Of Blood and Sweat by Clyde W. Ford

Author:Clyde W. Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Briton Hammon was a Black Jack, a Black seaman in the Age of Sail, and he wasn’t alone. By the early 1800s, Black men worked at 18 percent of all American seafaring jobs,2 a remarkable number when the 1800 census also recorded Blacks as just over 18 percent of the total American population.3 Black Jacks like Hammon endured the owners, the captains, the whips, the fears, and the general privations and hardships of being sailors, while also enduring the brutality and racism they encountered being Black and being at sea. In exchange, they enjoyed the adventure, the relative freedom, and the autonomy of a sailor’s life. Aboard ships, they worked as cooks and deckhands, as first mates, and, in some cases, even as captains. Some Black Jacks were free. Others were slaves, like Hammon, hired out to the benefit of their owners.

Southern plantation slaves are popularly thought of as being either “field slaves” or “house slaves.” Field slaves, the common wisdom goes, worked a hard life outside. House slaves worked an easier life inside. From there, many stereotypical images of slavery evolved, none more famous than Malcolm X’s contrasting distinction between the “house Negro” and the “field Negro.”

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