“The most common—and the most important—means of transportation to freedom was the ship,” according to Marcus Rediker, author of the recently published book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea.
“The metaphor ‘underground railroad’ has, from the late 1830s onward, pointed us in the wrong direction, limiting most historical investigations to the landed routes by which people traveled northward to freedom,” Rediker explained. “Thousands of people escaped slavery by sea, leaving behind voluminous documentation, yet the history books have had little to say about them. We have been ignorant not only of the mass of maritime escapes, but of their rate of success, which was likely much higher than those attempted by land.”
The enslaved escaped from dozens of ports. “They arrived throughout the Northern states that had abolished slavery, but mainly to Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, and Boston,” noted Rediker. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (M.A. and Ph.D. in history), he is the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and has written extensively on slavery and maritime subjects, along with biographies of Benjamin Lay, the fierce Quaker abolitionist who spent his last years in Philadelphia City and County.
With its proximity to slaves states, a relatively large population of free African Americans, and a strong abolitionist movement, Philadelphia was the first stop for many escaped slaves making their way to northern states or Canada. Also, the opening of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in 1829 facilitated maritime traffic from the slave states of Virginia and Maryland.
Exhaustively researched, Freedom Ship documents the systems of escape by sea Rediker calls “the Runaway Navy.” It included slaves and free African Americans who worked on East Coast waterfronts, white ship captains and crew members, free black sailors, and networks of supporters in southern and northern ports, where communities of free Black citizens and their friends provided shelter, food, clothing, and other assistance.
“The port of Philadelphia was a major site in the Atlantic system of maritime escape,” Rediker said. “The Quaker tradition and living legacy of anti-slavery, coupled with the presence of sailors, dockworkers, and market women, along with Robert Purvis and the abolitionist Vigilance Committee, made the city a magnet for freedom-seekers.”
Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee played a key role in welcoming, housing, and providing aid to runaways. Founded in 1837 by abolitionist Robert Purvis, the committee reorganized in 1852 with William Still as chairman. The son of former slaves, Still interviewed hundreds of escapees upon their arrival in Philadelphia and kept a written record of their lives in captivity and in flight. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, possession of such records put both the escapees and their helpers at grave risk. Purvis reportedly burned his, and during the Civil War, Still hid his journals in a cemetery. In 1872, he published them in The Underground Railroad. A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c.
Schooners, Steamboats, and Skiffs
A lithograph by John William Hill and Benjamin Franklin Smith shows the Philadelphia waterfront in 1850. | Image courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia
Rediker’s meticulous analysis of The Underground Railroad concluded, “Still’s notations made it abundantly clear that the most common—and the most important—means of transportation to freedom was the ship. For the 283 people whose means of escape he noted, two-thirds (67.4 percent) did not so much run away from bondage as sail, steam, or row away from it, depending on the kind of vessel they boarded in their home port. Arrivals by sea were thus more than twice as common as all other noted means of travel combined.”
The steamer Pennsylvania made at least six voyages with fugitives in 1854 and 1855, according to Rediker. The steamship City of Richmond brought runaways from Virginia to Philadelphia “on at least thirteen voyages between August 1853 and November 1854, each time carrying someone who was usually hidden near the scorching hot boiler in the engine room.”
One of the City of Richmond fugitives was Clarissa Davis, a 22-year old woman who escaped bondage in Portsmouth, Virginia. She boarded the ship disguised as a man and hid in a box during the voyage to Philadelphia. Given a new name and Underground Railroad passport by the Vigilance Committee, she eventually was reunited with her brothers and sister in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The S.S. City of Richmond at sea by American painter Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen. | Image courtesy of Bonhams
While almost one-quarter of runaways who landed in Philadelphia came by steamship, roughly two-fifths (42.4 percent) arrived on a schooner—one of the many two-masted sailing ships commonly used in the coastal trade. One of these was under the command of Captain James Fountain, who reportedly carried 57 people from Virginia and North Carolina to Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware between June 1855 and November 1857. “Of course, the number of fugitives he transported was no doubt greater and the time span of his efforts much longer,” noted Rediker. “Fountain family lore had it that the captain had assisted more than a thousand.”
