Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland 9780801460678

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. Work
2. Migration
3. Family
4. Dependency
5. Community
6. Recession
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Hirelings

Hirelings

African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

Jennifer Hull Dorsey

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dorsey, Jennifer Hull, 1969– Hirelings : African American workers and free labor in early Maryland / Jennifer Hull Dorsey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4778-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Free African Americans—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—History— 18th century. 2. Free African Americans—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)— History—19th century. 3. Free African Americans—Employment— Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—History—18th century. 4. Free African Americans—Employment—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—History— 19th century. 5. Agricultural laborers—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)— History—18th century. 6. Agricultural laborers—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—History—19th century. 7. African American agricultural laborers—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—History—18th century. 8. African American agricultural laborers—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)— History—19th century. 9. Slaves—Emancipation—Economic aspects—Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.) 10. Wage payment system— Eastern Shore (Md. and Va.)—History. I. Title. E185.93.M2D67 2011 331.2'160899607521—dc22 2010047915 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

List of Illustrations

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Preface

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Introduction

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1. Work

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2. Migration

45

3. Family

61

4. Dependency

82

5. Community

100

6. Recession

118

Conclusion

145

Notes

161

Bibliography

185

Index

203

Illustrations

Figures 1. Joseph Chain advertisement, 1817 2. House Servants Wanted, 1817 3. A Plea for Charity, 1817

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Maps 1. Map of the Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland 2. Map of the Delmarva Peninsula, ca. 1778 3. Map of Talbot County, 1878

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Tables 1.1. Average per diem wages earned by freed men, 1789–1823 (in dollars) 1.2. Average per diem wages earned by freed women, 1789–1823 (in dollars) 1.3. Property owners in Trappe and Hole-in-the-Wall, Talbot County, 1804–32

35 35 43

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Illustrations

2.1. Applicants for Certificates of Freedom as a percentage of whole free black populations, Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties, 1805–34 2.2. Sex and age structures of Certificate of Freedom applicants, Talbot County, 1800–34 2.3. Sex and age structures of Certificate of Freedom applicants, Queen Anne’s County, 1807–34

51 55 56

Preface

In 1997 historian Wilson J. Moses wished aloud that scholars would find something new to say about nineteenth-century free African Americans. Moses observed in Reviews in American History that the scholarship had become predictable, adding that there are “layers of data in support of theses that are no longer subject to serious dispute.” The field is ready for a revolution, he suggested.1 The exploration in this book into the working lives of manumitted and freeborn African Americans may not revolutionize the field, but it is meant to fill an inexplicable gap in African American studies as well as the history of the early republic. It is a history of free African American laborers, their families, and communities, but it is also an exploration of the relationship between the early republic manumissions and the nascent wage labor system. It is the story of how agricultural employers made slaves into wage laborers and how two generations of African Americans experienced this transition from slavery to wage work. With a few noteworthy exceptions, most historians have ignored the working lives of those African Americans manumitted in the first

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emancipation, the legislative abolition of slavery in the northern states between 1780 and 1804, concentrating instead on their family relations, religious institutions, social organizations, and political activism.2 It is a curious omission when we consider that histories of other emancipations are so hyperfocused on emancipation as a labor problem. Take histories of the British emancipation (1833) and the U.S. emancipation (1865) as examples.3 Both historiographies are replete with microhistories of how emancipated slaves experienced the transition from slave labor to free labor. They emphasize how former slaves worked within and around plantation systems to create economic, social, and civic niches for themselves.4 They also emphasize the relationships between emancipation, political economy, and the concurrent rise of a free labor ideology. By comparison, histories of the first emancipation have concentrated on the economic impetus for emancipation, but they do not explain what happened next: Where did these former slaves belong in a wage labor system? How did the availability of African American wage laborers alter hiring practices in specific industries? How did the steady increase in wage laborers influence public policy? Finally, how did working for wages alter the lives of African Americans? How did work shape their relationships with employers, family, other free laborers, and enslaved workers?5 As I read through emancipation studies, African American community studies, labor history, and plantation studies, it occurred to me that free African Americans in the early republic shared more common ground with other emancipated people throughout the Atlantic world over the course of the nineteenth century than the existing scholarship allows.6 I realized that early republic emancipators were no less concerned with matters of political economy than subsequent generations. They pursued emancipation with an eye toward implementing a wage labor system, and they expected to manipulate this system to their advantage. The early republic emancipations made slaves into wage-earning manual laborers who joined a fast-growing population of working poor. In this book I focus on one segment of this population: free African American agricultural laborers who worked in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I explain how African Americans made the transition from slave labor to wage labor. I also consider this transition from the perspective of the slaveholders who made it possible and shaped its process. The story begins with the manumission of hundreds of slaves, and follows this manumitted generation and their freeborn

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children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, new associations, and new communities over the next half-century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but in the colonial era they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the labor system. As free workers in a slave society, they contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters’ authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited their own households’ needs, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers, and migration became a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers’ control. Throughout it all free African Americans informed the early definition of “free labor” in early republic Maryland. Why the Eastern Shore of Maryland? The choice was strategic. First, the Eastern Shore counties claimed a significantly larger population of free African Americans than other rural counties on the mainland before the Civil War. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the free black population on the Eastern Shore increased by 400 percent while the white population declined steadily. Of course, the free African American population in Baltimore had increased by 3,100 percent in forty years, but Baltimore also attracted a large number of European migrants, and those white migrants maintained a white majority. In 1830 white Baltimoreans outnumbered black Baltimoreans three to one. By comparison, the Eastern Shore of Maryland became a kind of Free Black Belt within the state. Second, the history of wage work on the Eastern Shore is well documented, if not thoroughly explicated. Barbara Jeanne Fields raised awareness of free black agricultural workers on the Eastern Shore and the important but indirect role that they played in the politics of antebellum Maryland in her 1985 book, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. Fields described the unique “dual labor system” that combined slave and free labor and the lengths to which agriculturalist and industrialist went to preserve it amid heated contests over the vices and virtues of wage labor. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground is a study of political economy, and it has figured prominently in my analysis.

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The economic importance of the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia and Baltimore is another reason to look more closely at the free African American workers in this region. Throughout much of the eighteenth century Eastern Shore agriculture fueled the expansion of the milling and shipping industries in Philadelphia, making agricultural workers key players in the growth of the most dynamic economy in early American history. The economic relationship between Philadelphia, Baltimore, and their agricultural hinterlands can be traced to the early eighteenth century, when Eastern Shore planters began growing grains for export, a process detailed by historians Paul G. E. Clemens and Brooke Hunter. Historians have thoroughly explained the consequences of agricultural diversification on the economic development of the Eastern Shore. Jean B. Russo and Lorena Walsh, for example, have explained among other things how diversification altered plantation management and the work routines of slaves. Others have studied how a rising demand for skilled and unskilled labor in Baltimore and Philadelphia industries siphoned skilled labor from the countryside.7 What historians have not considered is how free African American laborers participated in this dynamic economy.8 One premise of this book is that the proximity of the Eastern Shore to the expanding economies of Philadelphia, and later Baltimore, mattered for how free African Americans experienced freedom. They participated actively in a regional exchange of people, ideas, money, and goods that had a pronounced effect both on their own communities and the demographic, economic, and cultural development of the greater Eastern Shore. Equally important, such opportunities for regional exchange and association across state lines encouraged free African Americans in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware to think of themselves as members of a regional community. Perhaps the most obvious example of how this regional exchange worked is in the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Only two years after African American Methodists in Philadelphia and Baltimore broke away from the Methodist Episcopal Church, an AME missionary appeared on the Eastern Shore. Why would the newly organized AME Church spend its limited resources on church-building efforts in the countryside? As we will see, the choice was neither coincidence nor accident but a natural outgrowth of African American migration between the Eastern Shore, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

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Nor were Eastern Shore planters immune to the influence of this regional exchange. In the colonial era several of the most prominent planter families on the Eastern Shore intermarried with the merchant elite of Philadelphia. They maintained estates in both Pennsylvania and Maryland, and they knew experientially the economic benefits of both enslaved and hired labor. These same planters were among the earliest to integrate wage laborers into the agricultural labor force, and although they did not know it, this choice altered the course of history. Specifically, it put Maryland on a different trajectory than Virginia and the rest of the slaveholding South. In the seventeenth century, Maryland and Virginia shared more similarities than differences: they were two Chesapeake colonies with economies underdeveloped by tobacco and slavery and governments beholden to the interests of the slaveholders who monopolized land and slaves. In the eighteenth century Maryland moved away from this heritage, in part because of a profitable alliance between Eastern Shore planters and Philadelphia merchants. Before the American Revolution Maryland gave up growing tobacco for grain, and, more important, it gave up slavery for a more complicated mixed labor system that included slaves and wage laborers. In the 1780s and 1790s Maryland and Virginia slaveholders manumitted slaves at comparable rates, and in both states some white men and women supported efforts to integrate former slaves into community life. However, Virginia contended with major slave revolts in 1800 and 1832, and white Virginians grew overtly hostile to black freedom. As early as 1806 the Virginia legislature instituted laws that mandated the expulsion of manumitted slaves. By comparison, a majority of white Marylanders, and most especially Eastern Shore plantation owners, accepted a wage labor system and could not imagine expelling black workers from it. As a result, the Maryland legislature was less concerned with expelling free African Americans and more concerned with shaping former slaves and their freeborn descendents into a reliable and dependent workforce. Bringing to light the history of these forgotten workers in rural Maryland required a teasing of information about African American life from a diversity of sources authored primarily by white men. Both the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore claim sizeable and diverse collections of public and private records from the Eastern Shore. The observations and hiring practices of

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Eastern Shore planters Thomas Chamberlain, Richard Tilghman, Robert Lloyd Nichols, and Robert Goldsborough revealed to me the process by which former slaves were integrated as free workers into a plantation economy built on slave labor. Plantation records proved vital for understanding how, when, and where free African American workers fit in with the agricultural economy. Assessment records collected by county governments made it possible to place free African Americans in specific neighborhoods and to compare their property holdings over time. The Census of Negroes (1832) revealed that former slaves formed large households that included multiple generations of free kin. Certificates of Freedom issued by county courts indicated the difference that gender and status (manumitted or freeborn) made in how former slaves experienced freedom. County court minutes also revealed how planters enforced a growing body of discriminatory laws to control their workforce. With the exception of the introduction, each of the chapters in this book revisits key themes in the history of the early republic from the vantage point of former slaves and freeborn African Americans on the Eastern Shore. The introduction provides historical context for the transition from slave labor to wage labor. It establishes a sense of place and offers a brief history of the society and economy of the Eastern Shore between settlement and the American Revolution. Chapter 1, “Labor,” addresses an important but obvious question: What employment opportunities were available to free African Americans in a slave society? The chapter describes the different types of work opportunities available to former slaves in an agricultural society. This chapter also challenges the standing argument that Maryland developed a “dual labor system” in the early nineteenth century.9 “Dual” implies competition or polarity, but in fact, employers and free African Americans more accurately experienced a labor system that integrated free, slave, and semifree (e.g., apprenticed children and “term slaves”) laborers. “Mixed labor system” better captures the complexity of labor relations between planters and their former slaves in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, “Migration,” considers the experience of migrant workers as well as the meaning of migration for African American laborers. Migration contributed to rural African Americans’ sense of belonging to a larger regional community that extended from the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia and Baltimore and beyond. Regional community, constructed through migration, is a theme that writers on the free African American communities

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of Baltimore and Philadelphia have overlooked. This chapter also considers white employers’ hostility to African American mobility and the steps they took to manage this migration to their advantage. It introduces the argument that this hostility to black mobility provided much of the impetus for the Maryland Black Codes. Chapter 3, “Family,” examines how the practice of gradual manumission divided African American families between slavery and freedom, strategies for maintaining familial integrity across that divide, and free African Americans’ advancement toward autonomous households. It also examines the African American family as an economic unit. Free family members worked toward the freedom of enslaved family members, manumitted parents cared for their freeborn children, and adult children worked to support the elderly in autonomous households. Even in freedom, family members remained connected to one another by their obligations as spouses, parents, children, and siblings. Chapter 4, “Dependency,” describes the legal regime created by the Maryland legislature to force free African Americans into wage dependence and how Eastern Shore planters engaged with it to their advantage. It also examines how free African Americans secured the services of the local government to protect their own investments in the Eastern Shore. Chapter 5, “Community,” centers on the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its meaning for free men and women in rural Maryland. On the Eastern Shore, as elsewhere, the AME Church expressed the values, culture, and experience of a distinct group of free African Americans. It also connected these believers across the Middle Atlantic states, reinforcing their membership in a regional community. Chapter 6, “Recession,” examines this watershed moment when the lucrative wartime trade in Eastern Shore grains collapsed and ended an era of relative prosperity and stability for rural free African Americans. I am grateful to the many people who have assisted me in the preparation of this book. Above all, I thank George, Josephine, and Casey for their patience, enthusiasm, good humor, and confidence. I could not have completed this work without them. I want to recognize the mentorship of Alison Games, who guided and encouraged me at the earliest stage. Alison, Adam Rothman, and T. Stephen Whitman filled the margins of preliminary drafts with thoughtful

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comments and advice, and I am indebted to them for what they have taught me about the craft of writing history. Equally meaningful were my conversations with Lois Green Carr, Jean B. Russo, and Lorena S. Walsh, scholars whose work continues to inspire me. I thank Douglas Egerton, Jon Sensbach, Peter H. Wood, and Gregory H. Nobles for gracious feedback on research that I presented at various academic conferences. I also thank Joseph Miller for the opportunity to discuss my work at the 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar “Roots: African Dimensions of the History and Culture of the Americas (through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).” I am deeply indebted to Christopher Clark and Paul G. E. Clemens who read the complete manuscript and submitted reports to Cornell University Press. Their careful feedback and helpful suggestions spurred me to rethink my work, to address its weaknesses, and to appreciate its strengths. Colleagues at Georgetown University, Arizona State University, and Siena College read the manuscript at different stages in its development. In particular, I thank Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, Jon Enriquez, Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Michael J. Socolow, and Michael Stancliff for taking time away from their own projects to read my work and nudge me forward in the writing process. Fellowships from the Department of History at Georgetown University and a number of summer research grants from the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University underwrote much of the research of this book. It is a pleasure to extend my heartfelt appreciation to the knowledgeable and efficient archivists at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Maryland Historical Society, and the Maryland State Archives, who directed me to many of the manuscripts that I needed to write this history. Finally, I am grateful for the opportunity to work with Cornell University Press and with acquisitions editor Michael J. McGandy, who has shepherded me through the publication process. Please note that I have opted to use modern spellings of all the town names. For example, Ivytown is listed as both Ivytown and Ivory Town in nineteenth-century records; Ivytown is the contemporary spelling.

Hirelings

Map 1. The Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Introduction

The waterways of the Delmarva Peninsula have shaped the economic and social development of the Eastern Shore of Maryland from settlement to the present. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English merchants who directed transatlantic trade easily accessed the Delmarva Peninsula and its settlers through the Elk, Sassafras, Chester, Miles, and Nanticoke rivers that flow from Chesapeake Bay. Merchants carried people, credit, manufactured supplies, and news to the peninsular communities. They also transported agricultural produce and lumber products to other destinations within the Atlantic world. Of all the bayside rivers the Choptank is arguably the most important for explaining the history of the Eastern Shore, in that it divides the territory into two distinctive agricultural regions. The Upper Eastern Shore, located between the Choptank and the Elk rivers, claims rich, deep, fertile, and well-irrigated soil suitable for staple agriculture. South of the Choptank, sandy soil, a marshy inland, and extensive woodlands prohibited the development of plantation agriculture. Instead, settlers in the Lower Eastern Shore harvested

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quick-growing perishables as well as valuable naval stores, including lumber, tar, and pitch from the woodlands. Although the poor quality of the soil on the Lower Eastern Shore prohibited tobacco production, the settlers were not exactly handicapped in the imperial economy. Merchants from England and Philadelphia found reliable West Indian markets for the corn, wheat, livestock, and lumber products harvested on the Lower Eastern Shore.1 Shipping and boating were equally important to the regional economy of the Delmarva Peninsula. Residents routinely plied the smaller rivers in dugout canoes, barges, and skiffs. Those who lived inland transported goods along the rivers and across land to larger landings on Delaware Bay. Everywhere, people fished, gathered oysters and crabs, and plucked terrapins from the salty waters. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, Eastern Shore shipbuilders in St. Michaels, Talbot County, provided Philadelphia and Baltimore merchants with cargo vessels. Waterways also served as natural boundaries between Eastern Shore counties. Kent County, the oldest county on the Upper Eastern Shore, was established in 1642. It lies between the Sassafras and Chester rivers. Talbot County, the most southern county on the Upper Eastern Shore, lies between the Miles and Choptank rivers. Queen Anne’s County, created out of part of Talbot in 1706, lies between Kent and Talbot, bound by the Chester and the Miles rivers. In 1773 the Maryland government carved Caroline County partly out of Queen Anne’s County. It is unique among the counties of the Upper Eastern Shore because it has no coastline although the Choptank River cuts through Caroline and flows into Chesapeake Bay. In the eighteenth century the government built roads that offered Caroline residents comparatively easier access to Delaware Bay. Thereafter, the economies of the most westward counties of the Upper Eastern Shore were directed away from Chesapeake Bay and toward Wilmington and other commercial centers on Delaware Bay. Early immigrants to the Eastern Shore came from every direction, crossing either Chesapeake Bay or the Atlantic Ocean, enticed by cheap land and the possibility of high profits in a booming tobacco economy. Among the first settlers were former indentured servants who felt pushed from the mainland because they lacked the necessary capital to undertake large-scale tobacco production. Others included religious dissenters, especially Quakers, who arrived in the 1660s to escape persecution by Virginia

Introduction

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authorities. Quakers initially settled on the Lower Eastern Shore, but the Presbyterians and Anglicans who dominated the religious life of the region harassed them. By the eighteenth century these Quaker communities had relocated to the Upper Eastern Shore, where they thrived notwithstanding their members’ status as religious dissenters. Everywhere on the Eastern Shore, Protestant settlers outnumbered Catholics, but in the eighteenth century, Jesuits established plantations in Talbot and Cecil County at the head of Chesapeake Bay bordering Pennsylvania and Delaware. These plantations provided a spiritual safe haven for Catholics, who had been disenfranchised by the Maryland colonial government in 1718. Penal laws prohibited Catholic clergy from carrying out missionary work, but from their plantations, the Jesuits sustained Catholicism, administering the sacraments and providing a religious education to Catholic settlers.2 Beginning in the 1630s thousands of English and Irish convicts were sentenced to labor in Maryland, and some undoubtedly went to the Eastern Shore to work for the emerging great planters. A second wave of convict laborers arrived in the 1750s and 1760s, and while most went to Annapolis and Baltimore, some landed on the Eastern Shore. One estimate holds that one in ten adult white men in Queen Anne’s County in 1755 was a British convict.3 In the seventeenth century, convict laborers outnumbered enslaved laborers, but by the eighteenth century, British convicts likely worked alongside African slaves throughout the colony. The first people of African descent on the Eastern Shore of Maryland were a handful of free Africans who migrated northward from Virginia in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Some came to escape persecution, others to take advantage of inexpensive land. Little is known about their experience, but their names appear sporadically in a handful of early court records: the Driggers and Johnsons of Somerset County, Robert Butchery of Dorchester, and Grinedge of Talbot. It seems the free Africans were anglicized (adopted English customs, culture, and language) and Christian. Some were landowners and others were tenants, and some intermarried with whites, but the colonial government nevertheless looked on them with suspicion, prohibiting them from serving in local militias and denying them the right to testify against whites in court.4 In the 1630s the landscape of the Eastern Shore was dotted with familyoperated tobacco farms. But the economy and society underwent a significant transformation in the 1660s when the proprietor of Maryland, Lord

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Baltimore, granted thousands of acres to key allies who had the economic means to develop large-scale tobacco plantations. The colony was engaged in a border dispute with Virginia, and the proprietor encouraged this settlement to secure Maryland’s claims on the peninsula. These immigrants were Englishmen of middling means with ample capital to hire tenants, import indentured servants and convicts, and, beginning in the 1680s, to import African slaves. They included the Tilghmans, the Lloyds, the Hollydays, and the Goldsboroughs, families whose names are now synonymous with the golden age of colonial Maryland. The 1690s were especially lucrative for these tobacco planters, who imported record numbers of indentured servants and African slaves to increase agricultural output. In short time they had made significant fortunes, and in this frontier society their economic success translated into enormous political influence both on the peninsula and in the capital of Annapolis. By the 1720s, the great planters of the Upper Eastern Shore had adopted all the cultural trappings of manor lords and lived no differently than the more well-known Virginia elite (the Byrds, Berkeleys, and Randolphs). Their elite status was manifest in their clothing, manners, diet, religion (Anglican), recreational interests, and, most evidently, in the stately mansions each family built along the waterways of the Eastern Shore—The Hermitage, Redbourne, Wye House—symbols of wealth and power that still attract the attention of contemporary visitors. In just a few years, these moneyed settlers drove up the price of land and labor, forcing those who could not compete to move out of the tidewater counties of the Eastern Shore farther inland to Caroline County or even farther on to Delaware and Pennsylvania. The outmigration of poorer settlers intensified the stratification of Upper Eastern Shore society. A 1756 survey of Talbot County landowners by agents of the proprietor found that just thirty-five planters controlled 38 percent of the land. By comparison, middling planters (the 341 planters who owned fewer than two hundred acres each) owned only 16 percent of the land.5 At the same time, the elite families of the Eastern Shore built extended-family networks through intermarriage that secured their economic, social, and political dominance of the region for generations. One estimate holds that as early as 1700 half of Eastern Shore landowners were connected to one another by marriage or kinship.6 But fluid borders also meant that this plantation elite moved easily between the Eastern Shore, the Western Shore, Philadelphia, and England.

Introduction

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Shared economic interests connected the plantation elite of the Upper Eastern Shore to the merchant elite of Philadelphia. Over time, intermarriage between Philadelphia merchants and Eastern Shore planters created extended-family networks and, more important, a distinct group of elite families that wielded economic, social, and political influence on both sides of the border. The Tilghman family offers one clear example. By the 1720s, the Tilghmans of Queen Anne’s County had intermarried with all of the most prominent first families of Maryland and a few prominent Philadelphia families. James Tilghman (1716–93), son of Colonel Richard Tilghman and grandson of Philemon Lloyd, married the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant in 1743. Their son, Tench Tilghman, was born on the Eastern Shore in Talbot County, but he was educated in Philadelphia and began his professional career in the mercantile business owned by his mother’s family. Tench Tilghman famously served as George Washington’s aide-de-camp during the American Revolution, and after the war, he established a mercantile business in Baltimore. Tench’s brother William (1756–1827) was also born in Talbot County, and like Tench, he pursued his education in Philadelphia. In the 1770s, William took up residence at the family’s Queen Anne’s County estate, The Forest, practiced law in Chestertown, and served in the Maryland legislature. In 1793 he married the granddaughter of William Allen, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and in 1799 he moved his family to Philadelphia, where he assumed leadership of the 3rd Judicial Circuit that then included Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Subsequently, he was appointed chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a position he held until his death in 1827. In sum, William Tilghman’s personal and professional careers fully integrated the best of Philadelphia and the Eastern Shore, and notwithstanding his prominent role in early national Pennsylvania, he maintained his connections to the Eastern Shore. His cosmopolitan Philadelphia lifestyle was subsidized in part by the slaves who harvested the tobacco and grains grown at The Forest. The Eastern Shore–Philadelphia connection had its origins in a decadelong economic depression that followed Queen Anne’s War (1702–13). At that time, tobacco planters on both sides of Chesapeake Bay contended with two critical threats to their prosperity: declining tobacco prices and a wartime suppression of trade. Sustaining their lavish lifestyles required a change in agricultural practices. Simply put, planters had to grow something other than tobacco. In the 1700s and 1710s, planters on the Upper

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Eastern Shore began growing wheat, corn, and other grains for the British and French West Indies. Certainly, the tobacco, rice, and sugar trades were more lucrative, but the grain trade was reliable. The exchange worked so well that some Caribbean sugar planters subsequently gave up food production so that they could convert every inch of arable land to sugar cane. Initially, Maryland planters thought of grain as a safety crop, meant to tide them over until the next upward swing in the tobacco boom, but in the 1750s, an unanticipated food shortage throughout the Atlantic world moved grain from the periphery to the center of many planters’ ledgers.7 First, Great Britain began importing American grains. The demand for food was the result of a population explosion and the migration of agricultural workers into emerging industrial centers. The resettlement of agricultural workers into manufacturing centers meant that Britain could not grow enough food to feed its population and fuel its industrial revolution. Next, Portugal, Spain, and Italy looked to America for food. As in Britain, record population growth had created near famine conditions on the Iberian Peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese merchants were initially inclined to buy food from eastern European growers, but the scarcity of European-grown grains also forced them to look to America. Thereafter, the Iberian Peninsula was a reliable consumer of American grains well into the nineteenth century.8 Finally, the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) that involved most of Europe and the Caribbean created a heavy, if temporary, demand for American foodstuffs. Philadelphia merchants drew the planters of the Upper Eastern Shore into all of these markets. As the world demand for foodstuffs increased, Philadelphia merchants searched beyond the Delaware River Valley for new sources of grains. In time their supply networks came to include grain farmers in southeastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, the Upper Eastern Shore, and, eventually, western Virginia. Eastern Shore wheat was shipped or carted to mills in northern Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, milled into flour, and then shipped from Philadelphia and Wilmington to ports in the Caribbean and Europe. Smaller ports like Chestertown in Kent County and Oxford in Talbot County also handled a portion of the trade.9 Steadily, more and more Upper Eastern Shore planters discontinued tobacco production for grain production. According to one estimate, Eastern Shore wheat accounted for nearly one fifth of all the wheat exported from Philadelphia between 1770 and 1775.

Introduction

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Many planters who made the switch to mixed agriculture would never return to exclusive tobacco production, but not all Eastern Shore counties participated equally in this transformation from tobacco to grains. It seems that proximity to the Delaware River and the Philadelphia merchants who organized the transatlantic flour trade determined the speed of conversion. Kent County, for example, specialized in wheat by 1770, producing nearly twice as much wheat as any other Upper Eastern Shore county (300,000 bushels annually between 1700 and 1775). Queen Anne’s County, just south of Kent, grew approximately 80,000 bushels annually, and Talbot County, the most southern county on the Upper Eastern Shore, produced just 20,000 bushels.10 Eastern Shore planters did not abandon tobacco altogether but diversified their production, and by the 1770s, this diversification was the norm for those plantations large enough to sustain it. Even in Talbot County, a county committed to tobacco production until the 1780s, most large plantations cultivated a mix of tobacco, wheat, and corn. A survey of the inventories of forty-six Talbot County estates in the 1750s found that 43 percent included a mixture of tobacco, corn, and wheat. All of the plantations that grew tobacco also grew some corn or wheat, and 39 percent of the inventoried estates only grew corn and wheat. Twenty years later tobacco remained an important Talbot County crop, but diversification continued with 64 percent of forty-eight estates inventoried by the county court between 1770 and 1774 planting a mix of tobacco, corn, and wheat.11 Slave labor was instrumental to this trend toward agricultural diversification. In the 1680s only a handful of African slaves worked in Talbot County, but as planters invested in growing tobacco on a large scale, and then grains, the slave population grew to 492 by the 1710s. By 1755 the slave population had grown to 2,910, and slaves made up roughly 34 percent of the total population. Over the next twenty years the slave population of Talbot County grew by an additional 30 percent, totaling 6,717 in 1775 (roughly 38% of the population).12 In the 1720s approximately 25 percent of the estates inventoried by the Talbot County Court included slaves; by the 1750s, 37 percent did.13 In effect, enslaved Africans built the Upper Eastern Shore grain farms that helped feed the Atlantic world in the middle of the eighteenth century. Altogether, an estimated 18,000 Africans survived the transatlantic journey to Maryland in the eighteenth century. They came from the

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Gambia, modern-day Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, and various coastal communities along the Bight of Benin.14 In Africa these men and women identified as Mandingas, Jolofs, Fulas, Fon, Yoruba, Edo, or Igbos, but on their arrival in Maryland they became “Negroes.”15 We know very little about those who went to the Eastern Shore, but the ex-slave narrative of Ayuba “Job” Suleiman Diallo (1701–1773), who spent two years enslaved in Maryland, provides some insight into their experience. Job was a Muslim aristocrat from the Funta kingdom in the Senegambia when he was captured by political rivals and sold to English slave traders at the mouth of Gambia River. He arrived in Annapolis in 1730 and was sold to a Queen Anne’s County planter. In his short time in slavery Job coped with cultural disorientation and material depravation. On his arrival in Queen Anne’s County he went to work in the tobacco fields, but unaccustomed to the heavy work of hoeing, he was soon sick. The slaveholder made the choice to assign him to another task rather than risk his early death. Exhausted and depressed, Job sought comfort in prayer, sometimes leaving the cattle put in his charge so that he could pray in solitude in the woods. But “a white Boy frequently watched him, and whilst he was at his Devotion would mock him, and throw Dirt in his Face.”16 Job ran away from the Eastern Shore not just to escape a harsh work regime, but also out of frustration with his inability to communicate with anyone. He was distressed, but he was also lonely. The combination of sparse African settlement and high mortality rates for the first generation of African slaves limited opportunities for companionship among Africans on the Eastern Shore. Few planters had sufficient capital or credit to buy more than one or two Africans at a time, and so men like Job mourned alone the loss of family and culture. The severe sexual imbalance also denied seventeenth-century Africans in America the opportunity for a family life. Estimates suggest that in the 1680s African men may have outnumbered women by two to one in Talbot County, and estate inventories filed with the county court included only two enslaved children for every ten enslaved adults.17 Over time the Africans who survived their first few years in slavery found ways to develop relationships with other Africans across Eastern Shore plantations.18 They developed a common language and established an independent social life out of the view of whites. Over time these efforts set the groundwork for family life and an Americanborn slave population.

Introduction

9

As for the runaway Job, he was captured and returned to his owner, who decided to sell him to an Annapolis businessman rather than invest any more effort in his enslavement. Had Job stayed on the Eastern Shore the planter-slaveholder would have inevitably added grain cultivation to his work regime. Job and other Senegambia-born slaves would have been familiar with tobacco agriculture as tobacco was widely grown, consumed, and traded in West Africa from the Senegambia to the Niger Delta. The sight of rowed tobacco hills along Eastern Shore waterways would have been eerily familiar to West African slaves.19 Wheat cultivation, on the other hand, was a different matter. West Africans had no previous knowledge of the tools of wheat agriculture, such as plows, sickles (later scythes), and oxen teams. In West Africa men and women often grew tobacco in small patches around a family compound, but wheat required thoroughly cleared land. In Africa and in Maryland both men and women wielded the hoe on tobacco farms, but labor on wheat farms was divided into gendered tasks. Men managed the draft animals, directed the plow and the harrow, and wielded the scythe, while women and children would thresh and bind the harvested wheat. Tobacco required attention year-round, but once slaves planted wheat, the crop could remain undisturbed until the harvest. However, the wheat harvest was a laborintensive event, as slaves had only ten to fourteen days to cut, bind, stack, and thresh the ripe stalks.20 On the Upper Eastern Shore slaves would have worked alongside neighborhood artisans and craftsmen, who were hired by the plantation owner to speed up the harvest. At each harvest white blacksmiths exchanged their hammers and anvils for scythes and worked as day laborers for periods as short as two weeks to earn cash wages.21 Elsewhere in colonial America a single staple crop often determined a slave’s work regime. Slaves who worked in rice plantations in the Carolinas, for example, worked according to a task system that rewarded efficiency. Slaves who completed their assigned task in a timely matter were free to cultivate their own gardens and market their produce in town. South Carolina planters even extended a break to rice slaves in the hot summer months. By comparison, Upper Eastern Shore slaves attending to three different crops with three different growing cycles were rarely idle. The long growing season kept slaves at work in the tobacco fields throughout the year, six days a week, and the demands of the delicate crop meant that Maryland and Virginia slaveholders were reluctant to extend even the

10

Hirelings

traditional Anglican Church holidays to slaves.22 The adding of grain production guaranteed that slaves were continually occupied clearing ground, preparing fields, planting, hoeing, mowing, reaping, threshing, grinding, seeding, packing, and carting. When slaves were not working in the fields, they ground corn into meal, repaired fences, gathered firewood, cared for livestock, and planted root vegetables, among other tasks. Slaves were also preoccupied with their own domestic chores as their mortality rates declined in the 1720s (one benefit of increased food production) and enslaved Africans married and bore children who survived to adulthood. Ironically, it was the American War of Independence that offered slaves on the Eastern Shore a meaningful break from an otherwise stifling work routine. The British blockade of Chesapeake Bay in 1777, and again in 1779, denied Eastern Shore planters access to the mercantile networks that were so critical to their economy. In 1777 two hundred British ships escorted General William Howe’s army through Chesapeake Bay before landing at the head of Elk River, whence they began an eastward march toward Philadelphia.23 The subsequent British occupation of Philadelphia (1777–78) also limited trade between Eastern Shore planters and the Philadelphia merchants who shipped their grains to the world. In 1778 the Continental Congress embargoed American foodstuffs in an effort to encourage patriotism among farmers who were too willing to sell their grains to the specie-carrying British Army. The subsequent American alliance with France prompted the Continental Congress to lift the embargo, allowing American farmers and merchants to market their grains to allies stationed in the Spanish and French West Indies. But the business was dangerous, as shipping grains to the Caribbean required captains to slip past the British Navy that patrolled Chesapeake Bay.24 With all the traditional markets closed, tobacco production ceased on the Upper Eastern Shore, but wheat production continued, partly because the Continental Congress demanded it. The military campaigns in southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania had destroyed grain crops, forcing the Continental Army to look to Maryland and then Virginia for foodstuffs. In 1778 the Maryland Council of Safety established war committees at the county level to procure war supplies, especially wheat, flour, rye, and corn. The committees were empowered to requisition supplies and men for the war effort. The system was renowned for its efficiency, and it was duplicated in other states, but Maryland farmers hated it.25 The reality was that

Introduction

11

Map 2. The Delmarva Peninsula, ca. 1778. Map courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

12

Hirelings

war had made farming cost prohibitive. Wartime labor shortages and the rising cost of fodder increased production costs, inflation cut into farmers’ profits, and now the Continental Army insisted on paying for a precious commodity (food) with worthless certificates. One study of the wartime economy concluded that the cost of common commodities had increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1776 and 1780.26 Representatives from several war committees appeared before the Council of Safety to explain that their citizens would no longer accept inflated Continental script for precious food supplies. In July 1780, Blake Corsica, a representative of the Queen Anne’s County war committee, reported to Governor Thomas Sim Lee that livestock, wheat, and other supplies were in ample supply for buyers who paid in cash. He insisted that “much wheat may now be had for Cash but credit will do little. [T]he People’s wants cannot be supplied by certificates.” Corsica warned that inflated Continental script, credit notes, and tobacco notes simply “will not do here.” He pleaded with the governor for cash for Queen Anne’s County suppliers, noting with frustration that “the commission without Cash is like a body without a Soul incapable of motion.”27 The Eastern Shore had not been a hotbed of revolutionary activity in the decade before the outbreak of war. Planters had misgivings about imperial policies, but they were reluctant to align themselves with the revolutionaries. Some Eastern Shore patriots opposed the Stamp Act of 1765 and protested the Tea Act of 1773 by dumping a shipload of tea in the Chester River; but only after Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts of 1774, which closed the ports of Boston Harbor indefinitely, did Eastern Shore planters establish Committees of Correspondence and pledge their willingness to take up arms against Britain.28 Even then, the patriot sentiment was not universal across Delmarva Peninsula. The Upper Eastern Shore joined the independence movement after 1774, but the Lower Eastern Shore did not. Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties were patriot strongholds, but Dorchester and Somerset counties were safe havens for Loyalists.29 Lower Eastern Shore citizens notoriously gave aid and comfort to invading British troops. Loyalists obstructed patriot supply lines and otherwise made havoc for the patriot militia. Unrest was common, especially on the Lower Eastern Shore. The historical record includes twenty-six known instances of violent opposition to the patriots on the Eastern Shore between 1775 and 1781, including riots, insurrections, arsons, and plundering. One incident

Introduction

13

involved as many as seven hundred men in northern Queen Anne’s County in 1778, but the majority of such incidents occurred in Lower Eastern Shore communities.30 Moreover, as the comments by Commissioner Blake Corsica suggest, the violence was not necessarily linked to political ideology. Shortages of essentials, including clothing, medicine, and salt, provoked tenants and artisans to riot and plunder the supplies of their wealthier neighbors.31 Patriot militias mobilized against the Loyalists, and in the meantime, the Council of Safety worried over the loyalty of historically disaffected groups, including Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, and, of course, slaves. Catholics supported the patriot government, but they also expected that their loyalty would be rewarded with a repeal of the penal laws that disenfranchised them and denied them freedom of conscience. They expected Catholic emancipation in exchange for their contributions to the war effort.32 Pacifists, in particular the Quakers, were a perennial problem for all wartime governments. Quakers not only refused to serve in the militias, but they also refused to take the loyalty oath that the Maryland government required of all adult males after 1777. Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey also required pacifists to take loyalty oaths, but the Oath of Fidelity administered in Maryland was particularly problematic because it implied a military obligation on the part of the signer. Anyone who refused to sign was subject to triple taxation and property confiscation as well as restrictions on travel and speech, and, inevitably, violence by patriot vigilantes. Religious leaders who refused the oath could not legally preach in Maryland. Eastern Shore Quakers would not take the oath, but there is no evidence that patriots harassed them. It seems that patriots tolerated Quaker pacifism because many affluent Quakers were well integrated into the elite families of the Upper Eastern Shore. Methodists were another matter. Itinerant Methodist preachers had fanned out from Delaware into the Eastern Shore in the early 1770s, and by the end of the war, the evangelical movement claimed more than two thousand adherents on the Upper Eastern Shore. The Methodists annoyed Anglicans and Presbyterians equally, and on both the Upper and Lower Eastern Shores, patriot militias vigorously enforced the loyalty oaths against them. Patriots hassled Methodists for refusing to sign the oath, for preaching against the war, and for dissuading others from signing up. One Eastern Shore patriot complained, “The

