Virginia Waterways & Underground Railroad

A part of the Underground Railroad, read here of enslaved people and their stories of using Virginia's waterways to achieve freedom.

Enslaved Virginians sought freedom from the time they were first brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619. Acts of self-emancipation were aided by Virginia's waterways, which became part of the network of the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. Watermen willing to help escaped slaves made eighteenth-century Norfolk a haven for freedom seekers. Famous nineteenth-century escapees like Shadrack Minkins and Henry Box Brown were aided by the Underground Railroad. Enslaved men like Henry Lewey, known as Bluebeard, aided freedom seekers as conductors, and black and white sympathizers acted as station masters. Historian Cassandra Newby-Alexander narrates the ways that enslaved people used Virginia's waterways to achieve humanity's dream of freedom.

• Pages: 192
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Imprint: The History Press
• Series: American Heritage
• Publication Date: 4th December 2017
• State: Virginia
• Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
• ISBN: 9781625859631
• Format: Paperback

Cassandra Newby-Alexander currently serves as a professor of history and the director of the Joseph Jenkins Roberts Center for the African Diaspora at Norfolk State University. She has spearheaded the 1619 Making of America conference, which seeks to transform the narrative about the role of early Africans in the evolution of America. Her books include An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads and Hampton Roads: Remembering Our Schools and Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy.