Of the innumerable images published in American newspapers in the decades before the Civil War, few were as ubiquitous as those depicting a young Black man traveling on foot through a forest (represented by a single tree), his belongings wrapped in a sack attached to a pole slung over his shoulder. Instantly recognizable as a runaway slave, the image was usually accompanied by text providing a physical description of the fugitive, the offer of a reward for his capture, and a warning that anyone who assisted the runaway—or even refused to take part in his capture—risked serious legal consequences.
Thousands of these notices (including those for women1) appeared in print, testimony to American slaves’ intense desire for freedom and their willingness to risk their lives to obtain it. But this familiar depiction, argues the historian Marcus Rediker in his new book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, is misleading, encouraging historians to focus on overland flight, ignoring the fact that “a large proportion” of slaves escaped by boat. Moreover, these advertisements imply that most fugitive slaves were acting on their own, whereas many relied on assistance from sympathetic individuals or organizations such as the Vigilance Committees. Springing into existence in the 1830s and 1840s in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other northern cities, they sought to combat an epidemic of kidnapping of northern free Blacks for sale into slavery and to provide help to fugitives. Taken together, these local networks came to be known as the Underground Railroad.
Ironically, the rapid expansion of cotton production in the lower South beginning in the 1820s not only enriched slave owners, merchants, and bankers, North and South, but also established a web of maritime trading routes that greatly increased fugitives’ opportunities for escape by sea. Hundreds of ships each year carried the South’s “white gold” to the port cities of the Atlantic coast and on to textile factories in New England and Europe. Rediker presents some startling statistics that illustrate the growth of seaborne commerce. By the middle of the nineteenth century nearly 200,000 seamen sailed out of the major ports each year, the largest number to and from New York City, which dominated the cotton trade. Some 20,000 of the sailors were African Americans. In 1855 American shipyards produced over two thousand new vessels. That explosion in maritime commerce, a result of slavery’s widening role in the American economy, created more occasions to steal away on ships and rendered obsolete the idea that those who fled the South did so unassisted.