Some runaways were recaptured, but successful renditions were costly. Anthony Burns escaped from Virginia by boat in 1854 but was transported back to slavery on a ship from Boston Harbor. To get him there the local authorities required over one thousand armed militia, police, and infantry—hoping to prevent a repetition of events in 1851, when a large, mostly Black crowd rescued the escaped slave Shadrach Minkins from a Boston courthouse and spirited him off to Canada. Rediker devotes an entire chapter to William Powell, who with his wife ran the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House in New York City, a refuge for sailors who needed lodging until they found work at sea and where numerous fugitives were hidden. Rediker describes Powell as a “quintessential waterfront intellectual and activist.” He had sailed the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific and kept detailed records of the over six thousand boarders, including a number of white sailors, that he housed between 1839 and 1851. A prolific writer and speaker, he lectured alongside Douglass. Powell presided at a mass meeting organized by Black New Yorkers to protest the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which exposed free Black people to kidnapping or simply misidentification by courts. Powell himself, along with his wife and seven children, departed for Liverpool in 1851, fearing capture by the law even though none had ever been a slave. They returned to New York after a few years in Great Britain and resumed their work. Powell also became the city’s first Black notary, enabling him to produce “seamen’s protection certificates” like the one Douglass used on his escape.
States tried to impose their authority on the maritime working class but had little success. As noted above they jailed Black sailors who came into port on northern vessels. In 1859 the government of Charleston, fearing that northern sailors lacked sympathy for “our peculiar institutions,” resolved to train poor white youths to become “homegrown” mariners. Nothing came of this effort. Slave owners in Savannah formed the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association to stop fraternization onshore between Black and white maritime workers, who often bought and sold stolen goods.
Penalties for those who aided fugitives were not light. Sailors and captains who were caught were arrested and jailed. In Virginia Captain William Baylis was sentenced to forty years in prison and only freed when Union soldiers liberated Richmond at the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, by the 1850s captains were making what Rediker calls a “business of escape,” charging substantial fees for transporting runaways to the North. Among the most active members of this maritime underground was James Fountain, who had a secret compartment built on his ship, the Chas. T. Ford, where stowaways could hide. A Black ship carpenter worked with Fountain, alerting fugitives when he was sailing. Fountain charged as much as one hundred dollars per fugitive—a substantial sum in those days. He was not averse to carrying groups. On one occasion, in 1856, he transported twenty-one men, women, and children from Norfolk to the North—the largest group escape by sea of the pre-war period.
Freedom Ship joins a burgeoning literature that emphasizes the centrality of the fugitive slave issue in bringing on the Civil War and a smaller but growing literature on the maritime Underground Railroad, including Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander’s Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad and Timothy D. Walker’s edited volume Sailing to Freedom. As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, debates took place over the responsibility for apprehending runaway slaves. The Constitution required that they be returned to their owners, but exactly how remained unclear. A national law enacted during the presidency of George Washington authorized owners to track down and apprehend fugitives on their own (not always an easy thing to accomplish). Half a century later, efforts to implement the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which transferred responsibility for rendition to the federal government, inspired widespread resistance in the North. Some free states enacted “personal liberty” laws that sought to nullify the national statute by barring local officials from participating in the capture of runaways. These measures showed that the South’s ideology of states’ rights could be invoked to combat abusive national policies (a historical lesson especially relevant at the moment). None of this could have happened without the actions of slaves who sought to escape bondage and the people who helped them.
Given the evidence Rediker accumulates, it should not be surprising that the longest complaint against the North in South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession of 1860 was that the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause had been “render[ed] useless” by popular resistance in the free states. How appropriate that the Civil War began in Charleston Harbor, where the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery had long been fought on docks piled high with bales of cotton and on ships that daily sailed past the looming presence of Fort Sumter, some of them carrying hidden fugitives on their way to freedom.
English (US) · 