Caulker's Trade

By: Delano Greenidge-Copprue

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Caulker's Trade

As a caulker in Baltimore, Maryland, a major site of American shipbuilding, from 1836 to 1838, Frederick Douglass put sealant between the boards of hulls to make ships watertight. He learned the caulker's trade while enslaved in Baltimore, and the experiences Douglass gained in the shipyards there proved instrumental in his escape from slavery.

Douglass's career as a caulker began when Hugh Auld, his master and shipbuilder, apprenticed the young Douglass in the shipyard of William Gardiner. As his apprenticeship began, Douglass witnessed black and white carpenters working shoulder to shoulder; however, as white employment in shipyards became increasingly difficult because of immigration and the arrival of both free and enslaved blacks in Baltimore, white carpenters threatened to strike unless all black carpenters were fired and white carpenters hired in their stead. Under a highly profitable contract to build warships for the Mexican government, Gardiner fired all his black carpenters to prevent a strike and the loss of money. As a caulker, Douglass was not fired; yet antiblack sentiments remained in the shipyard, and twice Douglass thwarted physical attacks, showing his impressive strength, before being severely beaten by four of his fellow white caulkers. Other white shipbuilders looked on during the attack and intervened only when Douglass attempted a counterattack. Douglass was not allowed to prosecute his attackers because, under the laws of Maryland, a black person, whether slave or free, could not testify against a white person.

Seeing the attack on Douglass as a personal attack on his “property,” Auld gained an alternate apprenticeship for Douglass in Asa Price's shipyard, also in Baltimore. Having lost his own shipbuilding business on the City Block, Auld then worked as a foreman for Price. At Price's shipyard Douglass completed his apprenticeship as a caulker and became a journeyman caulker—a skilled worker who could practice his craft in any shipyard. Within a year Douglass commanded the highest wages paid journeymen caulkers—one dollar and fifty cents a day. In any given week Douglass earned from six to nine dollars; yet while inching toward his own freedom, Douglass unwittingly helped caulk three slave ships: Delorez, Teayer, and Eagle. These ships, built in the Price shipyard, held freshwater in the ballast as opposed to seawater, giving the human cargo a supply of water during passage, and had shallow but wide storage areas for those humans beneath the decks.

Having left behind plantation labor and taken up his caulking tools, Douglass was introduced to a wider world in the Baltimore shipyards. Early nineteenth-century American shipbuilding owed its boom to the slave trade in the Caribbean and South America and to revolutionary efforts in Central and South America and Greece, as well as to the war effort in Mexico. In the shipyards Douglass met other black caulkers and black mariners, free black men who in the early nineteenth century made up one-fifth of the more than 100,000 American mariners.

Thus caulking gave Douglass a trade, put him in contact with other free blacks, and also helped him pocket the money necessary for his planned escape to the North. Early in his career as a caulker Douglass handed over all of his wages to Auld, keeping nothing himself. While working in the Price shipyard, Douglass made arrangements to pay Auld three dollars a week; in return Douglass would provide for his own room and board as well as cover the expenses for his caulking tools. With this arrangement Douglass gained an increase in liberty and was able to keep up to six dollars a week.

In his escape from slavery, Douglass dressed as a sailor and carried a Seamen's Protection Certificate that he had acquired from a black sailor. Yet freedom for Douglass proved precarious; the open sky of the North closed when, after his New York City marriage to Anna Murray, he arrived in the whaling port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and was denied work as a caulker because of the color of his skin. Life for Douglass remained a struggle, even on free soil. Instead of gaining employment in the specialized trade of the caulker, he eventually worked as a common laborer, for which he earned a dollar a day—half of what he would have earned as a caulker.

In the shipyards of the antebellum United States, African American men dominated the caulking trade; their dominance persisted until after the Civil War. Douglass's own career as a caulker, one that saw opportunity as well as racism and the denial of opportunity, touched on many of the ambiguities concerning African Americans and ships—vessels of slavery as well as freedom.

See also Auld Family; Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery in; Civil War; Douglass, Anna Murray; Douglass, Frederick; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Mexican-American War; Racism; and Slave Trade.

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