Baltimore Ship Building and the Slave Trade

Isn’t it ironic that in the Baltimore shipyards, skilled and unskilled Black workers, were essential to the building of the very ships in which the illegal slave trade depended?


Ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass worked as a caulker in a Baltimore shipyard in the 1830s and commented on this curious fact: "Until a very little while after I went there [to the shipyard], white and black ship-carpenters worked side-by-side, and no one seemed to see any impropriety in it. All hands seemed to be very well satisfied. Many of the black carpenters were free men. Things seemed to be going on very well." (Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself Edited with an Introduction by David W. Blight (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 91.) Another caulker and black leader, Isaac Myers, led a group of black entrepreneurs in opening and operating the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Drydock Company in 1868. It was one of the earliest and largest black-owned businesses in America.

In 1800, there were thirty five shipbuilders at the Port of Baltimore. Half of these shipbuilders were using 5-6 black slaves for caulking and various other stages of the shipbuilding process. Englishman Alfred Pairpont described the shipbuilding docks at the Port of Baltimore, "it seemed, at first, as if I had been transplanted to some unknown land," when referring to the masses of African slaves involved in shipbuilding. (Phillips, Christopher. Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860. Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois Press. 1997)


The Baltimore Clipper is not only an emblem of Maryland, but its an emissary to the world. Since the first true Baltimore Clipper emerged soon after the Revolutionary War, its expansion can be traced as Maryland, and its maritime expenditures, develops from a British colony to a representative U.S. state. However, the Clippers went into use as shipping vessel for enslaved human cargo when the slave trade was banned in 1808. Therefore, they were looked down upon for both their use in this controversial issue and for going against the laws of the United States. Thus the Baltimore Clippers faded away to be replaced by larger ships capable of carrying greater cargoes with the same speed that the Clippers were so famous for. (Klima, Jennifer: The Baltimore Clipper. Maryland State Archives. 1998)

Photo courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society. Ringold Brothers Skipjack