
Contents
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Commerce, Government, and Science Commerce, Government, and Science
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New England, New York, and the Southern Oyster Trade New England, New York, and the Southern Oyster Trade
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Chesapeake Oystering, Black Mobility, and Legislative Control Chesapeake Oystering, Black Mobility, and Legislative Control
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Oysters and Emancipation Oysters and Emancipation
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Four Oysters and Emancipation: The Antebellum Shellfish Industry as a Pathway to Freedom
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Published:October 2021
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Abstract
The U.S. government formed the U.S. Coast Survey (now the Office of Coast Survey) in 1807 as one of its first scientific organizations. The agency’s task was to facilitate commerce and national defense by producing nautical charts that identified the shoreline, water depths, and navigation hazards. In the process, as the historian Michelle Zacks demonstrates, its mapmakers offered detailed studies of specific maritime spaces, some shaped by captive labor and others intimately understood by African Americans, both freed and enslaved, who navigated the nation’s eastern coast in the oystering trade. The commercial exchange of oysters and other goods between the Chesapeake, New York, and New England opened up mechanisms for enslaved people to navigate within the boundaries of slavery. For many, their hard-earned knowledge of this trade and the oyster beds that fed it offer an emancipatory path. The spatial knowledge of producers and distributors within the antebellum oyster industry was a form of geopolitical literacy.
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