Aspects of Slavery and Freedom Seeking in North Carolina
Water-Absconding-Newspapers, Vessel Information, and Escape
In addition, advertisements listed if and when vessels could take on new items if space was available for goods or passengers. It sometimes also listed desired items for export and sometimes included the date of setting sail.
As few enslaved blacks and free blacks could read, and there were many who could, it aided the enslaved people. Those that could read newspapers for vessel information used this information to help freedom seekers mainly by looking for friendly captains and testing new captains that may aid in helping freedom seekers to escape.
It should not go without mentioning that advertisements also discussed the import of slaves from places such as Grenada. This is an example of an advertisement, namely ‘the sloop (vessel) Dolphin was moored “at the market-street wharf” where some slaves would be sold “for cash or lumber.”’ Many ships, particularly those entering and exiting North Carolina, traded up and down the US coast and into the West Indies.
It was known that enslaved people used ships as a way to escape slavery, and it was illegal for ship masters to “entertain negroes or mulattoes, slaves or freemen, on their ships between sunset and sunrise.” This seems to show that enslaved labor hired on ships defined the start of relationships, which forged a relationship that assisted more than a handful of freedom seekers.
The law prevented these relations from parlaying with blacks in the night, which is when most enslaved people were snuck into the ships. Several escape notices, particularly those on the coast, frequently included a warning against masters of vessels who may seek to harbor any slaves.
Although prevented from entering a vessel on a planned day of escape, Harriet Jacobs recalled twice how her plans to leave on north-bound vessels were prevented because the ship was watched and thoroughly examined. She noted that while she hid in Snaky Swamp, where she had already been bitten by a venomous snake, she was covered by mosquitoes until her uncle and friend prepared an escape route. However, while on a small boat, waiting for clearance to board the larger vessels, they learned that the boat was searched, and she had to return to the mainland and a new hiding place in the small attic at her grandmother’s house.
Vessels were often searched and smoked to draw out runaways. Searches and smoke [fumigation] sometimes work and sometimes they did not. For instance, in 1850, a 19-year-old young woman from Wilmington was on a vessel that was smoked repeatedly, yet she remained hidden until she made it “half-starved and half-frozen” to Boston [National Anti-slavery Standard, January 24, 1850].