The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina

The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. By David S. Cecelski. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 324. Illustrations, maps. $39.95.) The Waterman's Song is a richly textured and detailed description of slavery as practiced in maritime North Carolina. The book focuses on the period leading up to the Civil War and examines how the experiences of slaves and free blacks engaged in maritime occupations in coastal communities differed from those of slaves who labored on plantations or farms in the interior. By the nature of their work, black watermen were highly skilled and had much greater access to information, to avenues of escape, and to potential assistance. In his first four chapters, David S. Cecelski categorizes the bondsmen of coastal North Carolina according to their occupations. Beginning with watermen-those slaves who worked as hands or even captains on coastal vessels, as pilots, and merchant seamen-he describes a life that many slaves considered "as far as a colored man can there be free" (chap. 1). He then moves on to fishing, discussing both those men who fished locally and those who followed the shad, rockfish, and herring fishery. If seagoing was the high point of black maritime work, canal digging was at the bottom, and Cecelski recounts the brutal and dangerous attempts to construct a network of canals using slave labor. Having outlined the parameters of maritime slavery, Cecelski demonstrates the unique place held by slave watermen in the African-American struggle. Besides being conduits of information, maritime bondsmen played a very practical role in aiding escape. "Having one foot in the local shoreline culture and the other on board the vessels that sailed the Atlantic, slave watermen lay like a gangplank between the two worlds. All the clandestine pathways funneled into seafaring villages, and only watermen could provide the final portage that fugitive slaves needed" (136). From spreading news and assisting runaways, skilled black sailors and pilots moved quickly to aiding federal forces during the Civil War, helping U. S. Navy vessels negotiate the dangerous shoal waters of the North Carolina coast and, in the case of Beaufort, facilitating a surprise attack and bloodless conquest of the town. For a variety of reasons, black sailors were no strangers to the U. S. Navy, and runaways as well as newly freed slaves joined in large numbers. Cecelski ends the book with a close examination of Abraham Galloway, a former slave, Union spy, Reconstruction legislator, and southern subversive. "Galloway's story traces in miniature the emergence of a subversive politics out of a black maritime culture that was generations old" (182). The book is strongest in its first five chapters, where the author establishes the significance of his subject. The last two chapters, which deal with the Civil War and Reconstruction, are interesting but lack the breadth and depth of earlier sections. An extremely helpful map, glossary, and numerous illustrations add to the work, although half-tone lines dividing parts of the chapters are distracting. Women do not loom large in this account, primarily because men dominated maritime employment. Slave sailors and pilots, fishermen, even brutally treated canal diggers were male. But where women worked the fishery or as urban laborers, Cecelski incorporates them into his narrative. …