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Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)
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C
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Markus Rediker again. It's the second time that I'm talking with Markus. He's a world renowned historian of transatlantic slavery and today he's here with us to talk about his latest book called Freedom the Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by and their book was just published a couple of months ago by Viking Publishers. Markus, thank you very much for accepting this invitation.
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D
My pleasure to be with you again.
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C
We usually ask people to introduce themselves, but you need no introduction. So I'll just get to the topic and you have been on our channel several times. I do encourage our listeners to viewers to check the website and listen to your previous podcast, Freedom Ship. I talked to you, I guess about a couple of years ago about a book, a very famous book you wrote a number of years ago called Slave Ship. And this book is called Freedom Ship. So can you tell us, first of all, and I do remember you did tell me that you were working on that book at that time. Tell us about the idea that the inception of this book and how does it follow up on. Or if it follows up on the last book that you wrote?
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D
Yes, it is definitely a sequel to the Slave Ship. But let me come to that in a moment after I talk about the origins of this particular book. As it happens, this book began more than 30 years ago. Wow. As I was working on a book with someone named Peter Linebaugh, a book called the Many Headed Hydra, about transatlantic resistance in the 17th and the 18th century. And during that work, I began to read advertisements for fugitives from bondage in the south and more specifically in southern port cities. And what I found in these advertisements was fascinating. They would frequently say that the runaway, the escapee, was last seen in the company of sailors or last seen heading toward the docks, or was well known around the port city. And then there was one particular phrase that was repeated again and again and again. All masters of vessels are warned not to take this person on board or they will suffer the full consequences of the law. So what I began to see was a lot of these people were getting on board of ships and sailing away. So I began to think about this. I did more research. I basically found hundreds of these ads. And what was really fascinating about it was that at that time, and to a large extent since, the overwhelming majority of studies of the so called underground railroad concerned people who escaped by land. So I wondered how important was this group of escapees who were getting away by sea. And so this kind of prompted me to. To pursue the subject. I. I wrote a lecture about the subject. I called it the Maritime Frontier of Freedom. American history at that time was very much concerned about frontiers, but the landed frontier in the west didn't really think about the ocean as a frontier. But then as it happens, that book, the Many Headed Hydra, became over large. And we cut a lot of things out of it. And one of the things that went out was the work on these fugitives. So I put it aside and didn't think of it for a while. But I never entirely forgot about these stories. And then I'd say about five years ago, I thought, maybe I'll revisit that subject. And so I went back to it. I recovered the previous research, I began to do new research. And that then represented the origins of the current project. Now, during those 30 years, some very significant work had been done on People escaping slavery by sea. And I would mention three people in particular. David Cselsky wrote a beautiful book called the Waterman's Song about basically maritime life and labor among African Americans in North Carolina. And there was a chapter there about escaping by sea. And then a very good scholar named Cassandra Newby Alexander wrote a book about Virginia waterways and the escape by Sea, the Chesapeake Bay, the Many rivers. Very useful book. And then someone else, Timothy D. Walker, got together a group of scholars to produce a collection of essays called Sailing to Freedom. So these are three very important works to me, and I think really played an important role in opening up this subject. And so I wrote Freedom Ship as a way to contribute to this work, to show that there was this very big, powerful engine of resistance that we knew relatively little about.
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C
It's quite fascinating when you talk about the idea was actually planted in your head or came to you about 30 years ago. And I think previously that I talked to. You did mention that history is usually made at the sea, but there's this bias towards the land. And then you do call it terocentrism, I guess. And I wanted to ask you. I don't imagine this was an easy book to write in terms of resources. I can't even imagine now how many archives you had to go through to be able to find those little stories here and there. Can you talk about the sources? What sort of sources did you use? What kind of archival research did you go through? And maybe was there any. I'm sure you found a lot of fascinating stories, but any story that particularly stuck with you?
