Black Jacks

West African sailors had brought their boating and navigational skills with them to America throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The people living along the Atlantic coast of Africa had a long boating history, and after being brought to America these men would often gravitate to the familiar. Both free blacks and slaves would work on steamships and ferries around the Great Lakes and along America’s Atlantic coast. They also sailed on large clippers and small coasters. They worked as whalers and privateers and took on the nickname of “Black Jacks” as detailed in the books by historian W. Jeffrey Bolster.

By 1850, sailors had been using the Delaware Bay to transport milled grain from Delaware farmers to merchants in the North for years. Some of these sailors included free black men who traversed the route from the St. Jones River out into the Bay and north to Wilmington on a regular basis. Sometimes these boats would include false floors under which runaway slaves could be hidden and transported north. Other times fugitives would mix in with the other free black sailors in order to gain passage to Pennsylvania. Both methods were very dangerous because slave-catchers would still patrol the waters looking for runaways. 

-- The Black Jacks 

from Time Trip #2 (Chapter 22)

A black sailor in the Civil War

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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