Frederick Douglass, Ship Caulker

Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895) was born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore. As a young man he was sent to Baltimore, where he learned to read and learned a trade.

Fells Point

In the 1830s Fells Point was one of the busiest shipbuilding neighbourhoods in the United States, famous for fast schooners. Douglass was hired out to William Gardner's shipyard in 1836 to learn caulking. White apprentices, resentful of Black workers, attacked him. He then worked at another yard and became a skilled caulker, earning good wages, which his enslaver took.

The trade

Caulking made wooden hulls watertight. Caulkers drove twisted fibres of oakum or cotton into the seams between planks with a mallet and caulking iron, then covered them with hot pitch. It required strength, rhythm and judgement: too little and the seam leaked, too much and the planks could split.

Escape

In September 1838 Douglass escaped by train and boat, dressed in sailor's clothes and carrying borrowed papers of a free Black seaman. His knowledge of ships and sailors' talk helped him pass. He later wrote of his shipyard years in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

Why he is in the Hall of Makers

Douglass's story shows both the value of a trade and the ways labour markets were used to exclude workers by race. It connects to Isaac Myers, whose shipyard answered that exclusion (next panel).

Further reading

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom; Frederick Douglass–Isaac Myers Maritime Park, Baltimore.