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D
Yeah. Well, let me answer that by saying that I remember the last time we talked about the slave ship. One of the things I said was that I couldn't have written that book. But for the 30 years of work in maritime archives that I had already done. In other words, I had already gathered a lot of material on slave ships and on slave revolts on board of slave ships and that sort of thing. And the same was true of this book. I had already, as I've said, done a lot of research. I knew a lot about the waterfront. I knew a lot about sailors. I knew what kind of a subversive presence they could be in southern port cities. But when I came to expand the research, what I discovered was that there were really three main bodies of source material. First were the runaway advertisements. And of course, I expanded my research into these newspapers, which actually was much easier than it was 30 years ago, because at that time you didn't have keyword searchable Databases of. Of early American newspapers. So that actually became much easier. And. But I found, I guess I probably found around 1,500, 1,600 cases of. Now, let me be clear. These are advertisements placed by enslavers who think that they're enslaved people. Escape by sea, right? So sometimes you systematically mislead somebody. So that's always to be borne in mind. But that was a very important part of the research because these advertisements, even though they're small, some of them are only a couple of hundred words long, they frequently tell a very human story that this man or this woman was missing. Here's what they had on when they left. You know, identifying characteristics. Many people had, you know, wounds and scars that were probably the result of violence inflicted in this process of being enslaved. But these. This was a very important body of evidence. A second body was that I had already known this, but I discovered that abolitionists in northern cities, the cities to which people would escape, primarily Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, Massachusetts and Boston, these abolitionists began to take down the stories of these escapees. And of course, they took down the stories of people who escaped by land and by sea. But being in the port cities where the big abolitionist organizations were based, they basically took down the life stories and the drama of escape of quite a lot of these people. And they publish them. And so there is literally a published archive of first person accounts of escaping slavery by sea. Now, these two have to be used with care because sometimes the mostly white abolitionists would sort of interpolate their own values into the story. So you have to be very careful about what is authentic and likely coming from the escapee, him or herself, and what is being said. But by and large, you can hear the voices of the people who escaped, at great risk to themselves, I might add. So that's another very important kind of source because it gives you the voice of the rebels, the people who are escaping. A third very important group of sources were records kept by abolitionists, especially in New York and Philadelphia, when these people arrived by sea, because they would often go to the office of these groups called the vigilance committees. Vigilance committees were more radical abolitionist groups, usually led by black abolitionists. And these people would then speak to someone in the office who would then take down their story of how they escaped. Particularly outstanding in this regard is a man named William Still, a black abolitionist in Philadelphia who took down, in varying degrees of detail, the life stories of over 900 people, a large percentage of whom escaped by sea. So those three bodies of sources were crucial. But also, as someone who's been writing social history and history from below for a long time, one of the things I had to learn to do was to find every conceivable course. Excuse me, every conceivable source I could. And court records are really valuable in this regard because poor people end up in court records that are frequently on the wrong side of the law one way or another. So that became a fourth body of sources. But I used everything I could find. Those were the sources of the book.
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C
And I think in your previous book, Slave Ship, you did also rely a lot on court materials as well. Yeah, absolutely.
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D
I think actually in almost all of the books that.
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C
Yeah, you're right.
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D
Certainly true. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea about sailors in the 18th century. I found these extraordinary sources in the High Court of Admiralty Records in which sailors would give depositions about murder or piracy or mutiny or whatever it may be. So these court records are really crucial because they do allow you to get much closer to the subject matter and the people who are so brave as to want to escape.
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C
It's just fascinating how much information you can find from these usually understudied sources. And this is, I guess, the great thing about history from below, which is a phrase that actually I came to know by reading your books. And let me ask you another question, but before that, I do like to make this comment that I myself, you know, when I'm not a historian by any means, but I'm an enthusiast in American history. And I also had that bias that slave scapes was usually conducted or later facilitated by railroad. And you do talk about how this metaphor could be a bit misleading because there were also huge infrastructure, maritime infrastructure, which I did not know about again, before reading your book, and I do like to talk about that, but maybe we can talk about, I think it's conceivable how it might be relatively easier to escape by train. This is what a lot of people have in portrait in movies, fictionally might be. But when it comes to maritime or escaping by sea, it requires, as you mention in the book, it requires a whole body of a different kind of knowledge and skills. Literacy, geographic knowledge, social intelligence, technical skills. Can you talk about. And that's why you call it, I think a part of your book is a chapter of a book. It's called Art of Scape. Can you talk about what it involved to be able to escape by the sea? We're going to, given all the different skills that it required.