14

Hirelings

spirit of Methodism reigns so much among us that few or no men will be raised for war.”33 Some Methodists were also Loyalists, and at least one circuit preacher, British-born Martin Rodda, was arrested at the site of an insurrection at the border of Queen Anne’s and Caroline counties.34 Patriots considered all these actions treasonous, and they threatened Methodist circuit riders with incarceration and physical violence. The wartime government adopted common strategies for coping with Loyalists and religious dissenters. The patriots punished, threatened, and expelled the irredeemable and co-opted the issues of the disaffected to guarantee either their alliance or their neutrality. The wartime government confiscated the property of unrepentant Tories, and then sold or auctioned it as a reward to the patriot faithful. It offered other economic inducements to win broad support, including a restructuring of the tax burden and debtor relief. In 1776 the new state constitution extended the vote to the previously disenfranchised, including Catholics, Quakers, and smallholders, that is, those with small land holdings. The state still required voters to own property (land or other real assets), but the property requirement was cut by 50 percent. On the eve of the Revolution as many as 62 percent of Talbot County householders could not vote because they did not own enough property, but the revisions increased the voter rolls of most counties by 10 percent on average.35 Later, the government granted clemency to many of those who had participated in insurrections and riots or given aid to the British. Eastern Shore slaves experienced and contributed to the wartime chaos on the Maryland home front. The British blockade of the Chesapeake and the American embargo meant material deprivation for slaves, since slaveholders withheld the usual allotments of clothing, shoes, and other imported supplies. Slaves undoubtedly suffered from malnutrition and were weakened by exposure to the cold and diseases carried by invading armies. Decreased agricultural production also meant a change in work routines, with planters reassigning slaves to new tasks such as craftwork for men and spinning and weaving for women. It also meant that slaves had more free time to pursue gardening, hunting, and fishing, activities undoubtedly encouraged by slaveholders strapped for cash.36 Some Tory slaveholders abandoned their plantations altogether, leaving slaves to fend for themselves. When government officials arrived in Oxford, Talbot County, in 1788 to sell the confiscated property of the Loyalist Captain Peacock, they

Introduction

15

were surprised to find “ten or eleven wandering Negroes that have been [there] for eleven years.”37 But perhaps most important, the war created an unprecedented opportunity for slaves to escape. At least five thousand Maryland slaves took advantage of the opportunity presented by the British occupation of Chesapeake Bay to escape from slavery.38 British vessels plied the tidal waterways, and in at least one instance, they sailed twenty miles inland and picked up escapees. In St. Mary’s County, on the Maryland mainland, the mere appearance of British ships on the coast inspired slaves “to abandon the Service of their Masters who live on the Waters.” Across the Eastern Shore patriot militias focused their efforts on suppressing slave revolts and recovering escapees. Militias stepped up patrols of the waterways, questioned slaves who piloted canoes and skiffs, and confiscated or burned unclaimed boats.39 As early as 1778, dozens of irritable planters petitioned the Council of Safety for permission to travel into Pennsylvania to retrieve kidnapped and escaped slaves. Although the state would not permit them to travel across state lines to reclaim their slaves, they did suggest that turnabout was fair play. In a letter to one planter who had petitioned for permission to go North and retrieve his slaves, the council assured, “There is British property enough within this State to make Amends for all the Negroes taken away, and we hope the Sufferers will be indemnified without their going to Philadelphia.”40 The Eastern Shore was a quieter place after the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, but the threats posed by Loyalists, Methodists, and slaves left a lasting impression on Eastern Shore elites. Admittedly, the War of Independence did not substantively change Eastern Shore society. The same core of elite families maintained an iron grip on land, labor, and local government, but the experience of social disorder clearly scared them. More specifically, it left them anxious about rootless people. In the 1780s Queen Anne’s and Talbot county planters expressed anxiety about there being too many “beggars, vagrants and vagabonds,” black and white, wandering the countryside unemployed or underemployed. At the urging of Eastern Shore residents, the Maryland legislature passed a poor-relief act in 1788, empowering Queen Anne’s County residents to convert the local free school into an almshouse and workhouse. Talbot County residents also constructed their first poorhouse in the 1780s. It was not the poverty that worried Eastern Shore society, but the mobility. It was a desire to regulate the rootless that motivated local authorities to build an almshouse.41 In a

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Hirelings

1787 letter to fellow planter Henry Hollyday, Richard J. Earle, a Queen Anne’s County slaveholder, expressed his own anxieties about the rural poor and their potential to disrupt the peace at his own plantation. Earle complained that his spinning woman “is now idle, as are many other poor women in the country.” He noted that more people should be forced to work growing flax and raising sheep, or they “must starve or become a heavy burden to the country.” He further worried that if they were not compelled or encouraged to work, then they would likely end up thieves, “dealing with our Negroes.”42 What to do with poor, rootless people, black or white, was a question that would vex Eastern Shore planters for years to come. After 1778 the war moved southward and Chesapeake and Delaware bays reopened for trade. Soaring tobacco prices gave the economy a bump and incentivized tobacco production. Planters reasserted control over their slaves, and by 1781 all the slaves who had worked in crafts or spinning during the war had returned to the tobacco fields. In 1783 tobacco sales to “smoke-starved England” equaled the value of sales to England in 1776.43 But within two years the market was saturated, and prices dropped precipitously. Grain production also intensified in the 1780s. European demand for American grains rose in the early 1780s and then leveled off around 1785 as the British, French, and Spanish issued restrictions on U.S.-Caribbean trade. But the empires could not sustain these restrictions, because the Caribbean and Europe still required a steady supply of foodstuffs from the Middle Atlantic states. Spanish Cuba, for example, was a new sugar island, and Cuban planters, like their Jamaican rivals, insisted on importing food and reserving every inch of their own cultivatable ground for sugar cane. The British demand for flour also remained constant in the 1780s. British merchants had hoped that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, Canada would be the breadbasket of the British Empire, but the comparatively underdeveloped agricultural economy of Canada was not up to the task. Meanwhile, harvest failures across Europe in 1789 caused political unrest in France, Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere. As a result, Europe resumed importing American grains. In 1790 the value of American flour and wheat was 50 percent higher than in 1780, and flour became the nation’s leading export.44 Thereafter, the United States entered an era of sustained economic growth as European nations bought up American grains to feed the armies engaged in

Introduction

17

the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1803) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). Prices for foodstuffs soared, and, in response, planters on the Upper Eastern Shore unceremoniously abandoned tobacco to raise a mixture of grains, hay, livestock, and perishables for urban markets. In 1775 a Maryland wheat bushel sold for $.68: ten years later the same bushel sold for $.83, and by 1804 it sold for $2.00. Corn prices also rose from $.33 per bushel in 1775 to $.73 per bushel in 1804. The sustained demand for American grains resulted in unprecedented economic growth in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, but it also spurred migration, urbanization, and agricultural specialization. Northern Maryland and Western Pennsylvania, frontiers in 1776, now saw the settlement of hundreds of new farmers who came to plant wheat and corn for the European and Caribbean markets. Baltimore, a sparsely inhabited entrepôt before the American Revolution, was especially well situated for milling and marketing grains grown in the Susquehanna River Valley as well as northern and western Maryland. In the 1780s and 1790s Baltimore merchants staked a claim to the transatlantic grain trade, challenging Philadelphia merchants’ halfcentury monopoly of the trade. Baltimore merchants carried grains to Europe and the Caribbean and brought back specie. They paid off wartime debts and invested in flour milling and shipping. Merchant monies fueled milling, shipping, residential and commercial construction, as well as an emerging service sector (taverns, food vendors, laundresses). Skilled workers, free and enslaved, relocated from everywhere to Baltimore to work in the shipyards, home construction, tanneries, forges, and a host of other industries. The growing population of Baltimore consumers also created a heavy demand for perishables and nonperishables, encouraging truck agriculture in the hinterlands.45 One unanticipated outcome of the explosive growth of the Baltimore economy was the steady decline of smaller bayside ports, including Chestertown and Oxford on the Eastern Shore. As early as 1795 Baltimore-based merchants monopolized overseas trade, and in 1807 an observer noted, “The proximity of Baltimore has monopolized the trade of Chestertown. . . . It carried on formerly some foreign trade, but it has been abandoned these several years.”46 The shift to intensive grain production required slaveholders to restructure their labor forces, a challenge made more difficult by an unexpected baby boom that had doubled the slave population in Chesapeake Bay region between 1755 and 1782.47 Slaveholders who wanted to lighten their

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Hirelings

labor force could sell, hire out, or free their extra slaves. Selling was the instinctive choice, and the profits accumulated from the grain boom created a strong demand for additional slave labor in a variety of industries. Smallholders and tenants on the Upper Eastern Shore, who never before had the capital to buy slaves, now joined the ranks of slaveholders. In Talbot County alone the number of slaveholders increased by 17 percent between 1783 and 1810 as more small farmers used their new wealth to buy up their wealthy neighbors’ surplus labor.48 Baltimore and northern Maryland also clamored for slaves. Baltimore mechanics, artisans, and merchants purchased and hired Eastern Shore slaves to work in a variety of industries. Similarly, in northern Maryland, recently settled planters bought more slaves to clear land and start up grain production. One outcome of this intrastate trade in slaves was the resettlement of a significant number of Maryland slaves from the Eastern Shore to the Maryland mainland. Between 1790 and 1810, Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, and Saint Mary’s counties in southern Maryland experienced a 5 percent increase in their respective slave populations. Washington and Allegany counties, both located on the Pennsylvania border, doubled their respective slave populations. The slave population of Baltimore grew by 70 percent, from 1,255 slaves in 1790 to 4,672 in 1810.49 Manumission was not intuitive to slaveholders, but by 1781 the idea of black freedom provoked less anxiety than it had in the past. The fact was that individual slaveholders had freed nearly a thousand slaves in the 1770s without incident. Maryland Quakers had disavowed slavery in the 1760s, and by 1777 a Maryland Quaker could not own or hire slaves nor work as an overseer without being subject to expulsion from his meeting house.50 In Talbot County, Quakers had freed more than three hundred slaves by 1790. Inspired by their example, Methodists also began preaching against slavery in the 1770s and 1780s. Two of the most famed Methodist itinerants on the Delmarva Peninsula, Joseph Everett and Freeborn Garrettson, manumitted their slaves. Now they pressed other slaveholders to liberate themselves from the sin of slaveholding. In 1780 the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church took the official position that slavery was “contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society.”51 Slaves who escaped frequently or who otherwise challenged a slaveholder’s authority further pushed slaveholders toward manumission. Maryland slaveholders rightly anticipated that the Act for the Gradual Abolition of

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Slavery in Pennsylvania would have the same effect as British warships in the Chesapeake. The new “free state” would be a siren for slaves, and in the 1780s, before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1793), slaveholders had little hope of recovering a slave who had run away to neighboring Pennsylvania. As an advertisement placed by Queen Anne’s County slaveholder Arthur Bryan suggests, Maryland manumission and Pennsylvania emancipation had complicated slaveholding for Eastern Shore slaveholders. In 1785 Bryan advertised a reward for the recovery of a sixteen-year-old runaway named Phill. Bryan complained that “it is quite likely [Phill] may assume another name, and from the number (and multiplying evil) of black and copper coloured gentry to countenance the deception, he may also put on him a freeman.”52 Some slaveholders proposed to mitigate the effect of the multiplying “copper coloured gentry” on their enslaved workforces by negotiating conditional manumission arrangements with individual slaves who might be tempted to run away. Slaveholders would agree to free a slave only after he or she met certain conditions. The system worked well for slaveholders, who quickly realized that slaves working toward freedom had a very powerful incentive to work well and faithfully. In 1790 the Maryland legislature sanctioned and encouraged the trend toward manumission by adopting legislation that ended a thirty-eight-year ban on manumission by last will and testament. For many slaveholders testamentary manumission had the attractive feature of allowing a slaveholder to go to the grave with a guiltless conscious, if he or she indeed had any misgivings about slavery. Equally as important, a slaveholder who manumitted slaves by last will was unburdened by either the economic or social consequences of philanthropy. Whatever the motivation, more and more slaveholders opted for manumission, and the population of free African Americans on the Eastern Shore grew at an astonishing rate between 1790 and 1830. In 1790 only 3,907 free African Americans lived on the Eastern Shore. They were a distinct minority, overshadowed not only by white residents but also by 37,591 slaves. Ninety percent of Eastern Shore African Americans remained enslaved. But, by 1820, 15,700 free African Americans lived on the Eastern Shore. Equally important, 31 percent of the African Americans on the Eastern Shore were free. Remarkably, more free African Americans lived and worked on the Eastern Shore than anywhere else in Maryland. In 1820 Maryland claimed 39,730 free African Americans, and 40 percent of these lived on the Eastern Shore.

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In conclusion, the thorough integration of the Eastern Shore in the Atlantic economy contributed in large part to the radical changes the region experienced in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Deepening participation in the grain trade gave the region its character and its sense of purpose. It determined patterns of settlement, landholding, and labor relations. The grain trade enriched and emboldened the plantation elite of the Eastern Shore and connected them to the mercantile elites of Philadelphia and Baltimore. It was grain production that made the Eastern Shore meaningful to both the American and the British armies in the War of Independence. It was because the British wanted to control the trade in grains that Eastern Shore slaves had their first meaningful chance to escape slavery. Finally, it was the thorough integration of the Eastern Shore in the global grain market that contributed to the growth of African American freedom, and it was the same grain boom that prompted Eastern Shore slaveholders to hire the newly manumitted as seasonal workers in the 1790s.53 Indeed, this was a choice that revolutionized African American life on the Eastern Shore.

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Work

In January 1814, John Kennard of Talbot County placed an advertisement in the Eastern Shore General Advertiser that read: “ ‘Wanted to Hire’: A Negro man who understands the farming business.”1 Kennard may have intended to hire a slave-for-life or a term slave from a neighboring slaveholder. He may have also considered hiring a manumitted African American. Any Talbot County freedman who saw or heard of the advertisement knew what Kennard wanted from his new hire. The new hire would perform a variety of tasks related to grain production, including harrowing and plowing the soil, cutting the wheat with a cradle scythe, mowing the hay that Kennard grew for his draft animals, sharpening the plows, and maintaining the farm equipment. Kennard may have expected his new hire to recruit seasonal laborers, oversee their work, and distribute their pay. Compensation would have included wages, but Kennard may have also offered housing and provisions, and if his new hire was married, employment for his wife. It is strange that Kennard stated his preference for a man since everyone who read the advertisement understood that “the

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farming business” was men’s work. Although women worked alongside men during the harvest season, the hired work of a “Negro woman” was more typically domestic and might include housekeeping, laundering, cooking, and child care. Fifty years earlier Kennard would have filled this position by hiring a landless white man, a convict laborer, a tradesman who wanted seasonal work, or possibly an apprentice. Historically, Maryland “Negroes” were bought, not hired, but the manumission of hundreds of slaves after the 1780s gave Kennard the option of hiring a free African American for what was once a white man’s job. Beginning in the 1790s free African Americans worked for daily, weekly, or seasonal wages on the grain plantations that defined the economy and society of the Upper Eastern Shore. Some carved out economic niches for themselves as sawyers, barbers, ditchers, butchers, and peddlers; and a few others achieved the coveted status of landholder. Whatever their position in the hierarchy of rural labor, these former slaves maximized the potential of their status as a rural, laboring people to earn some money and to establish beneficial relationships with white employers. In the process, they transformed the century-old slave system of the Eastern Shore into a mixed labor system that balanced slave and wage labor. Maryland plantation owner John Beale Bordley was an early advocate of replacing slave labor with the hired labor of freedmen.2 In a manual for farmers titled Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs (1799), Bordley proposed a number of innovative agricultural techniques and weighed in on the subject of manumission and the transition to wage labor. He encouraged farmers and planters to consider how the transition to a wage labor system could potentially increase their profit margins as the region intensified agricultural production to meet the rising demand for food in the Atlantic world. Bordley, who owned more than one thousand acres of land and dozens of slaves in both Pennsylvania and the Eastern Shore, was uniquely qualified to lead such a discussion.3 With one foot in Pennsylvania, where manumission was compulsory after 1780, and one foot in Maryland, where the free African American population grew steadily after 1780, Bordley confidently declared that slavery was “done with in America.” It was time for Maryland farmers to “begin the inquiry” into alternate labor systems so “that they may be prepared for the change.”4

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Concerned that Maryland planters had insufficient experience with conducting “rural business with hired laborers,” Bordley urged them to carefully study the example set by Great Britain, with its long tradition of using “hirelings” in agriculture.5 Like other early republic landowners, Bordley believed that only the “considerable ignorant” made their lives as hirelings, while hardworking individuals joined the ranks of tenant farmers or smallholders. Essays and Notes suggests that without direction from their social betters, former slaves would act no differently than former indentured servants. The smart and skilled would ascend to tenancies or smallholdings, and the “ignorant” would remain marginally employed. Equally important, Bordley understood that the Maryland legislature would not follow the lead of Pennsylvania and convert slaves into apprentices, and so the burden of converting former slaves into wage laborers would fall to individual planters. The recent history of Eastern Shore planters with hired laborers was more complicated than Bordley suggested in Essays and Notes. Some rural wage laborers were members of a degraded, landless class with limited opportunity for socioeconomic advancement, but during most of the eighteenth century, they were skilled artisans and craftsmen who chose seasonal agricultural work to earn supplemental income. Six months out of the year, saddlers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and tailors practiced their respective trades. In the remaining months, they contracted with local wheat planters to do agricultural work, such as reaping, mowing, or threshing grains, for cash wages.6 These rural workers were neither ignorant nor desperate, as Bordley suggested, but bi-occupational. Nonetheless, Bordley rightly recognized that the existing pool of wage laborers was insufficient to fill the labor gap that he anticipated would follow whenever slavery ended in Maryland. Maryland did not need more bi-occupational laborers but rather a class of agricultural workers who accepted their hireling status as a legitimate and worthy “station in life.”7 In Essays and Notes Bordley championed the British cottager system as the ideal alternative to slavery. Cottagers (cottars or cottiers) were not yeomen. Nor were they independent tradesmen or craftsmen who hired themselves to local planters during the harvest season. Cottagers were landless men and their families who agreed to work in exchange for housing, a garden plot, access to pasturage, firewood, a line of credit, and, occasionally, cash. They resided on common lands or on the landowner’s

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premises in housing sometimes provided by their employers, and they worked for provisions mutually agreed on in an annual contract. Security was the chief benefit of the system for both employers and employees. It guaranteed employers a continuous flexible labor supply and employees job security and the necessities of life (housing, food, and fuel). Cottagers could neither tend their own land nor hire themselves to another employer while under contract. Bordley recommended that Maryland planters provide their cottagers with only a quarter-acre garden plot, “which gives employment and comfort to the wife and children: but not an inch of ground is otherwise allowed for cultivation of any sort, which might tend to draw the cottager from the [employer’s] business.” He insisted that for most poor people, who otherwise could not afford their own farm, the life of a cottager was a desirable substitute, allowing men to enjoy a family as well as the “useful and settled station of a decent, independent and contented labourer.”8 Bordley described the system as mutually beneficial to employer and employees, but his chief concern was the advantage to employers. In a brief discussion about the cost of employing cottagers, Bordley proposed that a farmer could save almost $590 a year by replacing thirty-five enslaved men, women, and children with a free labor force of four cottagers and their families.9 He bemoaned the fact that the farmer who owned slaves was often “a slave to his slave in cultivating his ground.” Often, slaveholders had more slaves than they needed and were burdened by the “supernumerary hands, eating, wasting, making confusion, &c. the year through without abatement.”10 By contrast, the employer of cottagers increased his profit margin by hiring only those hands he needed while relieving himself of the surplus. Bordley further suggested that for most Maryland planters, the transition from slaveholding to employing cottagers would be seamless because of the nature of the employer-cottager relationship. He encouraged planters to hire cottagers in the early winter, allowing both families to “have all the winter to become familiarly acquainted” and to be continuously “in attentions to [the cottagers].” Cottagers did not live within the planter’s household like servants, but they were still “regarded as part of his own.” In return, the planter could expect the happy cottagers to “look up to [their employer] as their friend.” Cottagers who proved to be “ungrateful and little disposed to prefer their landlord” could be compelled to “pay so much more” in their rent.11

