Sailing to Freedom
Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad
new york public library digital collections
by Timothy D. Walker, PhD
Escaping from Norfolk in Captain Lee’s skiff. Published in William Still’s The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Letters, Narratives, etc. 1872.
No sooner, indeed, does a vessel, known to be from the North, anchor in any of these waters–and the slaves are pretty adroit at ascertaining from what state a vessel comes–than she is boarded, if she remains any length of time, and especially overnight, by more or less of them, in hopes of obtaining a passage in her to a land of freedom. —Captain Daniel Drayton, Personal memoir of Daniel Drayton (1855)
G
iven the strong popular and scholarly interest focused on both maritime history and slavery in the United States, including the extraordinary means that enslaved individuals used to escape bondage, what explains the surprising lack of historical investigation into the maritime dimensions of the Underground Railroad? Maritime escape episodes figure prominently in the majority of published North American fugitive slave accounts written prior to 1865; of 103 extant pre-Emancipation slave narratives, more than seventy percent recount the use of oceangoing vessels as a means of fleeing slavery.1 In William Still’s 1872 account of his activities as an Underground Railroad “Station Master” in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most striking engravings that accompany the text illustrate dramatic waterborne, maritime escapes.2
20
Clearly, the sea should rightly constitute a central component of the full Underground Railroad story. Yet the topic remains surprisingly under-studied: maritime fugitives have drawn minimal attention in the historiography of the field, and the specific nautical circumstances of their flight garners little discussion in classrooms when the Underground Railroad is taught.3 Pedagogical materials focus almost exclusively on overland routes and interior river crossings—people travelling clandestinely on foot, often at night, seeking to flee enslavement in the antebellum South. The historical record, however, amply demonstrates that, because of the myriad practical difficulties consequent to being a northbound African American fugitive travelling through hostile slave-holding territory, where vigilante patrols for escapees were an ever-present danger, successful escapes overland almost never originated
in the Deep South.4 In fact, as prominent Underground Railroad historian Fergus M. Bordewich states flatly, “Escape by land from the Deep South was close to impossible.”5 Instead, the best scholarship shows that the overwhelming majority of successful overland escapes were relatively short journeys that began in slave states (Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri), which were close in proximity to a free state (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa). New investigations have revealed a surprising reality: great numbers of enslaved persons made their way to freedom using coastal water routes, mainly along the Atlantic seaboard, but also fleeing southward from regions adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico coast. Because most historians of the Underground Railroad typically have not cultivated a maritime dimension to their research, this essential component of the SEA HISTORY 175, SUMMER 2021