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D
Well, let me begin by reflecting just a Moment on the phrase underground railroad. Because that, as you know, is a metaphor. That's a metaphor. And what metaphors do, the way they work in our minds, is that they focus your attention on certain things, but they literally occlude from your vision, other things. So one of the things that struck me right away was that very few people escaped slavery underground and very few escaped by train. So that is kind of an interesting and misleading thing to call it. I think underground railroad was coined sort of in the late 1830s, early 1840s. But I think this maritime system of escape, people were blinded to it to a large extent by the metaphor. They just didn't think about people escaping by other means. And, of course, there were a lot of reasons why the ship was the best way to escape. For example, if you're trying to escape by land, on foot, as many people did and tried to do, every white person is deputed to arrest you if you seem suspicious to them, right? So you could go for hundreds of miles and run this risk hundreds of times. But if you get on board a ship, once you push off from the docks in that southern port, you're really not going to see anyone but the captain of the crew until you arrive in the northern port. So it's much, much safer, also much faster. And I do think that we have looked back at this retrospectively because of the looming industrial revolution, which the railroad was a major symbol. But if you look at the actual mechanics of trade in the, you know, 1830s to the 1860s, the amount of trade that happened by sea was vastly greater than what happened by railroad. So it's just a sheer economic fact that ships were much more important to the working of the antebell economy than were railroads at that time. Railroads become more important later on. So, yes, you're right. I do say, and I think it's an important point, that running away by sea was an art. It was something that required intelligence, thinking, planning, right? It's not something that. I mean, you can do it spontaneously, but the likelihood that you're going to get caught again is very, very great. So I found this man who said. He says running away requires head work, right? And you have to think your way through it. There are a lot of things you have to know. You have to know something about the local ecology, right? How am I going to escape? What's my route of escape? How can I feed myself on that route of escape? Let's say you live outside of Charleston, South Carolina, and you've got to go, you know, 10 or 15 miles before you get to the dockside of Charleston, where you can get on board a ship. You've got to know how you can sustain yourself as you're doing all this. Some people came from as far as 80 or 100 miles inland. So that's a really important question. You need to know something about the seasons. What is the temporality of shipping? When are there likely to be the most ships there? What time of year in what kind of weather? Right. But the thing that you needed most of all was social knowledge. You needed the ability to read people very quickly. You needed to be able to identify who were the people who can help you in this escape and who are the people who can harm you, who are the people that you really need to stay away from, lest you risk being recaptured. And I might just at this point say, you know, this is not an abstraction. If you run away from bondage and you fail, you're going to pay with the flesh on your back. There's going to be might even pay with your life, but there's going to be a violent punishment. In almost all cases that follows your desire to escape. So you need to know where you can get help. We have this image of the single runaway man with the bindle on a staff and a woman, a single runaway woman. This creates the impression that running away was an individual action. It wasn't. It was a social action and a collective action because you had to have help. And of course, the way it worked for the maritime system of escape was you'd get to the docks and then you would meet a sailor or a dock worker or a market woman, someone who lived and then worked on the docks. And then you try to talk your way on board the ship. You might pay some money to get on board. You might just count on some act of solidarity. There were a lot of black sailors in this time period who were sympathetic to people who wanted to escape. So you had to use that intelligence of social interaction to get on board that ship. So you literally needed to think your way to freedom.
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C
And apart from the skills you needed to have, you just alluded to the fact that there was also a social network, sailors, even women. There were churches, grog shops, that office, that maritime labor that all facilitated that scape. Can you talk about that social network that was there? Can you expand on that? You did mention that there were already a lot of black sailors there as well who were sympathetic to the cause. And I think what I'm really interested in is that, and I will ask you again towards the end of the interview because I do like to relate it to present time as well. That interracial solidarity, that social exchange that was at port.
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D
So a key to my book is basically the labor history of the port city because there is a social group and also a social force in every port city that I call the motley crew. And by that I mean the multi ethnic group of workers, men and women of many different races and ethnicities and backgrounds, who are required to load and unload the ships, to sail the ships. This world of work along the docks, those two or three blocks right at the edge of the water, this was an extraordinarily important place to the history of capitalism because these ports are kind of the linchpins of the Atlantic capitalist economy where the cooperation of workers is essential to the accumulation of capital. But once these workers have been organized to cooperate with each other, they can then come up with projects of their own that the merchants who basically have organized their cooperation would not approve of. So this is where you come in with this idea of organized networks of escape. Sometimes they happen they on the ship, sometimes they happen on the docks, sometimes they happen in a grog shop where mixed race groups of workers would come and sing and dance and hatch conspiracies. Right? You can imagine two people meeting in a grog shop and this, this escapee sees a Black sailor and says, hey, man, can you get me on board that ship? And that person will frequently say, yeah, I can show up tomorrow morning at such and so time, bring some food and bring some water, and I'll get you on board, and I'll hide you in between the bales of the cotton that we stow. Right? There's a whole labor aspect to creating a free space for people on the ship. So these networks are. What's fascinating about them is that they're fluid and sometimes temporary. But because many of these sailors are on what are called packet ships, it means they return to the same ports again and again and again. So they actually meet people and they form relationships of trust with people. So that is very important. I would also emphasize that in both the ports of exit and in the ports of arrival, the ports of exit in the south, the ports of arrival in the north, a really critical part is played by the free black communities in both places. Now, in the south, they're fairly small because free people of color were considered to be dangerous. But in every southern port, there is a group of people who are free, and they frequently live on the waterfront, and they frequently work on the waterfront. So they're in this strategic position so that they know the sailors who are coming into town next week, right? And they will frequently hide people in their homes, these free black workers, in the southern ports, until the right opportunity comes along. In Norfolk, Virginia, which was kind of an epicenter of escape, they could hide people for months at a time and feed them until the right vessel came along. And then the same thing is true in the northern cities, where you have larger free black communities, especially in Philadelphia and New York, smaller but important ones in New Bedford and Boston. And they, too, work on the waterfront. And so that when an escapee comes ashore, they're the first people who are there and able to help them. So all this is really critical. These networks are within the port and they are between the ports because the sailors are the mobile connectors of all this. And they will connect a network in New York to another network in Savannah, Georgia.
