Those Indomitable Downings

A WONDER OF THE NEW WORLD, the vast oyster beds supported by the great estuaries of the mid-Atlantic shore allowed free Blacks—and fugitive slaves—to carve out less-surveilled lives as self-employed watermen. These aquatic entrepreneurs included Thomas Downing, born in Chincoteague, Virginia, in 1791 to parents who were freed after their owner converted to Methodism (“Rehearsal for Rebellion,” June 2022). At 21, Thomas headed north, first to Philadelphia and then to Manhattan.

The New York diet so celebrated the oyster that locals called shell-fish-bearing outcroppings in the harbor Great Oyster Island and Little Oyster Island, later renamed Liberty Island, site of the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, scene of immigrant processing. Downing started out oystering,