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Skeptics who doubted the economic advantage of substituting wage laborers for slaves would find reassurance in the examples set by England and Pennsylvania, where the trend toward hired labor in commercial agriculture was strong. At different times in the eighteenth century, landowners on both sides of the Atlantic had expanded production in response to rising food prices, and in both instances agricultural intensification led to a growth in the population of agricultural wage laborers. In the case of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the reliance of landlords on hired labor started in earnest in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, when land was cheap and labor dear, the first priority of Chester County landowners was to secure a stable workforce. To that end, landowners offered land leases with generous terms to tenant farmers and their families, expecting that these tenants would clear, improve, and maintain new farms over several years. In the early eighteenth century, these developed lands were now valuable, but labor was easier to obtain than ever before. Landowners who concentrated on grain production needed fewer workers for shorter durations as well as a more diverse workforce that included both skilled and unskilled laborers. Concurrent population growth meant that landowners with improved lands could better tailor their workforces to the specific needs of grain cultivation. Newly arrived Irish and German immigrants who settled in Chester County needed immediate employment and housing. Cottager arrangements satisfied both these new immigrants and landowners, and beginning in the 1760s, the cottager was a fixture in this rural area. In 1769 Chester County assessors identified 12 percent of the county residents as cottagers. Ten years later 22 percent of residents were identified as cottagers. The trend continued and by 1800 county tax assessors identified one in four families as landless cottagers.12 In England the number of people identified as cottagers or agricultural workers grew as a result of a food crisis amid the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Wartime food demands had already created a food shortage, but two harvest failures (1794–95 and 1799–1800) had created near famine conditions in parts of the country. England needed food, and Parliament proposed to meet the demand by passing the Enclosure Acts that would sanction cultivation of the common lands. Peasants and smallholders had used these undeveloped grounds to pasture livestock, forage for herbs, trap small animals, and collect firewood. Common lands

26

Hirelings

were well used, even if they were uncultivated, but, to a nation in crisis, the common lands appeared an untapped resource, and so Parliament cleared the way for their development. Nearly three million acres were privatized between 1790 and 1819, and England’s agricultural output nearly doubled between 1750 and 1850.13 But enclosure also forever changed the agricultural workforce of the nation. Enclosure gave smallholders and peasants title to specifically allotted lands, but while privatization enriched some, it impoverished many others.14 Smallholders who already had some capital profited from privatization. They bought or rented their neighbors’ allotments, improved the lands by building drainage systems, and then stepped up agricultural production. The increase in agricultural production in turn stimulated the regional economy. New roads were built to facilitate trade between farms and towns where investors built new flour and corn mills and grain warehouses. Merchants who recognized the earning potential of these new landowners opened small shops in the bustling towns where they sold manufactured merchandise. Those smallholders who could not afford to rent or buy additional allotments watched their standard of living decline. Smallholders and peasants who had depended on the common lands for pasturage experienced the most precipitous decline. Families who before allotment kept garden plots, but relied principally on the income they earned from the sale of dairy products, eggs, and excess livestock and poultry, simply could not support themselves without rights in common land. The standard tenacre allotment was just large enough for a cow, a pig, and a garden plot. Inevitably, the families sold their flocks, their herds, and then their allotments. In desperation they looked for employment as day laborers on the expanding farms of their more fortunate neighbors or in the emerging towns. Men looked for work on grain farms or in the new grist mills. Women went to work as domestics or took in piecework. Whole communities seemed to be in flux, as men and women moved from their rural homes to find temporary or permanent employment. By the 1810s, the allotment process had made countless numbers of hirelings of formerly free men, and cottagers of once self-sufficient householders. In England the rise of rural poverty in the 1780s and 1790s was so alarming that English philanthropists urged a standardization of cottage construction to provide the most desperately poor with warmth, privacy, and a healthier living environment.15

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In 1800 Maryland looked to be the next place where the cottager system would take root. Intensified production had precipitated the manumission of hundreds of slaves from the Middle Atlantic states, who now looked to farmers for employment and housing. John Beale Bordley imagined that Maryland planters would hire their former slaves as wage laborers and that former slaves would accept their status as hirelings. Admittedly, cottagers and hirelings were not yeomen. They would be a degraded class, dependents in an age that celebrated independence, but what other choice would former slaves have? Some might rise to the rank of smallholder since Maryland law did not explicitly prohibit them from owning real estate in 1801. But John Beale Bordley accepted the inevitability of wage dependence for free African Americans, just as Chester County landowners had accepted it for newly arrived European immigrants and English landowners had accepted it for former peasants. On the Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland a contemporary of John Beale Bordley initiated changes in his agricultural workforce that could have provided a model for the planter-cottager relationship described in Essays and Notes.16 Before 1790, slaveholder Thomas Chamberlain manumitted all but one of his slaves and, thereafter, relied exclusively on the labor of free African Americans.17 In 1790 twenty-eight former slaves lived at Chamberlain’s plantation, and at least six negotiated work and living arrangements that reflected Bordley’s cottager ideal. Among the manumitted were Conway and Flora, a husband and wife who lived in cottager-type arrangements at the Chamberlain plantation between 1789 and 1792. Conway’s arrangement with his employer illustrates one way in which some former slaves experienced the challenges and rewards of these new worker-employer relations. Conway was one of six freedmen who contracted to serve Chamberlain for one year in return for an annual wage and necessities. In 1789 and 1790, he accepted contracts for “acting as an overseer altogether with common binding services,” for which he earned approximately £15 Maryland money annually as well as “clothing, food, 200lbs meat, [and] three barrels of corn.”18 Manumitted from slavery and then hired back by his former master, Conway was a supervisor and served as a liaison between the freedmen who worked for wages and their employer. He managed the labor of the hired agricultural workers, and between November 1789 and July 1790, his workforce included at least six freed men and seven freed women. Men and women who had been freed worked side by side in the

28

Hirelings

harvesting of grains under Conway’s direction. Traditionally, men cut the wheat and women and children bound and stowed it. But at the Chamberlain plantation, four women were among seven laborers who reaped wheat between 1789 and 1790.19 On at least one occasion, Conway distributed payments to Chamberlain’s employees. When Chamberlain discovered in August 1790 that he had underpaid Pompey for reaping services, he instructed Conway “to make up to [Pompey] six shillings a day for reaping at harvest.”20 Chamberlain’s decision to confer this position of trust on Conway suggests not only that his former slave was familiar with the plantation, the work, and the workforce, but also that he had held a similar leadership position as a slave. Chamberlain hired men and women to reap, bind, and stow wheat in July and then again in December; Conway oversaw the harvests of both spring wheat and winter wheat. He would have started plowing and planting in April and continued through November. Plowing was a specialized skill, so it is not surprising that Chamberlain relied on Conway and the other cottagers to plow rather than hiring seasonal laborers for the task. But because plowing required draft animals, additional freedmen were hired to mow hay, and Conway may have overseen their labor in the spring of 1790. When Conway was not plowing, planting, or harvesting, he was probably engaged in other kinds of maintenance around the plantation. Between March and May 1790, additional freedmen dug ditches for irrigation and sawed wood at the plantation, and Conway would have assisted in that work. At times Conway worked alongside his seasonal laborers and earned extra wages for “common binding services.” Conway’s work routine changed little after his manumission, but his domestic life probably underwent a radical transformation. As a cottager, Conway and his wife, Flora, maintained a household on their rather meager earnings, and like other rural poor people, they improved the quality of their lives by purchasing necessities on credit from their employer. Between 1791 and 1792 Conway purchased three pairs of shoes, two milk cows, a plow horse, six old chairs, and a bedstead from his employer.21 A steady line of credit gave Conway and Flora access to necessities and other material comforts that they otherwise could not have afforded, and perhaps it also sheltered them from the potential dangers faced by those who bought and bartered for goods in the so-called slave economy of stolen goods.

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Although he had some supervisory responsibilities, Conway earned significantly less than an overseer. In 1799 Richard Tilghman IV suggested to William Tilghman that overseers should earn £45 Maryland money annually, nearly three times Conway’s salary, and be given “prerequisites” that included four hundred pounds of pork, three barrels of corn, two lambs, “milk of one cow,” one horse, the right to raise fowl and ducks, and land to grow flax (for yarn).22 In 1811 Robert Lloyd Nicols agreed to pay £60 annually to an overseer and to provide him with five hundred pounds of pork, five bushels of wheat, and the milk of one cow. He also permitted his overseer the right to raise poultry and keep two sows.23 Overseeing, moreover, was a stepping-stone toward tenancy or farm ownership. At The Hermitage, a plantation in neighboring Queen Anne’s County, overseers received an annual corn and pork allowance, as well as annual wages, through the 1780s but with few exceptions most moved on within three years, and one, Robert Butler, moved from overseer to tenant-planter in 1788.24 In his lifetime, Conway undoubtedly watched more than one white man ascended from overseer to tenant or smallholder, and perhaps Conway had visions of moving beyond the rank of hired worker to tenancy. In 1791 and again in 1792 he purchased fourteen bushels of wheat and a plow horse, suggesting an attempt to broaden his economic opportunities by cultivating grains for market. For most freedmen, the dream of landownership would never materialize because they lacked the capital to acquire land, but Thomas Chamberlain bequeathed legacies to each of his nineteen former slaves, and so Conway inherited £50 Maryland money in freedom dues making smallholding a dream within his reach. According to the account books kept by Chamberlain’s executors, several manumitted slaves received their legacies between 1792 and 1799. Some of the mature adults received their entire legacy in one payment, but the children received their legacies on reaching their majority. Sampson, for example, accepted his promised legacy of £50 in 1792, but Young Daph, to whom Chamberlain had bequeathed more than £13, could not collect her inheritance until she reached her majority in 1799.25 Conway surely knew of his inheritance soon after Thomas Chamberlain died in 1790 and perhaps spent the next year preparing for his imagined future as a tenant farmer or even a small landowner. In 1793 Conway and Flora received the much-anticipated legacy with interest, £73 Maryland money in total, from Chamberlain’s executors.26

30

Hirelings

As a freed woman and a cottager’s wife, Flora had responsibilities within her own home as well as on the Chamberlain plantation. Like other wives, Flora managed and maintained her modest household. She probably kept a garden and cared for whatever livestock the couple owned, including the milk cows that her husband purchased in 1791. She also attended to the chores of her household: cooking, cleaning, mending, and laundering clothes. Some of those chores, especially laundry, would have allowed her to socialize with the other freed women who lived and worked on the plantation. When she was not attending to her family, Flora had also worked for Thomas Chamberlain. In 1790 Chamberlain hired Flora at the rate of £6 Maryland money a year for unspecified work, although she seems to have earned her wages primarily by spinning thread.27 Between February and July 1790, Flora delivered a total of 61.25 pounds of spun flax and “course thread” to Chamberlain. In July Flora left her spinning to work alongside the other freed men and freed women who were hired to harvest the summer wheat. Chamberlain paid her the standard wage of three shillings a day for the seven days that she stowed wheat in July 1790. There was plenty of agricultural work to be done by annual employees like Flora. While her husband may have devoted his time to plowing, Flora could have earned some of her salary by hoeing corn, harvesting vegetables, or breaking flax.28 Although working for wages posed real challenges for Conway and Flora, they enjoyed enviable living and working arrangements in 1790. Unlike the majority of freedmen, who worked at the Chamberlain plantation for seasonal wages, Conway and Flora had secured annual employment and housing. Even if their housing, salary, and provisions were meager, they enjoyed some economic security. As former slaves who had survived the lean years of the American Revolution, they knew how to stretch those supplies and supplement them as needed. Moreover, they had access to a line of credit that few seasonal migrant workers could claim. Most important, Conway and Flora, who received their freedom together and unconditionally, had each other. In the early republic, when slaveholders deliberately released only one family member from bondage with the expectation that a free spouse or parent would work toward purchasing those family members who remained enslaved, Conway and Flora’s partnership was an unusual asset.

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Nevertheless, while they were spared separation from each other, it is possible that Thomas Chamberlain’s manumission scheme separated Conway and Flora from either their children or their elderly parents. Although Chamberlain manumitted all his slaves, he put conditions on the freedom of his juvenile and elderly slaves. He apprenticed all of the enslaved children until they were twenty-one. Male slaves under fourteen were apprenticed “to profitable traders” on the condition that their new masters would teach them to read and write and would provide them with freedom dues. Girls under fourteen were apprenticed to families to learn to sew, spin, knit, “and to do those kind of work which women usually do.” Similarly, Chamberlain arranged for his executors to provide his four superannuated slaves with clothing, care, and housing at the expense of his plantation for the duration of their lives. While the provision seems generous, it effectively bound these elders to the plantation.29 Under the terms of these apprenticeships, manumitted parents could wait a minimum of seven years to see their apprenticed children enjoy their freedom. If Conway was the father of apprenticed children, then he had a powerful incentive to remain where he could see them, even if employment prospects seemed better elsewhere. The possible forced apprenticeship of his children might have influenced Conway’s choices when he purchased the wheat and the plow horse, contemplated where to take up a tenancy, or imagined where to buy land with his freedom dues. Until then, he and his wife made do with the wages that allowed them to support themselves in a community that likely included free and enslaved loved ones. Some manumitted slaves may have envied the security that Conway and Flora enjoyed as cottagers, but others likely rejected it as too restrictive. Some former slaves yearned for a radical break from the plantation work routine, and, as Conway’s arrangement with Chamberlain reveals, the cottager arrangement did not offer that break. Conway certainly knew many manumitted slaves who routinely moved in search of work, wages, and a better life. He oversaw the labor of at least seven freed men and freed women who were hired as seasonal laborers but were not Chamberlain’s own former slaves.30 Conway also met unfamiliar freedmen who peddled crafts at the plantation, including two freedmen who sold “a bread tray and butter bowl” and brooms to Chamberlain. Others came to sell “bushels of oysters.”31 If Conway had few chances to travel beyond the boundaries

32

Hirelings

of his employer’s plantation, he may have welcomed the news and tales that those peddlers brought along with their crafts to his own workplace. Conway and Flora’s example demonstrated to Eastern Shore plantation owners that, with the proper incentives, former slaves would continue to work on their plantations as hired laborers. Thus, the plantation experienced an uncomplicated transition from a slave system to a wage labor system. But the lesson of how to transform slaves into cottagers was largely lost on Maryland slaveholders, who never manumitted slaves at the rate that Bordley anticipated in Essays and Notes. Even as some slaveholders manumitted record numbers of slaves, other small and middling farmers with rising economic expectations purchased their first slaves.32 The central lesson of the 1790s was that slave labor and wage labor complemented each other. Maryland slaveholders did not discard one labor form for the other but experimented with both. Plantation records illustrate how planters created blended labor forces that included slaves-for-life, term slaves, free African American workers, and, eventually, child laborers.33 Even more important, the records reveal that rising grain prices forced rural employers to compete with one another for hired laborers and that free African Americans benefited from this competition with more consistent employment, a greater diversity of work assignments, better wages, and an opportunity to experiment with different methods of making a living. Slaveholder Richard Tilghman’s ledger, from the Talbot County plantation Grosses, showing arrangements with his hired workers provides an example of how free African Americans who performed agricultural wage work responded to the agricultural boom of the 1790s and 1800s. Tilghman owned fifty-eight slaves in 1810, but he also hired twenty additional African Americans laborers to harvest wheat at his Talbot County plantation between 1790 and 1806.34 Initially, Tilghman hired only one or two freedmen, and they rarely worked more than seven days a season. In July 1793, he paid twelve shillings Maryland money to a freedman named Anthony for two days of reaping wheat. When Anthony returned to Tilghman’s plantation the following summer, he labored for two and a half days, but he earned only twelve shillings and sixpence for his work. His economic prospects improved after 1796 as Tilghman intensified production. With more wheat to harvest, seasonal laborers like Anthony worked longer for better wages. In 1796 Tilghman paid Anthony six shillings a day to reap

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wheat for nine consecutive days.35 That same summer he employed at least two other freedmen to work alongside his many slaves, and still the harvest took eleven days to complete. By 1802, when freedman Adam Blake joined the workforce, the harvest lasted a minimum of eighteen days. Equally important, Tilghman upped his wages, presumably to attract reliable workers. In the three years that Adam Blake worked for Tilghman, his per diem wages rose from six shillings in 1802 to six shillings and sixpence in 1804, and then to seven shillings and sixpence in 1805.36 Women also worked at Tilghman’s Grosses plantation, but their work choices were few, and it seems the expansion of grain production actually reduced their employment opportunities. Responding to rising market demand, grain farmers from Virginia to Pennsylvania intensified production and sought out laborers who could handle the tools of modern grain production: plows, harrows, sickles, and cradle scythes. Physical strength gave male laborers an advantage on the largest and most modern grain plantations. African American men assumed the new skilled jobs of plowing and harrowing while African American women continued hoeing and weeding.37 Tilghman shared this preference for male laborers. He hired freed men each summer to assist in the harvest of his wheat but never paid a single freed woman to do the traditionally female work of binding or stowing wheat. Similarly, Talbot County slaveholder Robert Lloyd Nicols, who in 1815 owned nineteen male slaves and just six female slaves, consistently hired more men than women as wage workers, even though his enslaved labor force was already disproportionately male.38 The mechanization and masculinization of grain production drove many freed women out of agricultural work, leaving spinning as the only substantial employment option for women. Between 1790 and 1806, four freed women, Grace, Nan, Memory, and Eve, spun yarn for Richard Tilghman. Each woman spun for two or more consecutive years, and each received one shilling per pound of yarn.39 Equally important, Tilghman did not discriminate between his white and black spinners. In 1797 he paid his black spinners the same wages that he paid his white spinner, Betty Greenfield.40 In 1813, 1815, and 1816, African American women also spun “stocking yarn” for Robert Lloyd Nicols’s thirty-seven slaves.41 In contrast with other employers who paid their spinners by the pound, Nicols paid his spinning women monthly wages for their service. Between September and October 1815, he weighed and delivered 25.75 pounds of wool to Lettice,

34

Hirelings

a freed woman contracted to spin wool for his “people’s clothing.” He agreed to pay her a monthly wage for spinning, and then in August 1816, he “agreed with Lettice to increase her monthly wages to $2.50 a month.” While it is likely that these women spun yarn because they had few other options to earn wages, it is also possible that they preferred spinning to more arduous agricultural labor. After all, spinning allowed women to work at home throughout the year at a pace that complemented their other domestic responsibilities. In December and January, when plantation operations slowed, freed women continued to make money by selling their yarn. When husbands, fathers, and sons were underemployed in the off-season, wives and mothers became the principal wage earners. Eve, for example, earned fourteen shillings and eightpence for spinning 22 pounds of kersey yarn in November 1793 and fifteen shillings and tenpence for spinning 22.6 pounds the following November. She also supplemented her income by selling eggs and chickens to her employer. Other women opened lines of credit with their employers. Memory, for example, earned nearly £2 and five shillings for spinning 45 pounds of yarn in October 1798, but in the same month she also borrowed twenty-two shillings and sixpence from Tilghman.42 Eve’s and Memory’s enterprising efforts made a practical difference in cash-poor households and affirmed the important contribution freed women made to the domestic economy of African American households. With limited opportunities to perform skilled agricultural work, freed women competed with one another and with slaves for the least desirable jobs on a grain plantation: weeding with hoes, grubbing swamps, breaking up ground too difficult to plow, cleaning stables, and spreading manure (tables 1.1 and 1.2).43 At Robert Lloyd Nicols’s plantation, for example, only three African American women worked the wheat harvest, and their work options were limited to binding and stowing. Men, on the other hand, earned wages for sawing, mowing grass, binding, plowing corn, cutting the meadow, and cutting oats. Typically, freed men earned three to four times what freed women earned. Freed woman Maria Foster, for example, earned only fifty cents per diem for binding wheat in 1818. By comparison, James Grace and Jacob Howard each earned a dollar fifty per diem for cutting with sickles, and Hector Downes earned two dollars a day for mowing. Men who cut and mowed consistently earned the highest wages.44 After 1810 Eastern Shore planters also began hiring freeborn African American children to do so-called women’s work, that is, weeding with

