The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina.

By David S. Cecelski. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. xx, 304. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8078-4972-3; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2643-X.)

Recent studies by historians such as W. Jeffrey Bolster, Marcus Rediker, and Julius Scott have opened new vistas on the political culture of Atlantic seamen. In The Waterman's Song David S. Cecelski brings the exploration of black maritime labor and politics to the coastline of nineteenth-century North Carolina. This highly original and well-written study fuses the best of local history to the wider arena of Atlantic-world studies. Drawing from a creative range of sources including published slave narratives, diaries, newspapers, shipping records, planter journals, and legislative reports, Cecelski vividly portrays the lives and labors of African American maritime workers within the landscape of North Carolina's swamps, rivers, and coastal islands. As he does so, he argues persuasively that the politics of black "watermen" were intimately tied to the character of their labor and that antebellum maritime networks fostered a radicalism that clearly stamped African American freedom struggles during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The Waterman's Song is structured in two parts that reflect Cecelski's dual focus on African American maritime work and its political culture. Part One introduces the reader to North Carolina's black watermen and demonstrates how the independent character of maritime labor tended to undermine the goals of slaveholder dominance. Distance from white oversight, slaveholders' dependence on watermen's skills, and the unpredictability of the work all contributed to "a dynamic tension with a system of human bondage" (p. xx). Cecelski conveys the variety and hierarchy of maritime labor, ranging from the autonomy of African American pilots who guided ships through treacherous shoals to the deadly and exhausting work of enslaved canal diggers. Readers will appreciate Cecelski's meticulous attention to the material culture of laborers engaged in such dramatic tasks as diving to remove cypress trunks from river bottoms or spreading immense seines across coastal inlets.

A contribution in its own right, this first section on the work of North Carolina's watermen is only enhanced by the subsequent connections to black protest and politics. Whereas Part One is structured topically, Part Two is chronologically arranged to highlight the importance of African American watermen and North Carolina's seaports to nineteenth-century black freedom struggles. Although moving unevenly at times between biographical and collective narratives, these chapters convincingly demonstrate the radicalism of skilled black sailors, boatmen, and pilots. Even more important, maritime networks of communication among African American watermen nurtured a collective tradition of political activism that aided fugitives from slavery, turned the tide of Civil War toward emancipation, and emboldened the political strategies of freedpeople in seaport towns. By including North Carolina maritime laborers within the scope of the "revolutionary political tides" of the "black Atlantic" (p. xviii), Cecelski deepens our understanding of both the regional roots and the global dimensions of black southern political activism. Furthermore, Cecelski's focus on coastal North Carolina helps to fill a gap in southern slave society studies that have tended to focus on the Chesapeake and South Carolina/Georgia Lowcountry regions.

One question raised by both the evocative title and rich evidence of The Waterman's Song is the salience of gender, and specifically masculinity, in shaping the political culture of North Carolina's black maritime communities. Enslaved and free black women are present in this book as fishers, small boat operators, and herring processors, to name just a few examples. Yet, much of maritime labor took place in a distinctly masculine context. The nature of Cecelski's evidence begs for a connection to the emerging historiography on race, manhood, and nineteenth-century African American politics.

As a whole, The Waterman's Song is an exciting and important study that enriches the historiography of North American slave labor as well as the scholarship of nineteenth-century African American politics. Beautifully illustrated and impressively researched, it will appeal to general readers and academic specialists alike.

SHARLA M. FETT
Occidental College