At the heart of historian Marcus Rediker’s new book, Freedom Ship, is a stirring demonstration of just how much a careful researcher can uncover about the past, and how profoundly those discoveries can upend a history we thought we knew well. Rediker, whose body of scholarship focuses in large part on the history of migration across the Atlantic Ocean, has thoroughly and thoughtfully revealed a little-known dimension of the history of slavery in the United States—that what we call the Underground Railroad actually “had its origins on the waterfront.”
During the antebellum era, Northern-based merchant ships entering Southern ports offered fugitives from slavery a way out of bondage and a means of communicating among sailors, dockworkers, and other fugitives up and down the Atlantic coast. Thousands of enslaved people escaped Southern ports by sea during this time, creating an ever-changing community of resistance along the oceanfront. Rediker recounts the lives of several individuals involved in this maritime network, alongside a rich collection of historical photos, drawings, and prints that make the book a pleasure to leaf through. Any page will find a story both stirring and educational.
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery By Sea
By Marcus Rediker
Viking, 437 pages
Publication date: May 13, 2025
Rediker’s story begins with the influence of abolitionist texts such as Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles, a 1829 self-published pamphlet by free Black anti-slavery activist David Walker which had a wide if strictly sub-rosa circulation among Black and white sailors in Southern ports. Likewise, the 1825 self-published autobiography of William Grimes, a formerly enslaved barber who settled in New England, described the extreme cruelty of slavery down to the scars on his back, as well as how he and other enslaved people escaped with the help of Black and white seamen who hid them onboard between bales of cotton. Once in New York Harbor—famous for its slave-catchers—he moved through a maritime network of sympathetic seamen, and eventually settled down in New England.
Other figures that loomed large in maritime circuits of escape include both Black and white sailor-abolitionists such as William Powell and Jonathan Walker, as well as well-known formerly enslaved activists such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, both of whom escaped slavery by sea. Rediker also writes of David Ruggles, a free Black man and former sailor who patrolled the waterfront like a battle zone after 1835, seeking to free as many enslaved people as he could. More than a decade later, dockers in New York discovered a group of illegally enslaved people onboard a barque from Brazil, who subsequently escaped from prison after an abolitionist fed the jailer brandy and took away his keys.
That there are so many stories of abolitionist networks at sea is itself amazing—and that Rediker found these stories is a feat of scholarship. He traces the later lives of a number of escapees, many of whom settled in New England under assumed names. But even in the North, life was never easy for these fugitives from slavery, as the threat of recapture loomed even in states where slavery had been abolished. Other escapees, by the thousands, faced the worst possible conditions in jails after arriving in Southern ports.
Viking
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 prompted a mass mobilization in New York City, causing Mayor Caleb Woodhull to promise that no police would assist slave-catchers, but offering no assistance to the escapees in danger of being kidnapped. After the beginning of the Civil War, the politics shifted: In 1862, Black seamen in New York formed the American Seamen’s Protective Union Association, which Rediker describes as the “first Black trade union and the first seaman’s union of any kind in the history of the United States.” The union was chartered by New York State in 1863, and though it did not survive for long, its formation offered a legacy for those to come.
In Boston, the cradle of the organized abolitionist movement, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made life perilous for the Black population, leading about 400 Black Bostonians—20 percent of the free Black population at the time—to flee to Canada. As they left, hundreds of other free Black people arrived in town after fleeing New York, where the danger was even greater. In 1851, the attempted Shadrach Minkins, a Bostonian fugitive from slavery led to a struggle between the authorities and a large multiracial crowd of his supporters, resulting in his liberation and eventual escape to Canada. Southerners in Congress and in the press accused those involved in the struggle of treason; the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, meanwhile, called it the “noblest deed done in Boston since the destruction of the tea in 1773.”
Rediker closes out the book with a close look at the sea route passage by which fugitives in Southern States escaped from slavery to Philadelphia and New York. The use of boats to smuggle escapees was not unknown to the public at the time—newspapers published countless stories of the escape dramas, which undoubtedly made for more exciting headlines than any other local events prior to the beginning of the Civil War. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to say that Southern leaders increasingly viewed this drama as an unstoppable threat to the “peculiar institution” of slavery, and by extension, to their way of life.