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C
And among these networks, one thing that stood out for me was that you do talk about interracial solidarity, given what's happening around the world these days with Israel and Palestine. And Irish people have always been at the forefront of supporting oppressed groups because they were colonized themselves for a number of centuries. And you do mention also that there were Irish sailors there as well there who formed solidarity and were sympathetic to the cause of the black people and helped them Facilitate this escape.
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D
Well, let me illustrate your point using Frederick Douglass.
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C
Yeah.
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D
Who is probably the greatest abolitionist of the global 19th century. A person who escaped from slavery In Baltimore in 1838, when Frederick Douglass was a boy, he encountered two Irish sailors, and he helped them unload some stone from a small vessel onto shore. And one of them said, asked him, quite sympathetically, are you a slave? And Frederick Douglass said, yes, I think he was maybe 12 years old at the time. 12, 13 years old. And these two Irish sailors said, you know, you could get away from here and find freedom in the North. And Douglass was very savvy. He wasn't completely sure he trusted these two sailors. He thought they might have been encouraging him to run away and then return him for a reward. But he said to himself, I want to learn to write before I try to escape. I want to be a little older, but I made up my mind, he says, in that encounter with those Irish sailors, that someday I wouldn't be free. You see this dockside circulation of ideas of freedom.
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C
It's fascinating. I want to talk about specific people that you also mentioned in your book. One of them is David Walker and how he used that network of sailors to spread his ideas in southern ports. Who was he, and how did he use that network to circulate his racial ideas, ideas through maritime channel, his ideas about slavery?
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D
David Walker was a man of the waterfront in every sense throughout his life. He was born in the North Carolina port town of Wilmington. He lived for a time in Charleston, South Carolina, and then he moved to Boston. He was a free person of color. When he got to Boston, he set up a shop on the waterfront selling clothes to sailors. That's called a slop seller. So what he would do is really fascinating. He got to know these sailors that were in his shop all the time. Black sailors and white sailors. And of course, David Walker, as a committed abolitionist, wrote in 17. Excuse me, in 1829, a scorching critique of slavery called David Walker's Appeal, in which he was encouraging the enslaved people of the American south to rise up and follow the example of. Of the Haitian Revolution, which had happened, you know, about 25 years earlier. Here's the really clever thing that David Walker did to disseminate his ideas. He would give copies of this pamphlet to sailors and say, okay, where are you going? I'm going to Norfolk, Virginia. Okay, take these and give these out to people in Norfolk. Where are you going? I'm going to Charleston, South Carolina. Okay, take these, these and give these out. He would even go so far as to create a secret, hidden compartment in the clothing of the sailors where they could hide the pamphlets. So David Walker's work was disseminated in this maritime network by sailors. And of course, when these incendiary pamphlets start showing up in southern ports, the local ruling class, the city authorities, are terrified. And so they start rounding people up, they start arresting people, they start arresting sailors. And they pass laws to try to keep black sailors, especially, from bringing this kind of subversive material into the port cities. So these are called the Negro Seamen Act. South Carolina passes the first one in 1822. But every Southern state on the water everywhere passes one of these laws over the next 15 to 20 years to criminalize the relationship between the arriving black sailor and the enslaved worker on the docks.
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C
And I'm glad you mentioned that Negro simonite that was introduced in Southern. It's the southern laws in southern parts of the United States. What did it require? You mentioned that it required, for example, quarantining black sailors fumigating ships. Can you talk about what it actually required? And it obviously failed. How did that come about? How did it change? Let's say, how did people resist these laws?
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D
Well, what it meant was that when a ship came into a southern port, they had to pass through quarantine and the black sailors would be taken off the ship as if they were sick. Right. As if, like, the idea is that resistance is contagious. And, you know, I think it actually is contagious. So they were taken off these ships and they would be basically held in jail until the ship had unloaded its cargo and taken on a new Cargo. And then 24 hours before the ship was supposed to set sail, the black sailors would be allowed to go back on board. So a lot of them waited until the last 24 hours to take on board these escapees. Right. So it really didn't work. It's also true that white sailors were helping a lot of people get on board. And there's a case in Charleston, a very high profile court case, in which this white sailor named Edward Smith is distributing copies of. Of David Walker's pamphlet. So what the Negro Seaman Acts recognized was that the black sailor in a southern port was a potentially revolutionary figure. And so the authorities did everything they can to try to isolate and contain the ideas and the practices of resistance.
