The Black Maritime Network that was Harriet Tubman’s Secret Weapon

Gloucester County Historical Society Author Event Features Ellen Alford

Ellen Alford at the Gloucester County Historical Society discusses Harriet Tubman
Speaking at the Gloucester County Historical Society, historian and author Ellen Alford discussed her new book about the Underground Railroad in southern New Jersey. (Photo: Hoag Levins)

In her April 10 appearance at the Gloucester County Historical Society in Woodbury, NJ, historian and author of a new book on the subject Ellen Alford provided an overview of Southern New Jersey’s crucial involvement in the Underground Railroad as well as new insights into Harriet Tubman and her connections to the region’s Black maritime community.

Alford is a former newspaper journalist, public school educator, and university administrator. A communications graduate of Howard University, she pursued graduate studies in American History at Rutgers University. Her book, Abolition and the Underground Railroad in South Jersey, was published in 2023 by The History Press, a division of Arcadia Publishing.

Photo of Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman

“Harriet Tubman has long been my hero. I knew she was active in the Underground Railroad, but it wasn’t until I started researching her life and work that I learned she was so closely tied to South Jersey — particularly Cape May.” said Alford. “I think the Cape May Harriet Tubman Museum that opened in 2021 has really opened many people’s eyes.”

In the 1850s, many fugitives who had evaded slave catchers across Maryland and Delaware sheltered in the undergrowth along the shores north of Lewes, a Delaware fishing port and shipbuilding center at the mouth of Delaware Bay. Twenty-three miles due east across open water, was Cape May and paths north to the free states beyond.

In her book, Alford details how some of the escapees boarded shaky, flat-bottomed skiffs provided by local abolitionists, rowing out into the treacherous currents, some to be rescued by friendly fishing boat captains on the Cape May side. This was repeated in different ways with all kinds of boats all along the coasts of Delaware and particularly Cumberland County on the New Jersey side.

Black Watermen

“There was a lantern code Black watermen used,” said Alford. “It was flashing yellow and blue lights in certain ways. At night, you had people on the Jersey side watching for the boats coming across the bay. If they had a fugitive slave on board, they would flash a signal with the lantern. The people on Jersey shore would flash a response and then row out to meet the incoming boat. They exchanged passengers in the dark out on the water and then both boats would go back to their own shores. The fugitive slaves would then be taken into the Underground Railroad and transported to Camden. All along the way there were free Black people in lots of towns. Camden also had a settlement of free Blacks, and they all helped the fugitives move north and evade slave catchers.”

Tubman, whose forays back to Maryland plantation country to guide groups of escaped slaves into freedom made her a mysterious hero known as “Moses,” was closely tied to this community of Black watermen.

Illustration of African American oystermen on Delaware Bay who were part of the Black maritime network used by Tubman.
Black watermen were heavily involved in oyster fishing in both the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays.

Because history was written by and focused on white society, the extent of African American involvement in the maritime trades of the Delaware Bay and River in the mid-19th century is not well documented. But it’s important because it was one of the major drivers of the Underground Railroad and Tubman’s operations.

Extensive Presence Across the Water

This network of African American maritime workers — some freemen, some former slaves, some escaped slaves — was a non-obvious matrix of human connections and communication that lay across nearly all waterborne commerce throughout the Delaware River and its 52-mile long, 35-mile-wide bay.

They worked as fishermen, seaman, stevedores, oyster tongers, crabbers, and in the gangs that manned the massive mile-long nets during the Spring shad run that was then one of the region’s major economic events. They were tradesmen along the wharves in sailmaker and rigging lofts, chandlers, and vessel repair operations, and they were the laborers in the docks’ cargo sheds. They crewed the many hundreds of sloops, keelboats, steamboats, dories, ferry vessels, and wetland punt boats that moved across the Delaware River and Bay daily. Experts in the region’s wilderness ecosystem and the geography of its back-bay wetlands, they hired out as guides to well-heeled white hunters chasing rail birds and other high-status sports prey.

So, the situation existed where a Black waterman could be collecting a fee from a wealthy white fishing sportsman during the day and later that night be using the same small craft in the same obscure channels to ferry escaped slaves beyond the reach of slave catchers.

A Black waterman in the 1800s guides a white sports hunter in the backbay wetlands of Delaware Bay. Tubman traveled the same way.
A Thomas Eakins painting shows a Black waterman guiding a wealthy white hunter stalking rail birds on the Delaware River below Philadelphia. Black watermen were intimately familiar with the tangle of backwater areas that fringed the River and Bay — a skill that enabled them to effectively assist runaway slaves.

The broad Delaware Valley that was a main passageway for the Underground Railroad was a place where water, rather than crude roads, was often the primary means of travel. One reason fugitives chose it was that when on the water, they were harder for slave catchers on horseback with their bloodhounds to detect and track. Another reason was that once on the water, a small craft navigated by someone intimately familiar with the tangled estuary landscape could quickly evade and hide. Back then the vast areas of shore and wetlands between Philadelphia and the mouth of the Bay were a heavily forested maze of more than a hundred serpentine rivers, creeks, streams, swamps, vast mud flats, and dense reed banks.

Tubman on the Water

Tubman, an enslaved woman who grew up on a Maryland plantation surrounded on three sides by the Chesapeake Bay, was well attuned to life and work on the water. The last task she was assigned was the hard labor of a logging gang, cutting trees and working with crews of Black watermen to form log rafts that would be floated down Chesapeake waterways to the master’s sawmill. It was on these docks she engaged with the network of Black watermen whose connections spread in all directions across the bays and river and who would alter the trajectory of her life.

Black watermen in the 1800s work on the annual Shad catch in the Delaware River at Gloucester, New Jersey.
A Thomas Eakins painting documents a crew of Black watermen hauling in the Shad harvest on the Delaware River shore at Gloucester City.

“These were sailors not from just across the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, but from beyond that,” said Alford. “Some had crewed on vessels traveling to the Carolinas or the West Indies. They had a lot of experience, and they would be telling Tubman, ‘This is where you go. Here is where you can find Quakers. Go to this town but not this other one. This is how to escape. This is how to hide once you’re on your way.’ While she was getting all this information on how to run away, those same Black watermen had their own system for passing messages over long distances.

It was with information from this secret network of Black maritime workers that Tubman ultimately did escape. Once free, she used the same maritime connections to send messages back and forth to her still-enslaved relatives and an Underground Railroad operative as she prepared for her first furtive trek back to plantation country to lead her relatives to freedom.

As she continued to outwit plantation masters, local sheriffs, and slave catchers in her freedom raids back to Maryland, Tubman also operated out of Cape May, where she worked as a cook and domestic laborer to earn money to fund her travels.

Cape May as Abolitionist Outpost

At that time, Cape May was a cosmopolitan resort drawing large crowds of wealthy white politicians, industrialists, and the idle rich to its hotels, gambling casinos, social soirées, and famed restaurants, not to mention its beaches and hunting and fishing venues. With its large Black community, it was an established outpost of the abolitionist movement.

Perhaps more importantly, Cape May was a thriving maritime port and place of constant contact with the Black maritime network, not to mention its direct nautical proximity to the far Delaware shoreline that was such a crucial location in the Underground Railroad and Tubman’s operations.

1850's boat traffic at Cape May, New Jersey which provided Tubman with easy access to the regional network of Black watermen.
In the 1850s, steamships and sailing vessels were bringing thousands of vacationers to Cape May each summer. Meanwhile, the nearby oyster fleets and the fishing vessels cramming the docks of Cape May Island included a thriving community of Black watermen and sailors that Harriet Tubman could easily reach out to.

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