Baltimore caulkers: Douglass hands over "every cent," then Isaac Myers builds a Black-owned shipyard (Baltimore, MD, 1830s–1866)

SUMMARYBaltimore caulkers: Douglass hands over "every cent," then Isaac Myers builds a Black-owned shipyard (Baltimore, MD, 1830s–1866) [Connections: Tech & skilled labor, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDIn his Narrative (1845), Frederick Douglass says white carpenters at Gardner's shipyard "said they would not work with free colored workmen" and beat him. At Walter Price's yard he learned caulking: "my wages were a dollar and a half a day," and "it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh." Later he hired his own time on condition that "I was to pay him three dollars at the end of each week," while covering his own tools, board and clothes. In October 1865, Encyclopedia.com says, white caulkers "angered by black competition went on strike," police joined them, and African Americans were driven from the shipyards. Isaac Myers, born free in Baltimore in 1835 and an independent caulker by the Civil War, organized a cooperative. Black Baltimoreans raised $10,000, Myers borrowed $30,000 more, and the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock opened in February 1866, paying about 300 workers an average of $3 a day.
STATUS: Douglass is hired-out enslaved (wages to Hugh Auld, per his own Narrative), then self-hired ($3 a week to Auld). Myers is free (own shop / co-op owner)

PATTERNA skilled trade was held by Black workers, the wages were taken by owners, and after emancipation the trade was taken by strike, so Black workers built their own yard

LENS (WW9)Pushed out of the shipyard, they bought a shipyard

OPENCompany records of the Chesapeake Marine Railway; the 1865 strike in Baltimore newspapers

SOURCEFrederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Project Gutenberg; Encyclopedia.com, "Myers, Isaac".