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C
And this, when I was reading your book, this part, to me, it kind of illustrates the failure, let's say, the limits of state power in the face of grassroots resistance and grassroots movements. And again, I do always try to relate what I read about history to present times. And again, we'll come back to that towards the end of the interview. I do see it, people all over the world in the street basically every weekend asking the governments not to support sending weapons to Israel. And it's only an example, I guess, but you do see grassroots movements in unions, people taking to the street to demand change. And it is contagious, I guess, as you mentioned, resistance is contagious. Well, let me ask another question about Douglas. You did mention him at the. A few minutes ago, and I wasn't. I myself, I wasn't really familiar with. I didn't really relate him to this maritime labor and how it helped him shape his political consciousness and also his escape. And also Frederick Douglass. Douglass use of nautical imagery to reveal his ideas about freedom. Can you talk about that part of the book, please?
- [36:17]
D
Sure, yeah. Frederick Douglass said, you know, he wrote three great versions of his own autobiography. Two were published during the period of slavery. One was published afterwards. But he says, all of the good fortune I've ever had in my life came the moment I arrived in the port city of Baltimore, because urban slavery was just different. You weren't subject to the same kinds of controls. There was more de facto freedom. You could meet with other people. You could talk with people on the waterfront, like those two Irish sailors. So what Douglas did in the course of his life was to become a maritime worker. He acquired the skill of being a caulker. A caulker was a maritime artisan who would make a ship seaworthy, watertight by pressing oakum between the planks in the hull. It was actually very skilled work. And there were a lot of black caulkers in Baltimore at this time. They were actually fairly well organized. So this living in this maritime world enabled Frederick Douglass to first of all, gather up a great deal of knowledge about where he wanted to go and how he was going to get there. He ended up actually escaping by train to go back to the earlier part of our discussion. But here's what he did. He dressed as a sailor, and he got from a friend of his named Stanley, who was a black sailor, a seaman's protection certificate, which would be the document that he would show to anybody to make them realize that he was a sailor and was free and could travel to the North. And as he said, he said, look, I could walk the walk of a sailor. And sailors did walk a particular way because of the sort of the way the ship you had a certain a sailor was identified by how they walked. He said, I could talk the talk of a sailor. He knew all the technical terms of a ship. And so this disguise became his. His way to make it to freedom. So Douglass was someone who. Whose work on the waterfront really facilitated his escape. And it also had a deep effect on him because he remained very interested in the questions of labor for the rest of his life. He. He had a special feeling for black workers in particular and was involved in several undertakings in the 1840s and 1850s and even, well thereafter. So Frederick Douglass had a maritime dream. That's what I call that chapter. He used to stand in Baltimore and look at the Chesapeake Bay and see these vessels, these white sails out there. And they kind of haunted him. He called them freedom's swift angels. And so they sort of occupied a large part in his imagination of freedom. And then that maritime world contributed to his escape.
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C
And when it comes to social movements or history in general, especially history from below, one aspect that is usually understudied is the role of women or the gender aspect of it. And when I read your previous book, it wasn't your last book, the Slave, she wrote a number of years ago, you did talk about, you know, women on the ship. You do mention some of them, and to me was one of the most fascinating parts of that book and also really moving, disturbing description of women went through there. In your book Hero, you also, again, talk about gender and motherhood and the role they played in shaping, let's say, facilitating these scapes. I'm interested to know, and you mentioned some of them, like Harriet Jacobs, how her escape was shaped by her role as a mother. Can you talk about the role of women and perhaps talk about that kinship and communities that they built? And I'm guessing that even in any social movement, progressive movements, movements around the world, union movements in the United States or all parts of the world, women did play a very, very important role, which is unfortunately understudied. Can you talk about the role of women in maritime scape?
