The Fugitive's Gibraltar

Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts

Bibliographic Data

ID10018895
AuthorsJohn R Mckivigan (Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis), Kathryn Grover
Year2002
Volume89
Issue3
Pages1033-1033
Publication date2002-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3092375
OpenAlexW2049630168
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Why did the small New England city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, become the leading refuge for runaway slaves in the immediate pre-Civil War decades? Kathryn Grover contends that New Bedford attracted fugitive slaves because it had a history of racial diversity, welcomed black workers into its primarily maritime economy, and retained strong vestiges of its Quaker founders' antislavery traditions. Grover writes that Native Americans, Cape Verdeans, and Polynesians, as well as African Americans, were well represented in New Bedford from the start of the nineteenth century. This diverse population of color offered welcomed anonymity to escaping slaves. Grover estimates that by the 1840s as many as 40 percent of New Bedford's blacks were runaway slaves. She concludes that southern suspicions were correct that trading ships from New Bedford often spirited runaways from their ports to freedom. Through painstaking research in public records, contemporary newspapers, and correspondence archives, Grover constructs fascinating biographical sketches of over one hundred refugees from slavery

Abolitionism · Archaeology · Diversity (politics · Genealogy · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Polynesians · Population · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Underground Railroad · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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