Confronted with this uncertainty 

 and a heavy reliance on African- Ameri- 

 can maritime skills, merchants and 

 planters usually had to concede slave 

 watermen an exceptional degree of 

 leeway to conduct their business and a 

 variety of special rights and privileges. 



Though black Carolinians fled by 

 ship up to 1861, and even on blockade 

 runners leaving Wilmington during the 

 Civil War, the maritime Underground 

 Railroad was always fragile. It could, in 

 fact, collapse at any time. 



Suspected of abusing his privileged 

 status by planning his own and other 

 slaves' escape, Peter was eventually 

 sold into the Deep South; he never saw 



Abraham H. Galloway fled from Wilmington by sea as a young slave in 1857, 

 returned to North Carolina as a Union spy during the Civil War 

 and later represented New Hanover County in the state Senate. 

 Engraving taken from Still, Underground Railroad. 



his wife or children again. Suspicious 

 slaveholders also pointedly threatened 

 Fuller and Elliot, and they warned 

 local overseers not to allow the two 

 oystermen to speak with slaves. 

 Soon after discovering a skull and 

 crossbones on the door of his home, 

 Fuller vanished from Wilmington. 

 His family assumed that vigilantes 

 had murdered him for his activities 

 on behalf of fugitive slaves. 



F 



Arori 



.rom Colonial days onward, 

 the shores of North Carolina frustrated 

 slaveholders. Small harbors, shallow 

 sounds and treacherous inlets pre- 

 vented the development of a major 

 port and inhibited the growth of the 

 state's plantation economy. The Outer 

 Banks and the tremendous shoals that 

 extended far out onto the continental 

 shelf, the "Graveyard of the Atlantic," 

 posed a constant threat to shipping. 

 But the hazardous coastline that 

 seemed so inhospitable to slave- 

 holding merchants and planters 

 provided their black workers with 

 hope of passage to freedom. 



The forgotten courage and inge- 

 nuity of slave watermen, seamen and 

 other coastal residents clearly merits 

 greater attention today. But we must 

 also look beyond the relatively few 

 slaves who managed to escape by sea 

 to the broader aspects of coastal 

 culture that sustained their clandestine 

 current out of the South. 



Coastal slaves and many free 

 persons did not accept the boundaries 

 of slavery. Instead, they found ways 

 to carve out an independent life in 

 defiance of the prosperous slave- 

 holders who ruled North Carolina. 

 Looking further at those dissidents 

 will reveal much about our coast, 

 then and now. 



This article first appeared in The 

 North Carolina Historical Review in 

 April 1994. This is an edited version. [ 



8 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1994 