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TABLE 1.1 Average per diem wages earned by freed men, 1789–1823 (in dollars) Reap Year

Mow

N

Wage

N

1789–1790

4

1.84

1793–1796

5

1.79

Plow

Cut

Wage

N

Wage

N

Wage

2

.35

0

—

0

—

0

—

0

—

0

—

1802–1806

7

2.17

0

—

0

—

0

—

1815–1818

0

—

3

1.78

3

.50

5

1.38

1821–1823

0

—

0

—

2

.59

5

.70

TABLE 1.2 Average per diem wages earned by freed women, 1789–1823 (in dollars) Reap

Bind

Stow

Year

N

Wage

N

Wage

N

Wage

1789–1790

6

1.66

3

.80

3

.96

1793–1796

0

—

0

—

0

—

1802–1806

0

—

0

—

0

—

1815–1818

0

—

1

.50

0

—

1821–1823

0

—

4

.58

0

—

Sources: RHG Account Books, Contracts, 1789–1804, RLN Account Books, 1786–1810, RLN Account Books, Inventory, 1808–1809, 1815–1818, Thomas Chamberlaine Account Book, 1818–1821, and Richard Tilghman, Ledger, 1790–1806.

hoes, grubbing swamps, breaking up ground too difficult to plow, cleaning stables, and spreading manure.45 In August 1816, Nicols paid $1.25 each to “Isaac and William, two small boys” for their work in the harvest. Robert Henry Goldsborough hired girls to turn hay and boys to mow a meadow in August 1822.46 Slaveholders had always assigned domestic and agricultural tasks to enslaved children, and so it is not surprising that planters would put freeborn children to work, but these children were not forcibly indentured to their employers. Instead, they came to work at the request of their parents. For example, the freedman Greenberry, a day laborer hired by Goldsborough, negotiated work arrangements for his wife, Mary, and three of their children, Risden, Ann, and Pere. Greenberry performed a variety of odd jobs between 1821 and 1825, including agricultural work, caring for a colt, and making “two white oak brooms for sweeping chimneys.” Mary also earned wages for binding wheat in 1824. Their son Risden began working

36

Hirelings

at the plantation in 1824, turning hay and mowing the meadow. The following year Risden’s sister, Ann, worked “in the meadow,” and in 1825, their brother, Pere, earned $4.25 for a season of wheat cutting.47 The payment record indicates that their employer did not pay these wages to the individual laborers but to Greenberry, acknowledging him as the family patriarch. By the 1800s the Maryland legislature had sanctioned child labor and expressly empowered county courts to apprentice the freeborn children of indigent African American parents to white households. Nevertheless, few planters took advantage of this opportunity. Talbot County Court apprenticed sixty-eight children between 1808 and 1810, but only nine of these apprentices were free African Americans. In 1809 the typical courtindentured apprentice was a white teenage male, sixteen years old, and bound with the consent of at least one parent to a master craftsmen. Even as late as 1828, apprenticeship remained a path to a skilled profession for white boys. Planters had no great demand for child laborers, but persuasive parents like Greenberry successfully convinced planters to hire their children on terms that were acceptable to African American parents. Agricultural work remained the most important and common means for former slaves to earn a living, but some African Americans explored other options and created new opportunities for themselves. According to Talbot County tax assessments, a number of freed men and freed women owned barges and canoes, while others owned “yoke oxen” and “work steers.”48 Oxen owners may have carted produce and grains, and barge owners may have transported goods through the waterways of the Delmarva Peninsula. Those who owned canoes may have fished or oystered. A noteworthy number of African Americans raised sheep, presumably for food or wool, which suggests that sheep herding provided a number of African American households with income. In an 1817 tax assessment, thirteen Talbot County freedmen owned three or more sheep. Joseph Cooper and Andrew Moore, who resided in St. Michaels, owned thirteen and seven sheep, respectively. Nine years later they owned the same number of sheep, which suggests that they deliberately maintained the size of their flocks. Sheep herding was evidently very profitable for some African Americans. Abraham Dobson, who owned a flock of twenty-six sheep in 1817, was also one of the wealthiest freedmen in Talbot County.49 Freedmen who were trained as blacksmiths, masons, and coopers also successfully marketed their talents to the same planters who hired them to

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cut grains. Planter Robert Henry Goldsborough of Talbot County routinely hired free African American butchers, shoemakers, coopers, and a barber. In three years, he hired at least six African American sawyers and paid them fifty cents for each cord of cut wood they produced.50 Traditionally, sawing was seasonal work performed by slaves during the winter months before tobacco planting, but by the 1820s, freedmen dominated this work. Four sawyers, including Jere Banning, Toby Martin, James Dobson, and Chester Sewell, earned the bulk of their wages by sawing. James Dobson, for example, earned $19.38 in November 1823 for cutting thirty-nine cords of “oakwood.” Chester Sewell earned the majority of his wages between November 1823 and February 1824 by cutting wood, and agreed to “husk out corn” once, in January 1824.51 In the 1790s and 1800s Richard Tilghman of Grosses also hired numerous African American coopers for “trimming pork barrels,” “mending wheels,” and other unspecified “cooper’s work.” Freedman Daniel Caul worked for Tilghman for six years making cider casks and setting up tobacco hogsheads.52 As the manufacturing and shipping industries in Baltimore siphoned skilled slaves and white artisans away from the countryside, free African American tradesmen filled the void. But few African Americans achieved economic self-sufficiency as craftsmen, partly because white planters still preferred to hire white craftsmen.53 Tilghman, for example, hired several freedmen as coopers, but he hired only white blacksmiths and carpenters. Even the basket weaver, freedman Joseph Kelly, who wove more than twenty-seven baskets for Tilghman, varying in price from two shillings for small baskets to six shillings for larger “clothes baskets,” could not make his living by basket weaving alone. Inevitably, Kelly, like white craftsmen a generation before, was a semiagricultural craftsmen, or bi-occupational, in this plantation economy. He hired himself out for “service” for nine months in 1793 for £11 and five shillings and then again for ten months in 1794 for £12. Kelly also reaped wheat in 1795, 1802, 1804, and 1806.54 In the summer of 1804 he earned six shillings and sixpence a day for reaping wheat (nearly £6 Maryland money for sixteen days of work) and nearly £1 for weaving seven baskets. By 1820 free African American workers were a common sight across the Upper Eastern Shore, and planters did not think twice when hiring free African Americans for seasonal, semiskilled, or skilled work. Robert Henry Goldsborough even employed freedmen in managerial-type positions between 1818 and 1825. Although freedman Jacob Ross was not

38

Hirelings

identified by a particular job title in the account books, he was arguably Goldsborough’s most valued employee. Ross interacted with Goldsborough daily and served as his agent in a variety of local commercial transactions. He collected various sums of money from white clients, including tenants and Captain Vickars, the ship captain charged with transporting the harvested grains to the Baltimore market.55 Ross also shopped for his employer. He purchased necessary household items like bacon and sugar, as well as luxury items like “a pint of brandy,” “a quire of paper,” and “segars” at the local stores.56 Ross also labored in fields in 1821, but he performed skilled and high-paying labor such as plowing cornfields.57 Robert Henry Goldsborough trusted Jacob Ross, and he rewarded his diligence with a respectable income and considerable autonomy. Ross’s most important work was marketing his employer’s produce. Goldsborough experimented with truck agriculture, selling fruits, vegetables, and dairy products to town residents. Although the little town of Easton hardly compared with Baltimore or Annapolis, it claimed more than 150 residents and dozens of businesses in 1798. Truck agriculture had economic potential, and in 1821 Goldsborough entrusted Ross with overseeing the operation. This business occupied Ross from March through October, just as the majority of the free African Americans in Talbot County went to work in the grain fields. In the spring and summer Ross brought cherries, raspberries, peaches, and pears to the town, and in the early fall, he sold apples and apple cider. In November 1821 he sold 2.5 bushels of apples and earned $1.25, but more expensive fruits like cherries, which Ross brought to Easton in July 1823, earned him nearly a dollar for each half-bushel he sold.58 Since he sold all of his produce for cash, Ross regularly carried money with him, an experience that distinguished him from most other rural laborers. He also probably had responsibility for a cart or wagon and one or two draft animals, all valuable plantation equipment. Finally, since Goldsborough never acknowledged any assistants in his accounts, Ross must have worked alone, carting produce to market and carting the leftovers and money back to the plantation. If he had assistance, it was informal. Perhaps his wife or his children joined him in what must have been very long workdays. Jacob Ross may have considered Easton quite a metropolitan place. In 1821 the town was still small and young, but it was home to the General Court of the Eastern Shore as well as the Talbot County Courthouse, a

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local newspaper, numerous churches, and the first bank of the Eastern Shore, the Farmers Bank of Maryland.59 It was also a hub in the interstate slave trade, and as such the town regularly hosted slave buyers from the Deep South. Easton also claimed a substantial number of free African American residents who made their own unique contributions to the town. African American tradesmen like John Dorrell and Joseph Chain lived and worked in Easton, but they also served the plantations. Dorrell, a butcher, sold meat to both Robert Lloyd Nicols and Robert Henry Goldsborough. Chain, a barber, counted Goldsborough among his numerous clients. Jacob Ross would have seen Chain when he came to Goldsborough’s plantation, or he may have visited Chain’s barbershop to pick up razors for his employer. Even if Ross could not recognize Chain as the black barber of Easton, he may have recognized him as a leader in the recently formed African Methodist Episcopal Church. As an independent businessman and a leader of that church, Chain was one of the most recognizable African American men in Talbot County in 1820. If Robert Goldsborough’s dealings with Joseph Chain and the other tradesmen listed in his account books are representative, then white planters regularly patronized these free African American establishments in the 1820s. Chain probably spent most of his time in his shop, providing haircuts and shaves to established clients as well as to the men who visited the town on business. If Chain preferred that his customers visit him in his store, his newspaper advertisement indicated that he was nevertheless willing to visit his clients “elsewhere, with prompt attention.” Being away from his shop did not necessarily undermine his business, because traveling to other plantations allowed Chain to peddle shaving supplies, including razors, to country gentlemen. Chain, who charged as little as twenty-five cents for haircuts or shaves, depended as much on the income he earned from the sale of a pair of razors ($.75) and other toiletries as from barbering. Goldsborough routinely ordered razors from Chain, who undoubtedly traveled regularly to Baltimore or Philadelphia to stock up on supplies preferred by his white clients.60 African American tradesmen like Joseph Chain and John Dorrell experienced freedom differently than agricultural workers like Greenberry or even Jacob Ross. Chain and Dorrell were exceptional in that they avoided agricultural work, supporting themselves with earnings from practicing their respective trades. Both men courted the business of the white

40

Hirelings

Figure 1. Joseph Chain advertisement, 1817. Joseph Chain was a manumitted slave, a barber, and a leader in the free African American community of Easton, Maryland. He was one of a distinct class of free African American worker who provided Eastern Shore planters with goods and services. January 14, 1817, Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser. Courtesy of University of Vermont.

planter elite, and they maintained professional relationships with those men throughout the year. Their professional success depended equally on their skill at their trade and on the successful marketing of their skills to this plantation elite. Establishing their businesses, building a slaughterhouse, or renting a storefront required a capital investment that few freedmen could make without financial assistance from members of the white community. At a time when few free African Americans owned any

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real property, both Dorrell and Chain owned the tools of their respective trades as well as homes and shops in Easton. By 1817 Joseph Chain’s barbering business had outgrown its original location, an “old stand opposite the Fountain Inn tavern,” and he leased a storefront in the heart of town. That year he placed an advertisement in an Eastern Shore newspaper to notify his customers that he had relocated to a store “two doors south of the Bank” and just across the street from Mr. Samuel Groome’s new hotel. He hoped “to continue to merit the patronage of his old yearly customers” and welcomed the business of “traveling gentlemen.”61 John Dorrell’s rise within the African American community in Easton illustrates how some freedmen maximized the economic and professional possibilities available to them. How Dorrell achieved his freedom is unknown, but he first appeared in the 1804 Talbot County tax assessment as the owner of personal property worth approximately £26, including horses, cattle, hogs, and furniture.62 In 1809 he bought two acres, part of “Abraham’s Lot,” from John Webster, a free black carpenter, and his wife, Maria. Slightly larger than two acres, the lot was small, but it included four “log dwelling houses” and could potentially house tenants.63 Over the next few years, Dorrell continued to prosper, working steadily for both Robert Lloyd Nicols and Robert Henry Goldsborough and investing in real estate. By 1813 he had acquired a quarter-acre lot in the heart of Easton, a significant achievement by any standard given that Easton lots were among the most desirable and most valuable properties in the county. In 1817 half-acre lots near Easton were generally assessed at $20 or more and were considerably more valuable than a half-acre lot in the bayside town of St. Michaels ($10 to $20), or the inland villages of Trappe ($6 to $10) and Hole-in-the-Wall ($4 to $8).64 Dorrell also owned two more acres outside of Easton, and on that property stood a “framed dwelling house,” as well as a slaughterhouse, kitchen, carriage, and furniture assessed at $447.65 By 1813 John Dorrell was among the five wealthiest free African Americans in Talbot County; his property was ten times more valuable than that of the average free African American property owner in the county. Dorrell’s achievements were remarkable but not singular. Dozens of manumitted and freeborn African Americans purchased real estate, particularly in the villages of Trappe and Hole-in-the-Wall (table 1.3). As early as 1804, six free black families had purchased land in Trappe, just south of Easton. Among them were four men, Isaac Maccary, Phil

42

Hirelings

Chaplain, James Pritchart, and Sampson Stevens, and two women, Lettice Martin and Hester Stevens. All shared portions of “Kingsale” and “Alexander’s Chance,” but Isaac Maccary, who owned twenty-two acres, stood out. The second-largest property holder, James Pritchart, owned only four acres.66 In nearby Hole-in-the-Wall, four families owned equally modest estates. The largest landowner, Sam Demby, claimed only four acres, and the smallest landowner, James Bantom, claimed only half an acre.67 Several more African Americans acquired land in these communities before 1817; this included fourteen freed women, who purchased or leased property in Hole-in-the-Wall and Trappe. Five women acquired property in Trappe, and ten women acquired property in Hole-in-the-Wall, between 1805 and 1832. Although women rarely owned real property, these four women constituted half of the free African American property holders in Hole-in-the-Wall in 1832. Given that they were shrewd enough to acquire real estate in the first place, it is not surprising that these entrepreneurial African Americans sought to profit from their landholdings by leasing housing and lots to other freedmen.68 Samuel Demby, owner of a lot in Hole-in-the-Wall, had two “tenant houses” on his property in 1826. Henry Toomey rented two lots on Dover Road outside of Easton to free African Americans. Toomey also rented out a room in his Easton house to Maria Price, a freed woman, and her enslaved husband, Jerry Price.69 Isaac Maccary owned more property than any other free African American living in Trappe in 1832, and he too maintained a “tenant house” on his property.70 Perhaps Demby, Toomey, and Maccary were motivated by philanthropy, but in light of their extraordinary wealth, it is undeniable that profits mattered to them. According to the 1817 tax assessment record, Demby, Toomey, and Maccary collectively owned 12 percent of the free black community’s wealth in 1817. Eighty-one free African Americans were listed in the 1817 tax record, and together, these property holders owned roughly $4,050 in taxable property. In 1817 the average value of a free African American’s property was only $50, and fifty-five people who appeared (68%) owned less than $32 in property. By comparison, Demby, Toomey, and Maccary, whose combined assets equaled $470 in 1817, were among the five wealthiest free black property owners in the county. Although considerably poorer than the wealthiest African American families in Baltimore or Philadelphia, they nevertheless constituted an elite group on the Eastern Shore.71

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TABLE 1.3 Property owners in Trappe and Hole-in-the-Wall, Talbot County, 1804–32 Trappe Year

Black

White

Total

Percentage Black (%)

1804

6

31

37

16

1813

14

31

45

31

1817

14

39

53

26

1826

12

36

48

25

1832

10

35

45

22

Total

56

172

228

Hole-in-the-Wall Total

Percentage Black (%)

Year

Black

White

1804

4

17

21

19

1813

11

15

26

42

1817

12

19

31

39

1826

10

19

29

34 47

1832

8

9

17

Total

45

73

118

Sources: Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List) 1812, 1813–1816, 1818, 1820, 1822–1824. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record) 1804, 1813, 1817, 1826, 1832.

On the whole John Beale Bordley accurately predicted that landless slaves would re-enter the agricultural workforce as wage laborers. What he failed to imagine was the spectrum of free African Americans’ experience with wage work and freedom. Conway, the cottager, and Joseph Chain, the Easton barber, represent two points on that spectrum. In the 1780s, Conway and his wife, Flora, exited slavery and immediately learned the limits of their freedom. As they weighed their options for work and housing, the harsh economic realities of the 1780s tempered their enthusiasm. Because employment opportunities did not grow in step with the emerging population of manumitted slaves who needed work, Conway and Flora’s personal ambitions gave way to the compelling need to find steady employment and accommodations. As a cottager he enjoyed some economic and personal security. He had a steady wage, housing, and other provisions.

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In contrast, Joseph Chain shunned plantation life. He was not a native of the Eastern Shore, but he had lived as a freedman in Easton since at least 1813. His barber business was well established by the time he placed his advertisement in the local newspaper in 1817. What initially brought him to Easton is unknown, but Chain’s skill as a barber, coupled with his economic resources, made his break with plantation life possible. Not at the mercy of the cycles of grain production, Chain set his own schedule and traveled between Easton, the neighboring plantations, and Baltimore. However, this autonomy in his daily life did not mean that Joseph Chain was independent of the plantation elite. Chain’s lifestyle was possible only because planters invested in his business. Without their continued patronage, Chain inevitably would have had to join the agricultural workforce. Joseph Chain could have lived and worked anywhere, but he chose to establish his barbershop in a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He also accepted a leadership position in the local AME church and thereby played a critical part in organizing the free African American community in Easton. Joseph Chain was at home on the Eastern Shore. He was invested in the economic and social development of this community. Surely, Chain knew other free African Americans who did not share his attachment to Easton: men and women who wanted to experience the world beyond the Eastern Shore of Maryland. These African Americans were fortunate to live at a time when employers across the Middle Atlantic states were willing to hire free African Americans in all kinds of occupations. The steady demand for wage labor in a variety of industries created opportunities for laborers. Many African Americans moved readily to seize the opportunities made available to them by an expanding labor market.

