The lesser-known story of 100K courageous runaway slaves who fled the South via the ‘Blue Highway'

New York Post

17-05-2025

In 1857, an 18-year-old female slave, Lear Green, who had been repeatedly raped and forced into prostitution by her white owner, one James Noble, was surreptitiously placed in a wooden seaman's chest wearing a dress, bonnet and cape and delivered as simple freight on a steamship bound to Philadelphia from the port of Baltimore.
To avoid suffocation and starvation, her benefactors covered her with a quilt and put a little pillow in the box for a semblance of comfort, along with a few articles of clothing, a small amount of food, and a bottle of water, before sealing the crate, bound with heavy rope.
Eighteen hours later, the steamer arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, and the box was delivered to a family friend's house, where the young stowaway recovered from her arduous journey.
7 During the Civil War, in 1864, enslaved people of all ages left their homes in small watercraft to reach a Union naval vessel in the distance.
Harperâs Weekly, April 9, 1864, public domain
Lear Green was one of some 100,000 runaway slaves with unimaginable courage, willing to face horrifying cruelty and vicious flogging, who escaped bondage from the antebellum South on ships at sea.
The setting for their flights was what became known as the 'Blue Highway,' which ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard and enabled enslaved people to escape as stowaways in below-deck hideaways.
They journeyed under wind-filled sails from the Carolinas to the Chesapeake Bay and Boston's harbors three decades before the Civil War.
The ocean carried Africans into slavery, and the ocean was also a pathway that transported them to freedom with the assistance of Black sailors and waterfront workers, and sympathetic working-class whites.
'Thousands of people escaped slavery by sea — yet the history books have had little to say about them. Why have these dramatic tales of dockside conspiracies, below-deck hideaways, billowing sails, and ultimately liberation been so rarely told?' asks preeminent maritime scholar Marcus Rediker in his new book, 'Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea' (Viking).
The legendary Underground Railway had carried those fleeing bondage in the Deep South through swamps, thickets, forests, and rivers.
7 An image of historian William Still, who chronicled the lives of slaves who escaped by sea.
Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
But the Blue Highway, though far less well-known, was equally important in providing liberty to slaves.
'The maritime system of escape was organized by people who are largely unknown to us — poor people with calloused hands, often nameless in the historical record and therefore unremembered, the wretched of the earth,' writes Rediker.
'They acted out courageous, death-defying stories. They escaped slavery in ingenious ways. Their labor on the docks and ships, with the dynamic political economy of port cities, drove the freedom story.'
7 A placard from Boston in 1851 shamed a wealthy trader who forced a fugitive slave to return to his ownership.
Digital Commonwealth, courtesy of the Boston Public Library
Enraged owners advertised in port city newspapers when a slave absconded, but shipmasters were expected to police their own ships, and fugitives were able to find their way on board.
'Escaping slavery by sea was an art,' observes the author.
It required planning, reading people and situations quickly. Some runaways dressed as gentlemen, while some females disguised themselves as male sailors.
7 A scene from the waterfront at Charleston, SC, in 1853 shows dockworkers — key players on the 'Blue Highway.'
public domain
A would-be runner had to understand the climate, ecology, and geography of the escape route — and that could mean the difference between life and death.
Rediker, the award-winning University of Pittsburgh professor of Atlantic history, anchors his book in a series of extraordinary Blue Highway narratives. Along with Green, there's Moses Roper, who made his first escape in 1834 at age 13 from his enslaver, the brutal cotton planter John Gooch.
Repeatedly captured and sent back to his owners, Roper made no less than a dozen more escape attempts over six years — a never-ending cycle of flight, recapture, grisly punishment, and resale.
7 A scene from 1885, when 21 slaves escaped via sea from Norfolk, Va. on a vessel led by Captain James Fountain.
Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872, public domain
'The slave-owning terrorists 'ploughed' his back with hundreds, perhaps thousands of lashes; crushed his fingernails in a vise; smashed his toenails on an anvil with a hammer; and poured tar on his head and set it on fire,' writes the author. 'They forced him to carry burdensome log chains, wear iron collars, and walk around with heavy bars on his feet.'
On his final escape, Roper traveled 350 miles by land and river, from Florida to Savannah, Ga., where he boarded a vessel disguised as a steward. Finally ashore in New York, he escaped the slave catchers crawling the waterfront and made it up the Hudson River to Albany and then overland to Boston with a bounty hunter on his heels.
He boarded a ship to Liverpool, where he published an account of his travails that brought him fame as an abolitionist.
7 'Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea,' is written by Marcus Rediker.
7 'Escaping slavery by sea was an art,' observes the author Marcus Rediker.
José Luis Silván Sen
African American abolitionist William Still interviewed 930 hungry, sick, and penniless runaways, provided them with aid and shelter between 1852 and 1860, and documented their lives.
Some had scars from being whipped, bullets fired at them, or suffered horrifying sexual abuse, and 'cruelty too revolting to be published,' Rediker writes.
Still, they had the strength to face death and escape being tortured. And they rallied together to help each other. That was Slave Power.
'These fugitives educated Still and the entire American abolitionist movement about the grim realities of the Slave Power,' Rediker writes. Though mostly hidden from history, these brave men and women demonstrated equal doses of resilience and resistance, and ultimately inspired both movement and nation.