Sailing to Freedom: Recovering and Re-centering the Maritime Dimension of the Underground Railroad

Dr. Timothy Walker (University of Massachusetts Darthmouth) highlights little-known stories of freedom-seeking by sea and describes the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad. This talk will reconsider and contextualize the importance of enslaved African Americans’ maritime and waterfront labor in southern ports, and how escapes were managed along the East Coast, moving from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland to safe harbor in northern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, and Boston. While scholarship on the Underground Railroad has focused almost exclusively on overland escape routes from the antebellum South, this new research expands our understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what this journey looked like for untold numbers of African Americans.  With few exceptions, successful escapes from enslavement in the Deep South were achieved not overland, but by water.