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Migration

Eastern Shore planters shamelessly sold slaves for profit, and then complained bitterly when free African Americans picked up and moved for their own economic gain. As early as 1797 some white residents of Talbot County urged the Maryland legislature to prohibit “manumitted slaves & their descendents to run about from county to county or to leave that in which their Manumitter resided unless to quit the State entirely.”1 White frustration with black migration waxed and waned through the early nineteenth century, but it was a sentiment that Maryland planters shared with planters in the postemancipation British Caribbean and later the post–Civil War South. In the 1860s and 1870s Maryland planters would again complain of chronic labor shortages as thousands of emancipated African Americans left their plantations for small towns and large cities. In both eras planters rebuked free African Americans for their “vagrancy” and then looked to the legislature to fix the new labor market to their advantage. African Americans, meanwhile, insisted on exercising their rights to mobility. Manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic

46

Hirelings

understood just as well as later generations of emancipated people that mobility, the right to move or not to move, was integral to the definition of freedom. African American migration was also purposeful. People did not run about from county to county because they could, as the Talbot petitioners suggested. They moved because the expanding economy had created a heavy and steady demand for labor in Philadelphia and Baltimore and on grain farms across Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. African American wage laborers migrated to take advantage of these employment opportunities. Some fled the countryside, never intending to return, while others engaged in planned, short-term migration. Some men and women were perpetually in motion, traveling back and forth between urban employment and rural family dwellings. The Maryland government largely ignored the Talbot County petitioners and others who wanted to put limits on African American mobility. With such a steady demand for labor in all sectors of the economy, the state wanted to facilitate migration for work, not prevent it. To varying degrees, every slaveholding state put limits on the mobility of free African Americans, because slaveholders insisted on such regulations as a matter of public safety. American slaveholders charged that free African Americans posed a threat to public safety, but what they really meant was that black freedom encouraged insolence among slaves. They argued that state authorities should strictly regulate the mobility of free African Americans as a preventative measure against slave rebellion. In theory, the threat of slave unrest grew in proportion with the free African American population, but even in the 1830s Maryland slaveholders did not behave as if they feared for their lives. They acted with great confidence that slave rebellion was not a problem of theirs. This certitude of their own safety stemmed partly from demographics. Maryland whites outnumbered all free and enslaved African Americans two to one by 1830, a population advantage that heightened the confidence of white Marylanders that a revolt would never get past the planning stages.2 It also stemmed from their peculiar history. In more than 150 years of slaveholding, Maryland slaveholders had never contended with a prolonged slave rebellion that extended beyond the boundaries of a single plantation. Slave traders carried enslaved Africans to Maryland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the colony never experienced a rebellion like those in New York (1712 and 1741) or South Carolina (1739). In the nineteenth century, slave

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47

traders carried African Americans from their ancestral homes in Maryland to an uncertain fate in the cotton growing states, but the slaves did not rebel. The abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania (1780) did not result in any armed rebellion, although it certainly encouraged slaves to run away. Maryland slaves did not rebel in response to the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), and although Baltimore received refugees from that island, Baltimore never contended with an uprising of Saint-Domingue refugees as New Orleans did in 1811. Similarly, Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800) in Richmond, Virginia, did not incite a similar uprising in Baltimore, even though the fast-growing population of both black and white artisans who lived and worked in Baltimore would have identified with Gabriel’s ideology. But if rebellion seemed a remote possibility, slave escape was an inveterate problem for Maryland slaveholders. During the American Revolution, Maryland slaveholders lost inestimable numbers of slaves to the British Navy that patrolled Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Even more worrisome to Eastern Shore slaveholders was the boldness with which some escaped slaves returned at the head of British raiding parties, which looted coastal plantations and lured away additional escapees.3 History repeated itself during the War of 1812. Great Britain’s attacks on Baltimore and the District of Columbia terrified the whites, while slaves greeted the British as liberators. Once again, unknown numbers of Maryland slaves escaped to the British fleet, and some returned to fight alongside the British in 1814.4 Slaves would continue to rely on the waterways for escape well after the British evacuated the United States. In peacetime, escaping slaves joined the crews of American vessels bound for the free states, the Caribbean, and Europe. The problem of slave escape via the waterways was sufficiently vexing that in 1825 the Maryland legislature passed a law that required ship captains to keep a register of all the African Americans on board and authorized local authorities to search ships without a warrant for escaping slaves. Virginia adopted similar legislation in the 1850s, allowing for the search of all northward-bound vessels.5 In the 1790s Maryland slaveholders discovered that for escaping slaves peacetime prosperity provided as good a cover as wartime chaos. Economic expansion had created an unanticipated labor shortage across Maryland, and the heavy demand for laborers in all industries incentivized escape. Eastern Shore planters needed cheap and temporary labor, but so did a great many other farmers throughout Maryland, Pennsylvania, and

48

Hirelings

Delaware. In Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and the District of Columbia, merchants, manufacturers, and shipbuilders also needed more labor than they could readily find. Even the state of Maryland needed a continuous labor supply to build and maintain the transportation infrastructure (roads, canals, and Baltimore Harbor) that would connect agricultural regions with Baltimore. Slaveholders soon discovered that employers who needed cheap and temporary laborers did not ask too many questions when an unfamiliar African American came to town looking for work. Eastern Shore planters complained bitterly about Delaware and Pennsylvania farmers who employed runaways. In 1797 planter James Hollyday of Kent County sought assistance in recovering Dick, a slave who had escaped to Pennsylvania and was rumored to live among Quakers. In a letter to William Tilghman, Hollyday wrote that he had reason to believe that a Pennsylvania Quaker had hired Dick to care for his horses and drive his carriage. Seeking Tilghman’s assistance in tracking down Dick, Hollyday declared he would “spare no pains or expense to get the fellow again” because Dick “keeps up a correspondence with my Negroes, and is enticing them away from me.” He further charged that greed more than charity motivated the Quakers who harbored his escaped slaves. After all, “runaway Negroes who want concealment, protection and a pass undoubtedly do work cheap.”6 In response to this very concern, the Maryland legislature adopted six resolutions between 1798 and 1826 that urged the Pennsylvania and Delaware legislatures to punish farmers who harbored and hired runaways. Even as William Tilghman maneuvered to recover his runaway, many other slaveholders made the choice to release their slaves into this expanding labor market. Perhaps the slaves were underemployed at home, or perhaps the slaveholders could not find a suitable employer to hire the slave on an annual contract. For whatever reason, more slaveholders were releasing their slaves into the community to hire themselves out. It was a practice that bothered the government, which passed a series of laws designed to discourage slaveholders from allowing their slaves to hire themselves without a contract. While not opposed to slave hiring, the state clearly preferred one-year contracts negotiated between slaveholders and prospective employers because contracts presumed continual employment and assured white Marylanders that these slaves remained under some white person’s authority. By contrast, slaves who hired themselves out were temporarily

Migration

49

Figure 2. House Servants Wanted, 1817. A Philadelphia employer proposes to hire two term slaves from Maryland. The advertisement illustrates the scope of the labor market. March 4, 1817, Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser. Courtesy of University of Vermont.

masterless. As early as 1787 the state imposed a fine on slaveholders who permitted their slaves to hire themselves out. Nine years later, the state required slaveholders to post a bond with local authorities when they let slaves hire themselves out. In 1823 the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation that authorized select Eastern Shore constables to arrest any slaves found working without a contract and then to hire them out for the duration of the year. The legislature added an important exception to these laws: it permitted slaves to move without threat of arrest “during twenty days in harvest time.”7 Gradual manumission only complicated the efforts of the government to manage the mobility of unfree laborers in an otherwise unregulated labor market. With more term slaves, manumitted slaves, and freeborn African Americans entering the workforce every day and moving from plantation to plantation, country to city, and even between states, Maryland whites needed a system to distinguish legitimately free workers from enslaved workers earning wages for slaveholders. Certificates of Freedom provided one potential solution. Popularly known as “freedom papers,” the Certificates of Freedom had their origins in a 1796 law that required former slaves to carry documentation that identified them as legally free. Certificates included details about the

50

Hirelings

manumitted person’s sex, height, age, skin tone, scars, and deformities, as well as a cursory explanation of how the bearer obtained freedom. Beginning in 1808, even freeborn African Americans could apply for certificates.8 Freedom certificates offered a convenience to both employers and free African American employees. If nothing else, the certificates clarified for employers which African American migrants were legitimate freedmen. But even certificates were not the final word on freedom. Later, the Maryland legislature pronounced that sheriffs could not detain a migrating African American on suspicion of being a runaway without just cause.9 In other words, local authorities should presume that even those African Americans traveling without freedom papers were free African American migrant workers, not runaway slaves. Over the centuries a mythology has developed around these “freedom papers.” We have long assumed that because the legislature required former slaves to register with their local courts, free African Americans did so. We have also assumed that courts used the registration-certification process to monitor and restrain African American mobility. Moreover, it was believed that free African Americans who never applied for freedom papers or lost their papers or had their papers stolen or destroyed faced certain reenslavement at the hands of unscrupulous white men. Frederick Douglass suggested as much in his autobiography. Douglass insisted that “cases have been known, where freemen have been called upon to show their papers, by a pack of ruffians—and, on the presentation of the papers, the ruffians have torn them up, and seized their victim, and sold him to a life of endless bondage.”10 In other words, freedom papers were all that separated freedmen from slaves, and any free African American who valued his freedom would not dare leave his home, never mind his community, without his freedom papers safely tucked in his pocket. As Douglass’s account implies, and every free African American knew, a piece of paper would not deter a kidnapper who was determined to steal and sell a man into slavery. If freedom papers protected African Americans from abduction, then one would expect that children, who were most vulnerable to kidnapping, would carry certificates in greater numbers than the elderly or others who were less vulnerable.11 This was not the case. In Talbot and Queen Anne’s counties only seventy children sixteen years or younger applied for certificates before 1832 (less than 3% of all certificate bearers). Free African Americans of all ages disregarded

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51

the General Assembly’s mandate. Only a fraction of manumitted or freeborn African Americans in Maryland ever applied for freedom certificates (table 2.1). In 1810 fewer than 9 percent of free African Americans in Baltimore applied to the Baltimore County Court for freedom certificates. By 1820 perhaps as few as 4 percent of free African Americans TABLE 2.1 Applicants for Certificates of Freedom as a percentage of whole free black populations, Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties, 1805–1834 1805–1809

County

1800–1809 No. of Applicants

1800 Population

Percentage of 1800 Population (%)

Percentage of 1810 Population (%)

Talbot

231

1,591

15

12

Queen Anne’s Total

19

1,025

2

2

250

2,616

10

8

Percentage of 1810 Population (%)

Percentage of 1820 Population (%)

1810–1819 County

1810–1819 No. of Applicants

1810 Population

Talbot

673

2,003

34

30

Queen Anne’s

106

1,025

10

5

Total

779

3,028

26

18

1820–1829 County

1820–1829 No. of Applicants

1820 Population

Percentage of 1820 Population (%)

Percentage of 1830 Population (%)

Talbot

241

2,243

11

10

Queen Anne’s

272

2,138

13

10

Total

513

4,381

12

10

1830–1834 County

1830–1834 No. of Applicants

1830 Population

Percentage of 1830 Population (%)

Talbot

60

2,483

2

Queen Anne’s

462

2,856

16

Total

522

5,339

10

Sources: Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom) 1807–1815 and 1815–1828. Queen Anne’s County Court (Certificates of Freedom) 1807–1848. Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth U.S. Census: 1800, 1810, 1820, 1830, Talbot County and Queen Anne’s County, Maryland.

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Hirelings

in Baltimore carried certificates.12 On the Eastern Shore more freedmen applied for the certificates, but even as late as 1830, twenty-five years after the legislature standardized the certificates, only 10 percent of the free African Americans in either Queen Anne’s or Talbot counties applied for them. In 1805, the first year county clerks recorded freedom certificates in the public record, only one manumitted slave appeared before the Talbot clerk.13 Twenty-five years later, only ten African Americans (three women and seven men) applied for certificates. In Talbot County three times as many free African Americans applied for certificates between 1810 and 1819 as had done so in the previous decade. Sixty-seven percent of the Talbot County applicants appeared before the court clerk between 1815 and 1819, and more freedmen applied for certificates in 1815 than in any other year before 1834.14 Similarly, in Queen Anne’s County the number of applicants for freedom certificates doubled after 1820. Before 1819 only 125 freedmen applied for certificates, but between 1820 and 1829, 272 people received certificates. Although the Queen Anne’s County Court issued an average of eighteen certificates annually before 1829, the court issued seventy-two certificates in 1826, forty-nine in 1827, and sixty-nine in 1828. In 1793 the Virginia General Assembly adopted similar legislation with similar outcomes. In Fairfax County, which claimed 311 free African American residents in 1830, only 95 free African Americans registered in eight years. In Campbell County, south of Lynchburg, only 287 free African Americans registered in forty years. In Amherst County, north of Lynchburg, only a third of the free African American population ever registered before 1860. Even in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831), when African Americans would have been most vulnerable to abuse and the state was extraordinarily concerned with public safety, clerks at the Fairfax County Court issued 177 certificates in two months, and these certificates represented a full 40 percent of the total number of certificates issued between 1822 and 1835.15 The lack of compliance is surprising considering that Virginia law empowered local authorities to fine freedmen who could not present their papers on demand, and the state required reregistration every three years.16 Delaware did not require free African Americans to apply for certificates at all until 1826.17 Whatever the intent of the registration and certification laws, it is clear that by the 1810s, free African Americans in Maryland had adopted

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53

freedom papers for their own purposes. Free African Americans did not apply because they were required to do so or because they thought that the certificates would protect their freedom. They filed for certificates because the papers facilitated migration and thereby created opportunities. Men and women obtained certificates when they expected to go among strangers in unfamiliar communities. In early national Maryland freedom papers functioned like contemporary green cards, identifying free African Americans as legitimate free workers, eligible for employment anywhere. As Thomas Cole’s 1794 certificate stated, he was a freedman and permitted “to engage in what work or business he pleases.”18 Predictably, the overwhelming majority of certificate applicants who appeared in Eastern Shore county courts were young, able-bodied, and single. Nearly 60 percent of applicants from Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties were under thirty years old: 12 percent were teenagers and 47 percent were between twenty and twenty-nine years old. Most of the twenty-year-olds were not heads of households but unwed young people who often arrived at the court clerk’s office accompanied by a sibling. The members of the Pipes and Maccary households exemplify this trend. Between 1814 and 1818, four of Isaac and Memory Maccary’s adult children applied for freedom certificates at the Talbot County Courthouse. Two of their sons, John (27) and Levin (24), received their freedom certificates on the same day in 1814. Younger sister Grace (22) applied for her freedom papers in 1818, and brother James (21) followed her to the courthouse a few months later.19 Similarly, Henrietta and Peter Pipes sent only six of their nine adult children to register with the court clerk for freedom certificates. The two eldest sons, Perry (21) and Jacob (19), applied for certificates on the same day in 1826. The following year Peter Jr. (20) and Maria (18) appeared at the court, and finally in 1828, eighteen-year-old Eliza registered for her freedom papers. At age forty-four, Henrietta Pipes was the only one of the four parents to apply for a certificate.20 It was the young adults who applied for certificates; the elderly and children did not. Put another way, those members of the Pipes family who had no intention of leaving the Eastern Shore, including the elderly Peter Pipes Senior (fifty-four years old in 1826) and his youngest children, William, Mary Ann, and Henny Pipes (nine, seven, and five years of age, respectively, in 1826), never applied for certificates before 1833. Nor did Isaac and Memory Maccary apply for freedom papers. As the owners of a small

54

Hirelings

farm of twenty-six acres, they were invested in the African American community of Talbot County and had more reasons to stay than to go. Not everyone who applied for a certificate with the intention of leaving the Eastern Shore stayed away forever. Isaac and Memory’s son, James, applied for a certificate in 1818 when he was twenty-one years old, suggesting that he intended to follow his siblings off the Eastern Shore. But if he left, he soon returned. By age thirty-five James had married, started his own family, and was, in 1832, the head of a ten-person household in Talbot County that included his elderly father, Isaac. A survey of the freedom papers issued to African American property owners in Talbot County hints at the possibility that a number of other young men left the countryside temporarily but eventually resettled in rural African American communities. According to the 1817 Talbot County Tax Assessment, twenty-three of the eighty-one African American men who paid taxes on real estate (28%) had applied for freedom certificates. Many of them fit the profile of free African American migrants. For example, ten of the twenty-four certificate bearers were under age thirty when they applied for their certificates. More important, nine of these certificate bearers applied for the certificates before they appeared in a tax assessment. Moses Smith, for example, was born free in 1787. When he turned twenty, he applied for a freedom certificate. In 1813, at the age of twenty-six, he appeared in the tax records as the owner of a three-acre lot near the town of Easton, and he remained the owner of that lot for at least thirteen years. Perhaps Smith spent those six years between the time he applied for his certificate and the time he appeared in a tax assessment traveling and working for wages before settling on the Eastern Shore where he could be close to family and where his money would buy more property. African Americans valued freedom papers because they potentially broadened a person’s economic and social horizons, not because they provided any meaningful protection against harassment, violence, or kidnapping. Young men and women migrated to Baltimore and to neighboring rural counties in search of work, potential spouses, or perhaps just adventure. Young people valued mobility, and not just because they were former slaves escaping the rigidity of plantation life. After all, 38 percent of the applicants for freedom certificates in Talbot and Queen Anne’s counties were freeborn. G. W. Offley, a freeborn African American, followed a path familiar to countless other young African Americans, and his migration

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55

choices exemplify the spirit of adventure among the freeborn. Offley reported in his autobiography that at twenty-one he took leave of his parents’ house in Queen Anne’s County, and “I went to work on a rail road; then I taught boxing school, and learned to write. After that I went to St. George, Del., to work at a hotel.” He traveled across the Delmarva Peninsula for six more years before moving north and settling in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1835.21 Young women were especially eager to try their fortunes in Baltimore. Women knew that neighborhood grain planters favored male over female laborers and that as long as they remained on the Eastern Shore they would be competing with slaves and freeborn child laborers to perform the least desirable, unskilled work for the lowest wages. But in Baltimore teenage girls and young women routinely found employment as laundresses, seamstresses, cooks, and domestics. Between 1810 and 1819, the number of free black laundresses included in the Baltimore directories rose from 3 to 118. By 1827 the city directory included 189 free black laundresses.22 Increased job opportunities in the city, coupled with shrinking work opportunities in the countryside, explains the steady increase in the number of country girls and women who applied for Certificates of Freedom after 1810 (tables 2.2 and 2.3). Women like Eliza Pipes, the youngest member of her family to register, made up nearly 60 percent of the certificate applicants under age twenty-one in Talbot County, and 55 percent in Queen Anne’s County. In Baltimore and Philadelphia free African American women consistently outnumbered black men, a fact that testifies both to women’s success in the urban labor market and to men’s mobility. Young men regularly TABLE 2.2 Sex and age structures of Certificate of Freedom applicants, Talbot County, 1800–34 Age (years) No age recorded

Females

Percentage (%)

Males

Percentage (%)

11

2

15

2

11 to 21

144

23

102

16

22 to 30

213

38

306

48

31 to 40

130

23

134

21

41 to 50

49

9

55

8

51 to 70

13

2

24

4

Total

560

636

Source: Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom) 1807–1815 and 1815–1828.

