The chance of betrayal or discov- 

 ery always existed, and many runaways 

 never reached a ship or were caught 

 before departure. Punishments included 

 re-enslavement, public whipping, hard 

 duty, deportation into the Deep South 

 and death. 



C 



^^onfronted by so many pit- 

 falls and deterrents, most slaves could 

 only dream of the sea. Like the young 

 Frederick Douglass, himself once a 

 slave in a port town, they may have 

 often mused about the "beautiful ves- 

 sels, robed in white" that might "yet 

 bear me into freedom." But throughout 

 the plantation belt of eastern North 

 Carolina, slaves tried to fulfill this 

 dream frequently enough that their 

 owners viewed the ocean as a serious 

 threat and suspected that runaways 

 might sail away. 



Slave owners' preoccupation with 

 the ocean's proximity often bordered 

 on obsessiveness. Reward posters and 

 newspaper advertisements routinely 

 warned "masters of vessels" not to 

 harbor, employ or carry away their 

 departed workers. State penalties for 

 protecting fugitive slaves were harsh; 

 after 1793, ship captains risked hanging 

 for carrying a runaway out of North 

 Carolina. 



Slaveholders also threatened 

 seamen with civil prosecution for 

 carrying away their slaves and offered 

 extravagant rewards for information 

 that would identify sailors who helped a 

 slave flee. In February 1838, Gov. 

 Edward Dudley offered up to $500 to 

 anyone who would name the mariner 

 who had taken his runaway slave from 

 Wilmington to Boston. 



Coastal geography and the willing- 

 ness of many local inhabitants to pro- 

 tect runaways compounded for 

 slaveholders the threat of the open sea 

 and, for slaves, its lure. Remote 

 swamps and dense forests offered ideal 

 haven for runaway slaves who needed a 

 long-term refuge, a point for hasty 



reconnaissance or a momentary way 

 station en route to a port. Swamps, 

 pocosins, pine savannas or tidal 

 marshes encroached on every settle- 

 ment in coastal North Carolina. 

 Though their drainage and foresting 

 was well under way by the early 19th 

 century, those woods and wetlands 

 promised a haven for fugitive slaves, 

 many of them well-schooled in surviv- 

 ing in the wilderness. 



To reach the sea, fugitive slaves 

 could not rely on vanishing into coastal 



Continued 



William Still, an African-American leader of the Underground Railroad 

 in Philadelphia, helped a number of North Carolina slaves 

 reach safety in the Northern states and Canada. 

 Portrait taken from Still, Underground Railroad. 



COASTWATCH 1 3 



