The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and is integral to the maritime history of the Mid-Atlantic region, yet history often overlooks the vital contributions of Black people to the success of its maritime industry.
Enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas with generations of ancestral maritime skills such as boat building, net-making, oystering and crabbing. White merchants saw the maritime skills these enslaved Africans possessed, and in 1796, almost 70 years before Emancipation, the federal government started issuing Seamen’s Protection Certificates. These certificates allowed Black men the same rights as white men, and in many cases sufficed as ‘free papers.’
The Chesapeake Bay was a major part of the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses run by abolitionists who worked to free enslaved Black people by bringing them North. Many Black people escaped the South by using ships that allowed them to board and then cross the Potomac River. Black men opted for this escape route because they could be mistaken for Black fishermen. Frederick Douglas escaped slavery via train, but he presented a friend’s Seaman’s Protection Certificate as his free papers.
After Emancipation, newly freed Black men turned to work on the waterway as sailors, captains, crew members, boatbuilders, seafood processors and fishermen. The symbolic multiple-log canoes seen to this day on the Chesapeake were first built by an enslaved man, Aaron of Your County, Virginia. Frederick S. Jewett, a Black innovator created the crab grading system—back fin, claw, lump—that is still used today to grade crab meat.
By the mid-to-late 19th century, the Chesapeake Bay was the main supplier of oysters in the United States with Black oystermen outnumbering white oystermen, which made oystering a lucrative career for Black men in the Chesapeake region.
Due to the flourishing oyster market and heavy involvement in marine manufacturing and waterway trade, Black people had an abundance of jobs that allowed them to create tight-knit communities in the area. These communities are still prominent Black communities along the Chesapeake.
Without the hard work, inventions and ancestral knowledge of Black people, the prolific trade and flourishing marine industry of the Chesapeake Bay would not have been possible.