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Hirelings

TABLE 2.3 Sex and age structures of Certificate of Freedom applicants, Queen Anne’s County, 1807–34 Age (years)

Females

Percentage (%)

Males

Percentage (%)

13

3

43

9

11 to 21

139

35

117

23

22 to 30

124

31

210

42

No age recorded

31 to 40

91

8

97

19

41 to 50

33

23

23

5

2

.5

8

2

51 to 70 Total

402

498

Source: Queen Anne’s County Court (Certificates of Freedom) 1807–1848.

moved within the countryside, from the country to the city, and back to the country. Duplicate certificates hint at a few of these men’s experiences with circular migration. Maryland courts issued duplicate certificates to free African Americans who claimed that their original certificate was lost, defaced, or stolen. People who sought duplicate certificates at the Queen Anne’s and Talbot county courthouses often reported that the originals were lost in Baltimore. Joseph Martin, a freeborn African American, returned to the court fourteen years after he acquired his first certificate because he lost the original “while lying on the gang board, which was extended from the vessel [in which he was employed as a hand] to the wharf at Baltimore.” Martin explained that “his pocket book with his freedom papers fell out of his pocket into the dock and was never recovered.” Similarly, Jacob Gibson acquired a duplicate of his certificate after the “original was stolen with his trunk from him in Baltimore.” In 1845 Joe Boyer returned to the Queen Anne’s County Courthouse for a duplicate freedom certificate because he lost the original (issued in 1832) “while lying at the wharf at Baltimore.”23 Maryland law did not require free African Americans to apply for freedom certificates in the community in which they were born or raised: it required only that the clerk verify the applicant’s freedom either through court records (e.g., last wills and testaments, deeds of manumission) or by the testimony of a white witness. A letter sent to the Talbot County Court suggests that clerks even received requests by mail. In April 1816 Emily Green of Baltimore sent a letter to the Talbot County Court, politely requesting that the clerk “please examine the will of William Haddaway

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57

who died sometime before the War of 1812 and see if the increase [descendents] of Nelly Turner the mother, and Rachel and Airy Turner her daughters are recorded free with their increase.” She identified herself as “one of the daughters of Airy and interested in the matter.”24 Nor did the law prohibit a manumitted slave or freeborn person from acquiring a certificate in any court in the state.25 In ten years the Baltimore County Court issued sixty-one certificates to free African Americans who were born and raised on the Eastern Shore. Clerks also issued freedom certificates to Maryland-born African Americans who now lived in other states. Such was the case for Henny Barnett, a resident of Sussex, Delaware, who received a certificate from the Talbot County Court in 1807. It seems that Delaware employers accepted Maryland-issued freedom certificates as proof of freedom, giving free African Americans additional incentive to explore opportunities abroad. Maryland was not so generous. In 1831 the legislature authorized county authorities to fine employers who hired freedmen from other states.26 Joseph Martin and Joe Boyer may have returned to the Eastern Shore for duplicate certificates, or perhaps they routinely divided their time between Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. Maybe their extended families lived on the Eastern Shore, or they returned east for seasonal work. Both Martin and Boyer were twenty-two years old and freeborn when they applied for their first certificates in 1831 and 1832, respectively. We cannot be certain that the two men knew each other at the time that they first obtained certificates, but by 1845, when they sought duplicates, they surely at least recognized one another, and perhaps even traveled together to Queen Anne’s County.27 Because both men claimed to have lost their certificates at the Baltimore wharf, they probably lived in the city at least part of the year, making it odd that they would return to the countryside for a certificate that they should have been able to acquire in Baltimore. Surely after as many as thirteen or fourteen years of service in Baltimore, Martin and Boyer could have found a witness, perhaps an employer, who would testify to their freedom and save them the trip across Chesapeake Bay. It is more likely that Martin and Boyer were part of a larger, very visible African American migration from country to city that shaped and reshaped the African American communities of Philadelphia and Baltimore. Philadelphia absorbed large numbers of African American migrants from

58

Hirelings

around the Middle Atlantic region as well as from the Caribbean, and those immigrants helped create one of the most vibrant free black communities in the Atlantic world. In 1813, when the Pennsylvania House of Representatives considered legislation to ban further migration of African Americans into the state, a committee report concluded that nearly four thousand fugitive slaves had taken refuge in the city.28 In the case of Baltimore, in 1790 nearly all of the black and white residents were recent migrants to the city. In 1768 Baltimore claimed just six thousand residents, but by 1790 the population had swelled to thirteen thousand. It was the fifth largest city in the United States.29 Until 1810 the majority of African Americans living in Baltimore were slaves. Baltimore-based merchant-artisans had scoured the Maryland countryside to purchase slave-artisans in the 1790s, and planters who were narrowly focused on agriculture happily sold them. Like Maryland grain planters, these merchant-artisans wanted to maximize the profit potential of the boom in commercial agriculture by expanding their skilled workforce. By 1810, 22 percent of Baltimore residents were African Americans, and for the first time free African Americans outnumbered slaves (5,617 free people of color, 4,672 slaves). By 1820 the free black population of Baltimore was 50 percent larger than its slave population, and in 1830 the free black population was 70 percent larger than the slave population. Such astonishing growth far exceeded both natural increase and the number of recorded manumissions in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and it can only be explained by the voluntary immigration of thousands of free African Americans to the city. From a list of 350 African American men and women who received Certificates of Freedom in Baltimore County between 1806 and 1816, 49 percent of the applicants (171 men and women) reported that they were born and raised outside of Baltimore.30 Before 1830 nearly nine of ten black Baltimoreans were migrants to the city, and even in Norfolk, Virginia, nearly 25 percent of the free African Americans had migrated to the city from neighboring counties.31 Joseph Martin and Joe Boyer were among countless numbers of young men who came from the countryside to Baltimore and Philadelphia to work in the shipping industry. Many served as crew members on ships that took them out of the city for months at a time. In 1821 at least 284 African American men worked as mariners in Philadelphia, and 92 percent of those men were rural migrants. Thirty percent of mariners in Philadelphia

Migration

59

came from rural Delaware and Maryland.32 Rural migrants who arrived in the city in the 1790s, when Atlantic trade was brisk, undoubtedly earned high wages for even the most unskilled labor. But African American men migrated often, and some of those male migrants may have returned to the countryside after a few months or years, moving west to work on the grain farms of southwestern Pennsylvania or northwestern Maryland. In Norfolk, Virginia, another maritime city, free black men regularly left the city to work in the countryside when the shipping industry suffered hard times. Still others went west of the Middle Atlantic region into rural Indiana and Ohio, and in the 1820s, some enterprising African American men took their maritime skills to the riverboats that cruised the Mississippi River.33 The profile of a young, single African American migrant in the Middle Atlantic states contrasts sharply with the profile of African American emigrants who left the United States for West Africa and the Caribbean. Charged with tracking the movement of former slaves out of the United States, the Maryland State Colonization Society reported to the legislature that a total of 627 free African Americans left Maryland for Africa, Guiana, and Haiti between 1832 and 1841. Fifty-one of these migrants left Talbot and Queen Anne’s counties on ships bound for Cape Palmas, Liberia, in 1835. Only six traveled alone; the remainder boarded the ships with multiple members of their immediate and extended families. The Parker family of Queen Anne’s County was representative of emigrants to Cape Palmas. The family included seven members who represented three generations, ranging in age from forty-two years (Eben Parker) to five months (Caroline Parker). Similarly, the Gibson family of Talbot County included Jacob (45) and Rebecca (43) and seven children between the ages of five and twelve. The only free African Americans to emigrate from neighboring Caroline County to Cape Palmas were the eleven members of the Walker family, including Luke (50) and Ann (35) and nine children under age fifteen.34 African Americans who emigrated from Virginia followed the same pattern of family migration to Liberia in the 1820s.35 The Cape Palmas migrants had much in common with Eastern Shore African Americans who migrated within the Middle Atlantic region. Economic opportunity, or the lack of it, for example, was a critical factor in the decision to resettle in Cape Palmas. Moreover, emigration was not a desperate act but a solution to the problem of shrinking opportunities for free African Americans. Like those who migrated within the Middle Atlantic

60

Hirelings

region, the Cape Palmas emigrants expected that the move would improve their material lives. They also expected that it would benefit their domestic lives. Migration, including emigration, was one of several strategies to preserve and protect the hard-won autonomy of free African American families.

3

Family

Slavery broke Elizabeth Jacobs’s family. She was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but while still a child she was separated from her parents and siblings when a slaveholder took her to Chester, Pennsylvania. Her experience was commonplace for slaves in nineteenth-century Maryland. Slaveholders gifted, traded, bequeathed, bought, and sold slaves without regard for family connections. They divided spouses and separated children from their siblings and their parents. As a child and a slave, Elizabeth was powerless to protect herself from this violence. Only after she was manumitted did she have a chance to recover the family that was taken from her. Once she was legally free, Elizabeth left Pennsylvania and returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She married sometime after 1830, adopted her new husband’s surname (Wilson), and remained in Queen Anne’s County until at least 1848. Historians of American Reconstruction have written extensively about the extraordinary efforts of former slaves to restore, reunite, and strengthen their families in the aftermath of the Civil War.1 The abolition

62

Hirelings

of slavery promised wholeness for African American families broken by slavery. By comparison, manumission offered no such assurance. Sometimes slaveholders in early republic Maryland manumitted entire families, but, more frequently, they manumitted individual slaves and divided family members between slavery and freedom. Before U.S. Emancipation the typical African American family on the Eastern Shore included manumitted slaves, slaves-for-life, term slaves, and freeborn African Americans. Elizabeth Jacobs Wilson and other manumitted African Americans assumed the responsibility for making their families whole. Some manumitted people worked to purchase freedom for spouses, children, and other family members left behind in slavery. Sometimes they succeeded, but often they did not. Families also negotiated other arrangements with slaveholders that allowed for reunification without freedom. When all else failed, family members looked for other ways to show their connectedness. The careful choice of a surname, for example, served to remind everyone that while some in the family were slaves-for-life, others term slaves, and still others freed or freeborn, all were elements of the same whole. Maintaining familial integrity was a process that required cooperation among family members. Even children were expected to contribute what they could to sustain a family in freedom. Manumitted parents raised their freeborn children with a keen awareness of their obligation to care for and support grandparents, parents, and siblings. This expectation of familial cooperation or reciprocity was a distinct value of free African American families. Early republic lawmakers who wrestled with the challenge of implementing emancipation schemes universally recognized that a slaveholder’s rights to property superseded the undefined human rights of slaves, but Americans were not unusual in this respect. In Spanish America the centuries-old custom of coartación required slaves to provide monetary compensation in exchange for legal freedom.2 Coartación, or gradual selfpurchase, acknowledged both the slaveholder’s right to compensation and a slave’s right to purchase freedom. It had developed over centuries across the Spanish Empire in America, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it offered slaves and slaveholders an orderly method for achieving gradual, compensated emancipation. Courts set the price of freedom according to the slave’s worth, and after the appraisal the slaveholder and slave entered a legally binding agreement that allowed the slave time to

Family

63

work toward his or her own purchase. Once set by a court-appointed assessor, a slave’s price of freedom could not be altered, and a slave whose worth had been determined by the court was thereafter identified as partially freed (coartado). As a partial slave, or a partial freedman, a coartado slave had legal sanction to sell his or her time to any employer for the purpose of raising money for freedom. Local authorities obliged masters to accept the coartado slave’s payments, and the slaves were assured manumission papers after making a final payment against the purchase price. It was a system that recognized the rights of masters, the rights of slaves, and the right of the state to arbitrate their competing claims. As in Spanish America, early national Americans respected property rights first and human rights second. But in the United States gradual manumission law evolved without any direction from the federal government, resulting in a patchwork of judicial and legislative schemes. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont ended slavery without compensating slaveholders, but Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island abolished slavery gradually and with economic compensation for slaveholders. Compensation came in the form of “term slavery” for the emancipated. Although “free” the newly emancipated were nevertheless compelled to serve their former masters for a predetermined number of years. In most states, then, emancipation was a transitional process from slavery to term slavery to African American freedom over a period of three generations. In Pennsylvania African American males born after 1780 were to serve as term slaves to age twenty-one and females to age eighteen.3 The New York emancipation followed the Pennsylvania model, incrementally freeing all children born to enslaved women after July 4, 1799. Males obtained freedom at twenty-eight and females at twenty-five. Similarly, in New Jersey emancipation called for term slavery for African American children born after 1804, requiring males to serve to age twenty-seven and females to age twenty-one. Beyond defining eligibility for manumission in 1796, the Maryland legislature hardly regulated the implementation of gradual manumission at all. Manumission remained a wholly private affair between a slave and a slaveholder, and perhaps for that reason, it also remained a popular practice among Maryland slaveholders. Individual slaveholders had unlimited power to set the price for black freedom and, by extension, their own terms for compensation. Slaveholders could set manumission prices

64

Hirelings

according to market value, or not. They could require twenty-five years of service, or more. They could also rescind their offers without consequence. Edward Fenwick of St. Mary’s County, Maryland, frankly admitted in court that he promised to manumit his slave Michael “in order to exite an ambition in him to exert himself the more to pay your respondent the large sum of money your rispondent had purcased him for and to secure negro michaels fedility and obedience as a servant.”4 Fenwick’s conditions for manumission included $318 and an expectation that Michael would “become orderly obedient and subservient to my will and wishes.” For Michael, raising the money proved easier than acting obediently. Over five years Michael made five payments worth $218 to Fenwick. The final payment came from Charles Gardner, a neighbor who agreed to pay Michael’s debt to Fenwick in exchange for three years of service. Fenwick apparently accepted the deal, but when it came time to draft the manumission deed, he refused to do it, arguing that he accepted Gardner’s money as payment for a three-year hire, not a manumission deed. In 1833 Michael and Charles Gardner petitioned the county court to force Fenwick to issue the manumission deed, to which Fenwick responded that the litigation itself proved Michael’s insolence and therefore his ineligibility for freedom. Although Maryland slaveholders enjoyed unlimited discretion in determining the price of African American freedom, a consensus emerged around the practice. First, an overwhelming majority of slaveholders obtained their economic compensation by delaying manumission. In his survey of more than two thousand Maryland manumission deeds, historian T. Stephen Whitman discovered that two-thirds of manumissions filed in rural counties delayed freedom to some established date.5 Typically, slaveholders delayed freedom until adulthood, and 31 percent required enslaved children to persist as slaves for sixteen to twenty years before obtaining their freedom. In fact, the modal age for immediate manumission was forty years for both sexes, indicating that slaveholders typically waited until male slaves had passed their prime as laborers or until female slaves had passed their childbearing years before manumitting them unconditionally.6 Fewer than 20 percent of slaveholders unconditionally liberated young people before they reached twenty years of age. Second, Maryland slaveholders routinely manumitted one generation of slaves while holding the next generation as either slaves-for-life or term slaves. For example,

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65

Jacob Barnes required Teney to serve twenty-one years as a slave before she received a manumission deed, and further stipulated that her children and grandchildren (“her issue and her issue’s issue”) would each provide twenty-five years of service before earning freedom.7 Similarly, Ann Reese’s mother was manumitted in 1798, but Ann and her siblings remained slaves until they turned twenty-five.8 Slaveholder Impey Dawson unconditionally manumitted Peter and Rose Chesnor as well as Eve Button by his last will and testament, but he also deeded the Chesnors’ five children and Eve’s three children to his brother, George Dawson.9 Slaveholders routinely separated parents from their enslaved children if it served their economic interests to do so. By 1809 the Maryland legislature sanctioned the practice with a statute that permitted probate courts to default to slavery for the unborn when a testamentary manumission did not explicitly extended freedom to the unborn. Thereafter, slaveholders who sincerely intended to liberate their slaves needed to document how far that gift of freedom extended. Solomon Holton, for example, explicated in his testamentary manumission of Mincy that he granted freedom to Mincy, her two children, any additional children she might give birth to after his death, and Mincy’s grandchildren (“the increase of the daughter of the said Mincy”) on the death of his wife.10 One obvious outcome of the Maryland system of compensated manumission was the division of family members between slavery and freedom. In other words, freedom fractured families. One spouse obtained freedom while the other waited. Parents escaped, but children remained enslaved. Among those born into a fractured family was William Green of Talbot County. His family had been enslaved “for many generations,” but early in the nineteenth century, Mary Goldsborough manumitted his mother’s family. William was not freed, but his legal status changed from slave-forlife to term slave, and he expected to obtain his freedom after twenty-five years of service. Although William remained in his mother’s care for the first eight years of his life, he recognized that his continued enslavement still separated him from her. He remembered years later that “having a great many relations who were almost all free, and I being a slave, made me very unhappy, and every day I became more and more determined to be free or die in the attempt.”11 As his account suggests, those left behind in slavery alternated between feelings of relief and resentment: relief that others had escaped and resentment that their own time had not yet come.

66

Hirelings

Equally tragic, the practice of delayed and compensated manumission sanctioned the notion that white freedom was inalienable, black freedom was a commodity, and like other commodities, its value was determined by market forces beyond the control of any single consumer. Inevitably, African American spouses and parents who wanted to buy a loved one from slavery competed against other purchasers with significantly more capital. In the 1780s and 1790s a freedman’s chief competitors at the auction block were small planters on either side of Chesapeake Bay as well as Baltimore merchants. By 1815 a freedman who aspired to purchase his wife or children competed against a professional slave trader charged with buying up enslaved laborers to work in the cotton and cane fields of the Deep South.12 In either case, any African American who wanted to buy a loved one from slavery had to develop a strategy to raise the necessary capital, and these fund-raising campaigns reflect the ingenuity and resourcefulness of free African Americans determined to unite their families in freedom. Some applied their hard-earned wages. Some borrowed money or took up donations. Others bartered goods, and still others sold their free labor for a term of years. Most mixed multiple methods to come up with the required cash for a purchase as quickly as possible. For example, in 1795 George Kersey paid Robert Lambdin approximately £20 Maryland money and one hundred yards of woven linen and woolen cloth for his wife, Martha, and their children, John and Margaret.13 By comparison, Richard Bowlin borrowed money from wealthy neighbors and worked for wages on several plantations to purchase his seven-year-old son, Asberry, for £30 from James Earle Jr. He worked for Earle cutting wood and wheat, securing hay, and laboring in Earle’s “lot” for five days. He transferred credits that he had earned working for two other planters to his account with Earle, borrowed money from at least one neighborhood planter, and made several cash payments. Two years after rescuing Asberry, Bowlin succeeded in raising another £18 and fifteen shillings Maryland currency to pay for his daughter, Maria.14 In addition to borrowing money from sympathetic white neighbors, African Americans sought monetary support from their fellow coreligionists. Noah Davis of Virginia and Edmund Kelley of Tennessee were two former slaves who traveled to Baltimore and Massachusetts respectively to solicit funds from sister congregations. Edmund Kelley, an ordained

Family

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Baptist minister, received funds from his congregation in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to rescue his wife and children from slavery. Noah Davis convinced slaveholder Dr. F. Patten to permit him to purchase himself for $500 and “to let me travel and find friends, who would give me the money.”15 He earned $150 locally, another $150 from friends in “northern cities,” and more in Baltimore, where “white Baptist friends” had offered him a position as a missionary to the African American community in Baltimore.16 Davis was surprised to discover that some white people would not donate money “as it was against their principle to give money, to buy slaves,” but he was undeterred. Seeing the lengths to which Davis was willing to go to purchase his own freedom, “the rich widow lady” who claimed Davis’s wife and children, agreed to sell his wife and two youngest children to him for $800. While regretting the prospect of more time away from his wife and children, Davis agreed to the purchase price and over the next decade secured enough funds from friends in Fredericksburg, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; and Philadelphia to buy his wife and five of their seven children.17 Black freedom was expensive, and a spouse or parent could spend a lifetime laboring for the price of freedom and never succeed in buying the prized commodity. To improve their chances, families had to develop strategies for buying loved ones at favorable rates.18 Parents could more easily buy freedom for young children, the elderly, or any family member who was a term slave, but the cost of buying an adolescent slave-for-life could be prohibitive because of the heavy demand for young adults in the nation’s cotton fields. The disparity in cost was painfully evident to David Barnett who paid $300 for his fifteen-year-old son in 1824 but just $40 for his four-year-old daughter in 1825.19 In response to these economic realities, many manumitted African Americans bought their youngest children and even their elderly parents and then waited for their oldest children to age out of their prime worth. Free African Americans knew that the longer a child avoided sale the more likely his market value would eventually drop and freedom by purchase would again be an affordable option. G. W. Offley’s memory of how his own family came into freedom suggests that his parents followed this strategy. First, the Offleys raised funds to buy their daughter, whom they knew could be purchased cheaply because she was a term slave and therefore ineligible for sale out of state. Next, the Offleys purchased Greensbury’s paternal grandmother. Her old age made

