Escaping Slavery by Sea in Antebellum America: A Labor History

Abstract

This article explores a relatively neglected topic in the histories of slavery and abolitionism in the antebellum United States: how enslaved people escaped by sea and more specifically how the waterfront was a zone of struggle over slavery from roughly 1820 to 1865. The article treats four main themes: ships, trade, and port cities within the rise of Atlantic capitalism; life and work on the waterfront; efforts to control the docks from above; and the routes and destinations devised by escapees and their allies. Sailors, dockworkers, artisans, porters, market women, and seagoing fugitives cooperated and conspired in an alternative “public sphere,” using connections within the maritime working class to unleash a powerful though little understood force of abolitionism from below.

Keywords

• history from below
• slavery
• labor