- [40:48]
D
Yeah. Let me begin this way. Let me begin with Harriet Jacobs, about whom, as you know, I wrote a chapter in the book. Harriet Jacobs was enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina. She made her way to Philadelphia and then to New York. She went by sea. She escaped by sea, thanks to three uncles in her family, all of whom were sailors. So the maritime knowledge of her family was crucial. But when she got her freedom in the late 1850s and in 1861, she published a really extraordinarily powerful book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which, for the first time really blew up the issue of the peculiarly violent experience of women under bondage. She had in her own life, had to fight off this lecherous, would be rapist, this enslaver named James Norcom, Dr. James Norcom. She fought him off successfully, but she then exposed all this to the nation. So there is this very important part of the story, which is that women had experiences that made them very eager to escape, but they also had children, which made it harder for them to escape. Now, one of the things I wanted to look at was to see what percentage of the people escaping to Philadelphia and New York were women. Now, you think of the waterfront as a very masculine place, right? For male labor is really crucial. Well, it turns out that a somewhat higher percentage of the total of escapees by sea were greater than by comparison, by land. The general figure is around 20% of the people who escape by land are women. By sea, it's about 23%. Now, how did women get on board these slave ships? That's an interesting question. It was easier when they had the cooperation of the ship captain, who could then allow them to come on and bring their children. But that's not the only way. They actually managed to smuggle women and their whole families on board these ships and hide them away somewhere. So that's one aspect of the women's experience of maritime escape by sea. Another is that there were women working on the waterfront who facilitated escape. Now, one of the abolitionists, a black abolitionist named Robert Purvis in Philadelphia, singled out two women in Baltimore to market. Women in Baltimore, these are people who work on the waterfront. They sell, you know, cakes and pies and fresh vegetables and fruit frequently to hungry sailors who have just come off the ship. They work on the waterfront. They're in touch with these sailors. They know them. Right. He said these two women were absolutely crucial because what they would do is they would provide documents that would allow escapees to get away. And when they arrived in Philadelphia, they would take those documents, they were probably seamen's protection certificates, and then send them back to those same women so they could use them again and again. And in Boston, for example, a leading abolitionist there said when a ship would come in the market, women would go aboard the ship to sell, you know, fruit and the like to sailors. And then they would find a sympathetic sailor and say, do you have a stowaway on board? And if the person says, yes, we do, Then in at midnight or the middle of the night, a group of abolitionists would come out, row out in a boat and basically make an armed rescue of that person. But the intelligence provided by the market women was the key. So the role of women in this world of escape is really significant, both as escapee and as people who facilitated the escape. Well, I was down on my last.
- [45:11]
C
Dollar than I started saving because the.
- [45:12]
D
Bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving.
- [45:14]
C
So I put my earnings in a high yield account, let the savings compound in the interest amount. I'm optimizing cash flow, putting debt in check. Now time is my friend and not.
- [45:24]
D
A pain in the neck.
- [45:24]
C
And we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck.
- [45:28]
B
Boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. Brilliantly boring since 1865.
- [45:40]
C
I'm sure a lot of people go and read the book, but I do encourage to read that chapter of even more more carefully. And if they wanted me to read one chapter me from the book, I would suggest that one. It's simply amazing. And it just highlights, like you mentioned, the role of women in these movements, which has been quite strong throughout the history, but unfortunately has been understudied. And when we talked about solidarity, we talked about Irish sailors, we talk about black sailors, but there was also white solidarity, and there were risks associated with it. And you mentioned one, one particular guy, Jonathan Walker, who was sympathetic to the cause, but he was branded with two alphabets, SS slave stealer. And I found that story also quite interesting. And I'm sure our listeners would be interested to know about Jonathan Walker, who he was and how he's being branded slave stealer, how it became like a symbol for abolitionist movement.
- [46:40]
D
Yeah, Jonathan Walker was a sailor from New England. He had sailed out of Nantucket. He had sailed to the South a lot. And he basically said, every time I was in the South, I studied slavery. I talked to people. I talked to people on the ships, I talked to people on the docks, I talked to people on plantations. And this fortified his resolve to help people escape. He ended up relocating to Pensacola, Florida, where in 1844 a group of enslaved men came to him. He already had a reputation as an abolitionist. He readily admitted it, which was not a popular thing to do in a Deep south place like Pensacola, Florida. But they knew him by reputation. Some of them had worked with him on the waterfront. And they said, will you carry us to freedom? And Walker said, I felt it was my moral responsibility to say yes, that I would do whatever I could to help. So they got on board a small whale boat, as it's called. These are the small boats that whale boats would carry when men would go out and harpoon the whales, very sturdy, kind of smaller vessel. And they were going to sail and row from Pensacola to Nassau in the Bahamas, a place where slavery had already been abolished by the British, that was still a British colony. And they got very close to making it where they were, but they were intercepted. And one white man and seven African American men in the boat ship captain thought these people are runaways or better yet, sail aways. So they were arrested, they were taken back to Pensacola. And Jonathan Walker was tried as a slave stealer. And as you can imagine, that's a very serious allegation in the South. He was a political prisoner for quite a long time. And the formal punishment, part of the formal punishment he got was to have his hand branded, as you said, with S. S standing for slave stealer. White men weren't branded in the 19th century. This was something that was reserved for enslaved people. So this was kind of scandalous. And in a way, the authorities were saying, you're no better than a slave and we're going to treat you that way. So anyway, eventually, make a long story short, Northern abolitionists raised the money to pay off his bills. His time had been served. He comes back to the north and he becomes a celebrity in the abolitionist movement, going from town to town to speak about his plight. And the thing that really was just completely electrifying to the audiences that he spoke to was to show them the SS scars on his hand. So he became known as the man with the branded hand. And this became a major symbol of the abolitionist movement during the 1840s.
