Freedom Ship

A Library Journal Best History Book of 2025

“In Freedom Ship, the seasoned historian Marcus Rediker provides an expansive account of how fugitive slaves escaped from Southern ports . . . Rediker writes with a commanding understanding of both slavery and seafaring, and Freedom Ship opens a new and often surprising perspective on the antislavery struggle. . . . The most ambitious work to date on the maritime underground.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“The legendary Underground Railway had carried those fleeing bondage in the Deep South through swamps, thickets, forests, and rivers. But the Blue Highway, though far less well-known, was equally important in providing liberty to slaves. . . . Rediker anchors his book in a series of extraordinary Blue Highway narratives. . . . Though mostly hidden from history, these brave men and women demonstrated equal doses of resilience and resistance, and ultimately inspired both movement and nation.”
—The New York Post

“Many people familiar with the history of slavery in the United States associate the terror of the Middle Passage with tall ships traversing the high seas of the Atlantic, while they think of the Underground Railroad as the legendary land-based route that those fleeing bondage traveled to freedom. In this important new work, Freedom Ship, distinguished maritime historian Marcus Rediker turns this binary on its head by showing in dramatic human terms how escape by sea was a primary method used by enslaved Black Americans in the decades leading up to the Civil War. It’s a fascinating work, anchored in a commitment to history from below, that will undoubtedly expand the map of our understanding of how—and by whom—the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the crucial years that redefined our nation.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road

“Who could be better qualified to bring us a little-known slice of history concerning slavery and the political world of the Atlantic Ocean than Marcus Rediker? As someone who has admired his previous work on both subjects, I’m not surprised that he’s done it again. Freedom Ship is a fascinating, evocatively told story—and an inspiring one.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“Marcus Rediker has done more than any other historian to chronicle the history of what he calls ‘maritime radicalism’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Freedom Ship he focuses our attention on how the expansion of seaborne capitalism made possible the consolidation of American slavery but also created opportunities for thousands of slaves to escape from bondage by sea. Mining sources including fugitive slave narratives, newspaper advertisements for those seeking freedom, and the records of abolitionist societies, he tells the riveting stories of men and women whose quest for freedom transforms our understanding of the Underground Railroad, as well as of those who aided them in escaping—dockworkers, sailors, sympathetic ship captains, and members of African American communities up and down the East Coast, most of them previously unknown to history.”
—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize−winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Marcus Rediker’s career-long engagement with maritime freedom struggles—now including Freedom Ship, his most recent work—has definitively established waterways, docks, and ships as pivotal sites of resistance to slavery. The more we read his work, the more we learn that these stories of escape, requiring extensive collaboration of enslaved Black women and men, sailors, and dockworkers of all racial backgrounds, and self-identified abolitionists, were as quotidian as they were extraordinary. These awe-inspiring escape stories remind us of the power of alliances built across identity and social location and encourage those of us today who still believe in freedom to build on these legacies as we face new terrains of struggle.”
—Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

“The ocean carried Africans into slavery, but, as Marcus Rediker chronicles so vividly in his new book, it also often transported them to freedom. A distinguished maritime historian, Rediker shows us the world that sheltered and enabled enslaved workers determined to sail north from bondage. Freedom Ship tells a fascinating and inspiring story of inventiveness, courage, struggle, and solidarity. In redirecting our attention from land to sea, and in portraying the communities of sailors, dockworkers, and port city residents both Black and white who assisted the fugitives, Rediker changes our understanding of the nature and meaning of resistance to slavery in the nineteenth century United States.”
—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of National Book Award finalist This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“Some accounts of the ‘Underground Railroad’ end up offering alibis for whiteness, suggesting that the real heroes of emancipation were bourgeois whites who lived in comfortable homes. This is not that kind of book. The story of Marcus Rediker’s Freedom Ship is self-emancipation by sea. The heroes are Black freedom-seekers themselves. The help they got came from Black sailors, dock and waterfront people, tavern-owners and innkeepers, with a few truly radical working-class whites in the equation as well. Here is the real story of freedom. We have the choice of whether to learn from it—or drown.”
—Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

“Marcus Rediker reminds us that the fugitive did not always seek freedom through swamps, thickets, forests, and rivers. The same bloody seas, littered with the bones of their countrymen, was also a pathway to escape. Gripping and illuminating, Freedom Ship gives new meaning to the old nautical phrase ‘cut and run.’”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“Through an array of real-life stories, in which horrifying cruelty is pitched against unimaginable courage, Marcus Rediker shows that alongside the Underground Railroad there existed an equally important Blue Highway that enabled enslaved people to sail to freedom with the help of networks of solidarity that stretched up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. A triumph of storytelling as well as of archival recovery, Freedom Ship is a groundbreaking work by a pioneering maritime historian.”
—Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies

“Freedom Ship is a luminous and transformative work that redefines how we understand resistance to oppression in the United States. Through vibrant storytelling, Marcus Rediker brings to life the courage of enslaved people escaping bondage—capturing their physical struggle, intellectual brilliance, and the defiant spirit that powered their journeys to freedom. In these pages you can hear the waves of the Atlantic, the whispers of resistance below deck, and the sharp, fierce intelligence of a people fighting for liberation. Freedom Ship is a passionate testament to the will of a people working to be free and an extraordinary gift to history, humanity, and hope.”
—Naomi Wallace, author of One Flea Spare

“[A] revelatory and propulsive account . . . This is a radical reimagining of the antebellum period that enthrallingly depicts resistance to slavery as widespread, unwavering, and multiracial.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Based on the voluminous first-hand accounts and testimony left by enslaved people and abolitionists, this beautifully written and compassionate account highlights a little-known aspect of antebellum resistance to enslavement. Readers interested in studies of enslavement in the United States and American antebellum and maritime history will enjoy this book.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Inspiring . . . A much-needed comprehensive contribution to slavery history.”
—Kirkus Reviews