Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker
• H. Robert Baker

Timothy D. Walker, ed. Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2021. 220 pp. $27.95.

The Underground Railroad is, in the historical imagination, an over-ground affair. Enslaved persons crossed hundreds of miles of tangled [End Page 263] forest along invisible tracks, fleeing from station to station, helped along by conductors, signaled by lights in certain windows, patches on certain quilts, and the like. The metaphorical “railroad” conjures up this image effortlessly, as does a century and a half of mythic history writing, both popular and professional.

Sailing to Freedom stakes the claim that the Underground Railroad should be reimagined as primarily a maritime venture. Although a full quantitative appraisal of freedom seeking is not possible, the available evidence is strongly suggestive. As we learn from editor Timothy D. Walker’s introductory essay, of the 103 pre-emancipation slave narratives, “more than 70 percent recount the use of oceangoing vessels as a means of fleeing slavery” (1). Moreover, the deeper into the cotton kingdom one resided, the less likely was escape overland, unless there was a port nearby with connections to northern ports. And every person escaping from enslavement along the Mississippi or the Ohio would have used water transportation.

The book has an elegant geographical organization, beginning in Charleston, South Carolina and ending in New Bedford, Massachusetts, after stops up the coast in North Carolina, Virginia, New York, and Connecticut. There is remarkable coherency to the essays. They show how escape routes and networks were established, examine trace evidence of freedom seekers, and connect their stories to national politics and economy. This produces something rare in a volume of collected essays: They are worth more than the sum of their parts.

Patterns emerge across these geographies. Labor arrangements provided means for escape. Michael D. Thompson’s essay shows how runaways in Charleston, South Carolina would often seek work on the docks among the enslaved laborers, effectively hiding in plain sight. Access to the docks meant access to the ships, to free Black sailors who might assist them, and to the cargo holds where they might hide amid the bales of cotton (41). David S. Cecelski’s contribution shows how in North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, runaways found work in the forest products industry, where the state’s onerous requirements for registering workers of color were largely ignored. From there, freedom seekers found assistance from Black watermen as they sought to get to Wilmington or other fishing hamlets where they might find passage to freedom (62). Cassandra Newby-Alexander’s essay on coastal Virginia shows how enslaved people worked in waterborne-transport work, which provided them with navigational knowledge and access to the sloops and ferries that were necessary to aid freedom seekers, or to seek freedom themselves (86).

Taken together, the early chapters on southern ports describe an eastern seaboard dependent on the muscle and expertise of enslaved workers. That enslaved workers took advantage of their position to claim freedom or assist others in doing so clearly vexed slaveholding governments, who found their efforts to arrest such behavior fruitless.

This takes us to another dimension of the maritime underground railroad explored by the essays—national politics. We are accustomed to a narrative dominated by enslavement in the territories, the admission of slave states, and federal participation in fugitive slave rendition—important issues all. But the waterborne Underground Railroad brought about a crisis within [End Page 264] federalism that gets far less attention. When three free Black sailors helped a Virginia man escape enslavement after visiting the port of Norfolk in 1839, the governor of Virginia requested their extradition for prosecution. Governor William Seward of New York refused. Virginia retaliated by passing a law requiring vessels from New York to undergo an additional inspection before leaving the state. In a gesture of solidarity, South Carolina passed an identical statute.

These retaliatory laws were likely unconstitutional regulations because they burdened shippers from a particular state (in this case, New York). At the very least, they intruded on federal power to regulate interstate...