- [50:03]
C
I have only a couple of more questions and I've taken a lot of your time and there's a lot I want to cover in the book, but we don't want to. We want our listeners to also read the book. One thing, another thing, that when it comes to this solidarity was the first black union, the maritime union that was formed as a result of these maritime networks and the abolitionist movement. And you also mentioned another person, William Powell there. Can you talk about the establishment of that first black Marian union? I don't think it was easy for black people to form a unit back then.
- [50:43]
D
Not at all. William Powell is one of the most interesting people in this book. He was a black sailor abolitionist. He had gone to sea earlier in his life, and then what he decided to do was to create a boarding house for black sailors. And this boarding house would be, you know, a place where you could stay and rest up between voyages. But it was Also a place of sort of labor organizing. He would help the sailors to get jobs with ship captains who were not as prejudiced as some. He would help to get them decent jobs at decent wages. So William Powell was a man who believed in seafaring solidarity, solidarity with his fellow sailors. But he also believed that that solidarity should extend to these black sailors bringing enslaved people, freedom seekers, back to New York in what becomes another crucial aspect of this maritime system of escape. So literally hundreds upon hundreds of these escapees are brought to New York, and they stay in his boarding house until he gets them, you know, somewhere further on down the line to freedom. But what's really fascinating is that these black sailors who stay in his boarding house, they get a political education there because he holds reading groups and lectures. And, you know, he. He believes in the moral improvement of people, especially people who didn't have educational opportunities. And then in 1863, a significant group of black sailors decide they're going to form the first trade union for sailors, which turns out to be the first maritime union anywhere in the United States. Formed in New York, the American Seamens Protection Union Association. It's kind of a mouthful. So maritime solidarity to William Powell extended to black sailors and their work lives, extended to enslaved people who were seeking freedom. And finally, it extended to forming a union to protect the rights of maritime workers. So I think he's a great embodiment of one of the main themes of the book. It is.
- [53:11]
C
And I were few. I think it was a couple of months ago. I was just reading about. I haven't read the book yet, but I was reading about black liberalism and how black people started because the liberal ideology, United States, apparently didn't apply to them. But anyway, that. That was an interesting part of the book to me as well. And maybe two couple questions only. I'm interested to know how the political fallout of the Fugitive Slave Law came about. And what role did maritime play in this? There were a lot of, of course, abolitionists, a lot of movements against slavery. But I'm particularly interested in this area that hasn't been really studied that much. And you did mention a few of the acts and how resistance, as you mentioned, was contagious. What role did maritime play in bringing in fallout of the Fugitive Slave Act?
- [54:02]
D
Well, okay, so the issue of fugitives getting on board Northern vessels, okay. And one thing your listeners should know, your viewers should know, orteza, is that 80% of the ships trading in Southern ports were owned by Northern merchants. And after they leave the Southern ports, they're going back to the North. And every one of those ships represents a lifeline, right? So this is crucial. So the continual loss of labor through this maritime system of escape is infuriating to southern enslavers. And so they start screaming bloody murder. And actually, in Norfolk, as early as 1844, they propose something very similar to what becomes the Fugitive Slave act, which will be passed in 1850. And it's really driven by maritime escapees. Well, I use the port of Boston to demonstrate how maritime escapees were so important to the struggle against the Fugitive Slave Act. Turns out there were seven high profile cases from 1836 to 1854 in which people who arrived in Boston by sea became the object of intense struggle between southern enslavers and southern states supporting them, trying to get these rebels to be repatriated to the South. And on the other hand, the abolitionist community, which is growing and growing and growing. So every one of these cases results. They don't all result in victory. A couple of people are taken back. But even in defeat, there are new things that happen which are really crucial. New forms of organization, new ideas, new kinds of militants. And so finally, when the last person is taken back, that's Anthony Burns In 1854, 50,000 people gathered in the streets to try to protest against that return of this man to bondage. It took a military force of about 1500 armed soldiers to get that man onto the ship. And in the process of doing that, this became massively expensive. So people continued to escape to Boston. But after 1854, the Southern Enslavers and the federal government which had supported them gave up trying to return people from Boston. It was just too hard to do. So. You might say that the Motley Crue, the people in the streets working with the abolitionists, nullified the Fugitive Slave act in Boston. And in doing that, they increased the tensions that would move on to civil war.
