Freedom Ship

The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

Reviews

“Who could be better qualified to bring us a little-known slice of history concerning slavery and the political world of the Atlantic Ocean than Marcus Rediker? As someone who has admired his previous work on both subjects, I’m not surprised that he’s done it again. Freedom Ship is a fascinating, evocatively told story—and an inspiring one.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Many people familiar with the history of slavery in the United States associate the terror of the Middle Passage with tall ships traversing the high seas of the Atlantic, while they think of the Underground Railroad as the legendary land-based route that those fleeing bondage traveled to freedom. In this important new work, Freedom Ship, distinguished maritime historian Marcus Rediker turns this binary on its head by showing in dramatic human terms how escape by sea was a primary method used by enslaved Black Americans in the decades leading up to the Civil War. It’s a fascinating work, anchored in a commitment to history from below, that will undoubtedly expand the map of our understanding of how—and by whom—the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the crucial years that redefined our nation.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road

“Marcus Rediker has done more than any other historian to chronicle the history of what he calls ‘maritime radicalism’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Freedom Ship he focuses our attention on how the expansion of seaborne capitalism made possible the consolidation of American slavery but also created opportunities for thousands of slaves to escape from bondage by sea. Mining sources including fugitive slave narratives, newspaper advertisements for those seeking freedom, and the records of abolitionist societies, he tells the riveting stories of men and women whose quest for freedom transforms our understanding of the Underground Railroad, as well as of those who aided them in escaping—dockworkers, sailors, sympathetic ship captains, and members of African American communities up and down the East Coast, most of them previously unknown to history.”
—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize−winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery