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THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD’S STEALTH SAILORS  
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Eric Foner
October 2, 2025
The New York Review of Books
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_ The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime
workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of
reaching freedom were better below deck than over land. _

‘Heavy weights—arrival of a party at League Island. Fifteen
escaped in this schooner’; engraving by John Osler from William
Still’s The Underground Railroad, 1872,

 

REVIEWED:
FREEDOM SHIP: THE UNCHARTED HISTORY OF ESCAPING SLAVERY BY SEA
by Marcus Rediker
Viking, 403 pp., $33.00

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 women

) 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,

 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 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.

_ERIC FONER is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at
Columbia. His books include The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and
American Slavery, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History,
and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877.
(October 2025)_

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* U.S. history
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* Underground Railroad
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* slavery
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* maritime workers
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* Black workers
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* Slave trade
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