- [57:02]
C
And again, it just goes to show the power of resistance. One final question, and again, as usual, I'm interested to see how the book can help us inform our present, how the book can help us deal with the issues, social, political issues that people deal with around the world these days. One thing that in this book stood out for me was that power of solidarity and that network of solidarity that helps bring about change. And you talk about maritime here. And again, I'm really interested in what's happening, especially in case of Palestine and Israel. I think one of the most progressive unions all over the world were maritime unions. Again in Australia that I live. They are supporters of Palestine. In Europe, dock workers refuse to, in some cases they refuse to ship weapons to Israel. Which again highlights to me that these are universal stories. But in terms of this book, in terms of these minorities coming together, forming solidarity to bring about a positive change, what lessons do you think it has for contemporary movements for to bring about justice for labor rights movement? There are protests, there are strikes going around all over the world in uk, Australia, America, and unfortunately there is also the rise of anti immigrant movement. And the cause might be because people are disenchanted with the status quo, but the escape code is usually minorities. It's happening in the United States. A couple of weeks ago, it happened in Australia. There was a huge march of anti migrant, which by the reason wasn't really anti migrant. It was just some of them were neo Nazis. And one thing we all have in common with them is the skepticism of government. But they blame migrants, but we blame the real culprit, which is the corporates. And I'm guessing it's the same here as well. But can you tell us what lessons can we get from this book in terms of contemporary movements?
- [58:54]
D
Well, here's, I think one of the most important things, I mean, if you try to imagine what people escaping slavery in the 1830s, the 1840s, 1850s, what they were up against, right? I mean, the, the southern states of the American Union were unbelievable economic powerhouses, right? And the idea of emancipation was almost unthinkable in the face of that economic power. But what happened was that this resistance, case by case by case, right? I basically call this maritime system of escape death by a thousand cuts to the south, right? The cumulative power of collective resistance over a period of like 30 years, right? I mean, think about the accomplishment of this resistance movement called abolitionism, when in fact, in 1863, the emancipation proclamation is passed. So in terms of being up against tremendous obstacles, this is one of the best examples that you'll ever see. And the thing that I wanted to emphasize is that this resistance came from below. Now, for example, the abolitionists, mostly white abolitionists in the northern ports played a very important part, but they didn't even get involved in these escape attempts until the person that already reached the northern port. In other words, all of the risks were borne on the ground by the fugitives and the people who stood in solidarity with them, the sailors and the dock workers and the market women, they took all the risks until the person had made it to the North. So building local solidarity is really, you know, solidarity is not an inherent thing. It's not Inherent in work relations or anything else. It's something that has to be built. It has to be built and nurtured and protected and defended. And I feel like this is a very good example of how that could happen. It can grow out of these work relations. It doesn't always, but this is really a crucial lesson here. Resistance from below can make tremendous change when you least expect it. It's unpredictable. And look at the George Floyd uprising. Nobody saw that coming. People are killed by police in this country every day in the United States and in many other parts of the world. But suddenly this thing just blew up. I think something similar happened with the acceleration of resistance in the movement towards civil war. So I think that the lesson for us from these very brave people who risked so much in running away to freedom, they provide us a powerful example of political will. Right. This book is many ways a study of political will. You know, the will to be free. We need to honor that. We need to remember that. And people who are involved in resistance movements today can take inspiration from these previous stories, especially when, as in this case, they're successful. This was a successful struggle, the struggle against slavery. Now, it wasn't completely successful. It didn't eliminate racism. New forms of oppression came back through the sharecropping system and all the rest. But it's really crucial that this was a victory. We need stories of successful resistance, and I think this system of maritime escape is a very good example of that.
- [62:48]
C
Whenever I ask this question of historians, it usually ends on a very pessimistic note, but usually ended on a very optimistic note. So I'd rather end it here on an optimistic note. And I do echo what you said. You're absolutely right. We do need more stories of this kind. And I always highlight, when I talk to my friends, I always say, well, you can't ignore the role of imagination. Imagine a new world. Imagine new frontiers. This is what these slaves did. And you're absolutely in the 18th century or 17 or 18, it was unthinkable for these people to be free. And even 30 years ago, I listened to a. There was a documentary about James Baldwin, Sickening on a Hammer. I don't remember the name Exactly. It's on YouTube anyhow. And it was asking people that to have this. Part of it was about imagining new worlds. And 40 years ago, he did say there might be a black president. It happened. Well, we may not have, as you mentioned, eliminated racism, but it's a success story, and that's what we need to build upon. Dr. Marcus Radeke I can't tell you how much I enjoyed listening to you. Fascinating book. I do strongly recommend this book to our listeners and viewers. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and I'm sure our listeners and viewers will do the same. Thank you so much for your time.
- [64:10]
D
Thank you. Really good to be with you again. Mortesa I appreciated your very good questions.
- [64:22]
C
Sam.