SAVING GREAT PLACES
know if Sturgeon Creek slaves were ever tortured, but the 1831 Nat Turner insurrection in Southhampton County, Virginia just west of Norfolk created so much anger among Cape Fear slave owners that some of them tied slaves to stakes and lashed them. In Wilmington four slaves were beheaded. The rice slaves were part of a much larger slave economy on the Cape Fear, and they probably interacted in various ways with maritime slaves or watermen working on the rivers and turpentine slaves working in the forests. The watermen were particularly numerous around Wilmington, the largest port in the state. By 1850 Wilmington had about 10,000 residents, over half of them African American slaves. The slaves did all the work on the water as river pilots, ferrymen, fishermen, or sailors, and since they were constantly moving on the water they could not be supervised as closely as the rice slaves were. In the decades before the Civil War the watermen around Wilmington became very independentminded. They often came in contact with sailors from other ports and heard about freedom struggles by slaves in the Caribbean. From these stories and their own experiences with slave owners, several generations of watermen developed a clandestine political culture that advocated freedom and equality for all people. And they began to operate a section of the maritime underground railroad that helped runaway slaves escape on ships leaving Wilmington. Watermen
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