Slavery in a Texas Seaport: The Peculiar Institution in Galveston

Abstract

Historians of urban slavery, free black people and the Atlantic maritime world have demonstrated that the urban milieu, maritime commerce and proximity to the sea provided free and enslaved African Americans in seaport cities with opportunities that challenged the premises and practices of bondage. Yet the relatively young and small seaport of Galveston, Texas, has received little attention from scholars. Growing in the two decades before the American Civil War from a rough village to one of the most important cotton ports on the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston maintained strict slave codes modelled on those adopted by other Southern states in response to slave rebellions and the rise of militant abolitionism in the 1830s. Nevertheless, black Galvestonians, like black seaport residents elsewhere, found greater possibilities for resisting or fleeing slavery than were available to African Americans in the interior.