Not all attempts were successful. In 1848, Captain Daniel Drayton, a New Jersey native who spent most of his adult life in Philadelphia, was caught smuggling 77 men, women, and children from Washington, D.C. to freedom in the Quaker City. “Drayton, his two crewmates, and the freedom seekers were captured and returned to the nation’s capital, where police held at bay an angry mob eager to lynch Drayton,” Rediker wrote. Drayton was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He served four years before being pardoned by President Millard Fillmore.
A drawing of Lear Green being smuggled in a sailor’s sea chest. | Image from The Underground Railroad. A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. by William Still
William Still counted 18-year old Lear Green among “the heroic women of the nineteenth century.” Bonded to a butter dealer in Baltimore, Green wanted to marry her fiance, William Adams, as a free woman. Green, Adams, and his mother concocted a plan to smuggle her to freedom in a sailor’s sea chest. They had the loaded sea chest brought aboard one of the Ericsson Line steamers to Philadelphia as cargo. A free woman, “Adams’s mother would accompany the chest on the voyage, knowing that the racist policy of the shipping company required all people of color to remain on deck, which was exactly where she wanted to be, near the chest that carried Green,” explained Rediker.
After the 18-hour voyage, Green and the sea chest were brought ashore, eventually to Still’s home, where “she remained several days under the protection and care of the Vigilance Committee.” Green made it to Elmira, New York, where she married William Adams, but, sadly, died just three years later. “The chest in which Lear escaped has been preserved by the writer as a rare trophy, and her photograph, taken while in the chest, is an excellent likeness of her and, at the same time, a fitting memorial,” Still lamented.
‘A Sharp Contest with Pursuers’
William Still assisted nearly 1,000 men, women, and children along the eastern branch of the Underground Railroad as they fled enslavement. | Photo courtesy of Swarthmore College
The Underground Railroad remains widely available in print and online. It features vivid accounts of the cruelties escapees endured as slaves, along with detailed narratives of actual trips by people seeking freedom on schooners, steamboats, and small craft.
One of these narratives describes how, in 1860, Thomas and Mary Ann Sipple, Henry and Elizabeth Burkett, John Purnell, and Hale Burton decided to make a run from captivity in Worcester County, Maryland. “In considering what way would be safest for them to adopt, they concluded that the water would be less dangerous than any other route,” reported Still. They purchased an old bateau for six dollars and planned to cross the Delaware Bay to New Jersey. Not far from shore, “they were attacked by five white men in a small boat. The parties speedily came to blows. One of the white men dealt a heavy blow with his oar upon the head of one of the black men, which knocked him down, and broke the oar at the same time. The blow was immediately returned by Thomas Sipple, and one of the white men was laid flat on the bottom of the boat.
“The white men were instantly seized with a panic and retreated. After getting some yards off they snapped their guns at the fugitives several times, and one load of small shot was fired into them.” Four of the escapees were hit, “but the shot being light, none of the fugitives were seriously damaged. Some of the shot will remain in them as long as life lasts. The conflict lasted for several minutes, but the victorious bondmen were only made all the more courageous by seeing the foe retreat.”
Six escapees battle violent white pursuers while fleeing Maryland for New Jersey. | Image from The Underground Railroad. A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. by William Still
They made landfall not far from the Cape May lighthouse, exhausted and without resources or knowledge of their location. “After walking about one mile, they came across the captain of an oyster boat. They perceived that he spoke in a friendly way, and they at once asked directions with regard to Philadelphia. He gave them the desired information, and even offered to bring them to the city if they would pay him for his services. They had about twenty-five dollars in all. This they willingly gave him, and he brought them according to agreement.” Upon arrival in Philadelphia, “They greatly needed food, clothing, rest, and money, which they freely received.”
“Still assiduously recorded information about fugitives who passed through his office,” noted Rediker. “He wrote down the names of the self-emancipated and for many of them, noted details such as age, physical appearance, where their escape began, why they decided to run, and how they made their getaway, by land or by sea. Still listened sympathetically as the veterans of bondage told chilling tales of murder, flogging, rape, and other cruelties that staggered the imagination. [He] understood the historic nature of what he was witnessing and its importance for posterity.”
Likewise, in Freedom Ship, Rediker makes a valuable contribution to the history of what Still called the Underground Railroad. Covering the waterfront from Savannah to Boston, Freedom Ship is a ground-breaking, deeply researched, fascinating look into the long-neglected role of the maritime trade in enabling countless runaways to achieve freedom.