68

Hirelings

her affordable, and Greenbury’s parents desired to exempt “her from hard servitude in her old age.”20 Others shared the Offleys’ aspiration to relieve their elders from hard labor. In 1830 Henrietta Ridout purchased a fortyseven-year-old man ( James Toomey) for $20, and in 1833 Rachel Coursey bought forty-five-year-old Jim Coursey for $15. In the meantime, the Offleys’ enslaved son waited the longest for freedom, but the wait was consistent with a regional trend of boys lingering in slavery or term slavery until their age made them affordable again.21 It was a gamble that sent the Offleys and other parents scrambling to purchase a child at a public auction. In his memoir Noah Davis recounts the anxiety he felt as a parent waiting to free an adolescent. Davis knew that as his children matured they needed “my watchful care, more now than at any other time,” but in order to raise the money for their manumission, he went to work in Baltimore, while his children remained enslaved in Fredericksburg. Davis’s worst fears were nearly realized in 1858 when three of his children were put on the auction block. He rushed home from Baltimore too late to stop the sale, but he was able to negotiate their “redemption” for $2,120.22 Slaveholders knew parents’ fears and profited from them, demanding more money or more labor in less time. When former slave Edmund Kelley of Tennessee attempted to renegotiate the price of his wife and freedom for his four children, slaveholder James Walker responded that the price was nonnegotiable and that Kelley should pay quickly, as “I could get more money for them, and they are daily increasing in value.” He also warned that if Kelley could not raise the money “without delay,” then he should stop writing to his wife and children, “raising in them hopes that cannot be realized.”23 But what if a slaveholder would not sell at any price? What of those families who remained divided between slavery and freedom notwithstanding their best efforts to buy freedom for everyone? In these cases, African American families developed alternative strategies for maintaining familial integrity. One alternative was a negotiated arrangement that gave the free family possession of their enslaved family members for a term of years. For example, although he was a slave, William Green’s manumitted mother arranged for him to stay in her care until he was eight years old. Similarly, Nanny Occomy took possession of her three-year-old grandson by convincing slaveholder Sarah Hollyday to gift him to her for twentyone years. The arrangement did not free the boy, but it guaranteed that he would remain in his grandmother’s custody for the remainder of her

Family

69

life. Sarah Hollyday made a similar arrangement with a freedman named Jack, who sought custody of his daughter Maria.24 Finally, Peter and Rose Chesnor and Eve Button brokered comparable agreements with George Dawson to recover their enslaved children. Slaveholder Impey Dawson had broken the Chesnor and Button families when he manumitted these parents by last will and testament while bequeathing their enslaved children to his brother. George was unwilling to part with the children at the time, but in 1801 he consented in writing to transfer them back to their respective parents at the time of his death.25 Time and again, on the Eastern Shore and elsewhere, newly manumitted African Americans assumed the responsibility of rescuing those left behind. African Americans bartered and brokered to free wives, children, and elders from slavery. Even when families could not be united in freedom, African Americans still bartered and brokered for unification. In slavery and freedom, familial integrity was the ultimate goal, but even when freedom and reunification were impossible, families took steps to demonstrate their connectedness despite some being free and some enslaved. Surnames, for example, identified free family members’ connection to enslaved family members across time and space. Scholars who have explored the meaning of free African Americans’ surnames generally emphasize the personal and political significance that former slaves attached to these new names. Choosing a surname could have been a significant first step in the process of healing for many former slaves. Historians have concluded that since few free African Americans adopted the surname of their former master, and many defiantly chose names like “Newman” or “Freeman,” surnames signified a break from the enslaved past and a transition into a free future. In some cases former slaves may have taken their surname from a previous slaveholder, or the slaveholder of an earlier generation of enslaved family members, because “taking the name of an earlier owner was a way for slaves to recapture their history, to establish a link to a family of origins, and to forge a social identity separate from that of a successive owner.”26 In the very well-documented experience of free African Americans in early national Philadelphia, many men and women deliberately adopted inconspicuous surnames like “Jackson,” “Moore,” or “Morgan,” suggesting a preference for anonymity, but many others created original surnames such as “Dancer,” “Gooseberry,” and “Paulk,” names that had no significance to anyone other than the bearer.27

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Hirelings

Surnames also served a more ordinary purpose for many families. In the case of the extended Haskins family in Talbot County, a common surname clarified connections among enslaved and free family members. Between 1807 and 1832 the clerks of the Talbot County Court issued freedom certificates to fifty-two men and women manumitted by William Hindman. Forty-five of these former slaves had surnames, but not one adopted the surname Hindman. Caroline (b. 1768), Anna (b. 1801), and Joe (b. 1802) all claimed the surname Haskins, their common surname indicating that they were related to one another.28 Even more significant is the likelihood that they were related to some, if not all, of the nine other manumitted African Americans with the surname Haskins who applied for freedom certificates in Talbot County. In 1814 the Haskins family included multiple generations of men and women in slavery and various stages of freedom. Caroline Haskins, who was born in 1768, was the eldest, and it is likely that all of the manumitted family members who applied for certificates were connected to her. How she was connected to these other family members is unknown, but one obvious possibility is that Caroline was mother to all of these individuals. It is highly probable that she was mother to Anna and Joe, who were also manumitted by William Hindman. Whatever her relationship with the other members of the Haskins family, it is clear that slavery had separated them from one another. The nine members of the Haskins family had been divided among seven different slaveholders, who presumably lived in seven different locations. All the Haskins men and women would eventually achieve freedom, but freedom came incrementally. Although Caroline Haskins was the eldest of her kin group, four other members of the Haskins family, all manumitted by Philip Rigby and Henry Bowdle, applied for freedom certificates before she did. Moreover, six other family members remained slaves at the time that Caroline received her own certificate in 1814. Those Haskins family members who made the transition from slavery to freedom probably devoted their attention to the unique concerns of freedmen, including securing work and housing. This focus on sustaining oneself in freedom undoubtedly separated the free Haskins physically, if not emotionally, from their enslaved kin. Geography may have further fractured the family. Violet Haskins, for example, reported to the county clerk who issued her freedom certificate that she was born in Caroline

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County but raised in Talbot, suggesting that the Haskins of Talbot County had family in Caroline County. How many others remained in Caroline? Clearly, for Violet and the other members of her kinship group, the Haskins surname was more than an adornment. It was a meaningful way for Violet to demonstrate to everyone she encountered that she was connected to other members of the Haskins family, enslaved and free, across the generations and across the Eastern Shore. The literature on the nineteenth-century African American family in slavery and freedom is vast, but scholars from diverse fields agree that enslaved African Americans defined family broadly. Slaves identified family members as those connected to them by blood and by union, but also those connected to them by affection, obligation, and trust. This inclusive family structure developed partly in response to the threat that the domestic slave trade posed to the nuclear African American family. A young wife who lost her husband to the slave trade would receive sisterly comfort from another wife. A mother who lost her children to a slaveholder’s distant heirs would adopt the children of another mother sold to a distant plantation. An elderly parent who lost an adult child to lethal or crippling violence at the hands of an overseer could expect material and emotional comfort from the adult children of other elders. In other words, the vulnerability of the nuclear family to violence and forced separation encouraged the incorporation of others into a family. It had not always been this way. On the eve of the American Revolution, the African American family in Maryland was secure and reliable. Nuclear family was the key institution in the life of a slave even though it was still a young institution. Imbalanced sex ratios, high mortality rates, frequent dislocations, psychological disorientation, and poor physical health in the seventeenth century had prevented the first African slaves from forming families. But by the 1730s and 1740s American-born slaves successfully established an independent social life and then regular families. Slaves entered into committed love relationships of their own choosing. They chose to bear children, and in some cases, they chose to end pregnancies. Most important, they lived in autonomous households often at the encouragement of a slaveholder who expected that a married slave with a happy domestic life would be a content worker. By the 1750s, this experience was normative in Maryland. By 1775 nearly as many African Americans as whites lived in two-parent households, and even those enslaved men and

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Hirelings

women who were separated across quarters or plantations expected slaveholders to accommodate their familial arrangements by allowing visitation with spouses, children, or elders.29 Young African Americans who came of age in the 1760s and 1770s could expect to marry, raise children, and enjoy a domestic life. Slaveholders who did not meet these expectations could anticipate recurring episodes of running away. Only in the nineteenth century and in response to the threat that the domestic slave trade posed to the standard nuclear African American family did a broader definition of family emerge. The more inclusive family structure was largely a defensive measure. It was a supplementary structure meant to support the nuclear family, not replace it, and some African Americans never accepted the more inclusive definition of family. Frederick Douglass, for example, refuted the notion that a nuclear family, once broken, could be either mended or reconstituted with supplemental kin. Like countless other enslaved children, Douglass was separated from his mother as an infant, and notwithstanding his mother’s best efforts to build a relationship with him, he never bonded with her. He loved his grandparents as if they were his birth parents, and it was in their home that he learned “the notions of family, and the reciprocal duties and benefits of the relation.” He did not believe that children placed in the care of “strangers, who have no care for them apart from the wishes of their masters,” really experienced a family life or learned the value of family.30 When the slaveholder separated Douglass from his grandparents, he was inconsolable. He did not accept any other African American woman as a substitute mother (not even his biological mother), and the one woman actually charged with his care, Aunt Katy, certainly did not extend maternal affection to Douglass or any other enslaved children to whom she was not related. African Americans prioritized their commitments to nuclear family, members of the extended family, and those friends who were selectively incorporated into their families. After all, those family members identified by historians as “fictive kin” could only do so much. The young wife who lost her husband to the slave trade, for example, may have welcomed the sisterly comfort that came from a peer wife, but she would not have looked to the broader familial network for a new husband. In the nineteenth century African Americans remained committed to the standard nuclear African American family structure that had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century despite the increased likelihood of separation.

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They still entered marriage with the expectation that it would be a lifetime union, and they expected sexual fidelity and collaboration in child rearing. Widows rarely remarried, and those women widowed by the slave trade mourned the loss of a spouse for years. This commitment to the standard nuclear African American family structure is manifest in the structure of free families in early national Maryland. Freedom had emboldened the manumitted to rebuild their nuclear families as autonomous households. African Americans wanted to ransom their parents, wives, and children from slaveholders, and, just as important, they wanted to move them off of the plantations that were a source of unquantifiable suffering. Census information taken from across the region testifies to free African Americans’ unwillingness to reside on slaveholders’ plantations even to be near their enslaved loved ones. In 1810, 25 percent of Queen Anne’s County slaveholders had both slaves and free African Americans in their households. Ten years later just 10 percent of white households living there included both slaves and free African Americans. By comparison, 31 percent of the free African Americans of Loudon County, Virginia, lived in white households in 1810, but by 1830, only 18 percent did. In Delaware 76 percent of free African Americans lived in all-black households as early as 1820.31 G. W. Offley’s recollection of his own parents’ transition from slavery to freedom illustrates the importance that manumitted African Americans placed on reconstituting their families in autonomous households. While his grandparents had been slaves-for-life, Offley’s parents and his siblings escaped slavery in intervals. The family’s freedom originated with Offley’s father, a man who apparently acquired his freedom in the 1790s. In spite of his status as a freedman, he married an enslaved woman, and their young family grew steadily to include at least four enslaved children. At the death of her owner, Offley’s mother was manumitted, but the testamentary manumission that provided for her immediate and unconditional release from slavery did not extend this gift to any of her children. Instead, her master gifted the three oldest children to serve his heirs for a term of twenty-five years. Worse still, the will did not include any provisions to free the Offleys’ youngest son, thereby condemning him to a lifetime of slavery. In the beginning, the Offleys simply adapted their household arrangements to be near their enslaved children. Offley’s mother stayed on the plantation with her children, while his father took up residence

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elsewhere. G. W. Offley believed that the slaveholders did not want his father in residence, but they did want “to have mother and father to work for them,” and so holding all or even some of the children guaranteed their acquiescence. But Offley’s father lost patience with the separation, and so he offered to buy his children. At first the slaveholders refused, arguing that they “feared the children would suffer” if turned over to their impoverished parents. In time the Offleys successfully purchased their children and moved their large family into a rented house. The 1832 Census of Negroes indicates that most free African Americans shared the Offleys’ ambition to move their free family members into autonomous households. The legislature authorized the census to assist the Maryland State Colonization Society in its plan to export free African Americans to West Africa and the Caribbean.32 County sheriffs recorded the names, sexes, and ages of all free African Americans within their jurisdiction, including those men and women who lived in white households. What is remarkable about the 1832 Census of Negroes is that it provides a glimpse of free African Americans’ family structure in rural Maryland. In the case of Queen Anne’s County, the census takers recorded information in two books: one for men and boys, another for women and girls, a format that hides both residence groups and family groups. In Talbot County, however, the census takers grouped their subjects by household. The census includes the name, sex, and age of 1,890 free African Americans. Remarkably, 85 percent of the people listed in the census lived in free black households that included two or more free African Americans. Altogether, 1,611 free men, women, and children lived in 340 households headed by free African Americans over twenty-one years of age. Free men headed 217 households that together included a total of 1,078 men, women, and children, 57 percent of the county’s 1,832 free black population. Free women headed 36 percent of the households included in the 1832 census, and together those households comprised 533 men, women, and children, 28 percent of the 1832 free black population. In Talbot County the median free African American household included six people, but there were a number of significantly larger households. In fact, 60 percent of the free African Americans who lived in female-headed households shared their homes with six or more people. Certainly the large households of eight, ten, or twelve people included some nuclear families (parents and children), but they also may have included members of the

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extended family, including grandparents, in-laws, and cousins. Some of the largest households, like the Nicols-Howard household, included two nuclear families. In 1832, fifty-year-old Greenbury Nicols headed a household of ten people. His family included his thirty-year-old daughter, Anna Howard; her husband, Perry Howard; and their four children, Harriet (12), Ann (8), Elijah (6), and Frisby Howard (6 months). Because the census taker listed Anna as the oldest female living in the house, Greenbury may have been a widower. He may have also been the single father of three young children: Emily (16), Elizabeth (14), and William Nicols (6).33 Although it is possible that Anna Nicols never left her father’s household, it is equally possible that when she married Perry Howard, she and her new husband established their own home but returned to her father’s house at a later time for personal or economic reasons. One possibility is that she and her family joined Greenbury Nicols after his wife’s death in order to assist him with the care of his youngest children, especially six-year-old William. One outcome of this steady movement of free African American families into autonomous households was a baby boom. In 1800 the overwhelming majority of free African Americans in Maryland had acquired their freedom through the legal process of manumission, but by 1820 natural increase factored more prominently than manumission in maintaining and increasing the free African American population on the Eastern Shore. In 1820, 43 percent of free African Americans in Talbot County and 41 percent of free African Americans in Queen Anne’s County were children under fourteen. In Talbot County these children outnumbered adults between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five by a margin of two to one. In 1830 there were twice as many children under ten as there were young adults between twenty-four and thirty-six in both Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties. When we compare the free African American populations of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Talbot County, and Queen Anne’s County, these young freeborn African Americans of the rural Eastern Shore stand out. In Baltimore the ratio of free black adults to children was nearly equal in 1820. Thirty-four percent of African Americans in Baltimore were children under fourteen, and 27 percent were adults. Ten years later, children under age ten made up 24 percent of the population, and adults between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six made up 23 percent of the population. In Philadelphia free black adults outnumbered children in both 1820

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and 1830. In 1830 the 2,007 free children listed in the city census made up only 20 percent of the free African American population, compared with men and women between twenty-four and thirty-six, who made up 30 percent of it.34 Legal freedom and autonomous households provided the foundations for a secure domestic life. Free African Americans living in autonomous households in largely free African American neighborhoods now had the opportunity to restructure their domestic lives. In particular, free parents could reinvent their relationships with their manumitted and freeborn children. Enslaved parents struggled against exploitive and violent slaveholders to meet the physical and emotional needs of their children. Free parents still struggled to meet their children’s material needs, but freedom had also empowered mothers and fathers, who jealously guarded their parental prerogative. G. W. Offley’s mother confessed that when she struggled to feed her eight children “she often would think of her old master’s kitchen and wish for some of the good victuals she had given to the poor whites and the field slaves,” but she also fiercely defended her parental rights when her former masters charged that her children would suffer in her care.35 If the parental obligations periodically overwhelmed her, Offley also trusted that the collective efforts of her family would sustain them in freedom and autonomy. She could rely on her free husband, who worked for wages, a free mother-in-law, who probably assisted with domestic chores, and several children, whom she likely expected would work in the house or in the fields for wages. Family members worked for the benefit of the familial unit, and according to one anthropologist, this expectation of cooperation among family members was characteristic of African American families on the Eastern Shore well into the early twentieth century. Rural African Americans “cooperated and expected cooperation (assistance, sharing, aid, support, etc.) on various occasions and in a range of activities” from family members within the same home and those family members dispersed throughout the larger community.36 This expectation of cooperation, or what Frederick Douglass called “the reciprocal duties and benefits of relation,” was a distinctive value of free African American families, taught in the home, and modeled in parent-child relationships through the generations. So compelling was the reciprocity principal that it may have determined where free African American families settled in Talbot County.

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Talbot County had distinct free African American neighborhoods by 1832 (see chapter 5). Talbot tax assessment records include the addresses of 259 of the 645 free African Americans (40%) who owned or leased property between 1798 and 1832, and 32 percent of the 259 propertied freedmen owned or leased property in Easton or the villages of Trappe and Holein-the-Wall. Not surprisingly, the smallest number of free black property owners lived in Easton, where property values were nearly twice as high as in other towns. The village of Trappe, ten miles south of Easton, attracted the largest settlement of free African American households. Between 1798 and 1832, at least 13 percent of free black property owners in Talbot County lived in Trappe. Hole-in-the-Wall, adjacent to Trappe, claimed 11 percent of the free black property owners in Talbot.37 Looking closer at where free African American families settled, it is evident that some families not only wanted to live in African American neighborhoods, but they wanted to live in close proximity to their own family: a choice that probably facilitated cooperation and collaboration among family members. Such is the case of the Brooks family, which had lived freely in Talbot County since 1792 when Grace Brooks acquired a lifetime lease for a half-acre lot south of Easton. Grace assumed the lease from Henry Nicols, but Ned Brooks appeared in the 1800 census as the head of their household.38 By 1813 Ned and Grace had disappeared from the tax records, but a new member of the Brooks family, Hannah Brooks, had acquired two acres of “Bozman’s Addition” in Hole-in-the-Wall.39 Hannah’s lot was more than twice as large as the lot that Grace claimed. Perhaps Grace, who held property for more than twelve years in the same area, facilitated Hannah’s acquisition of land, or perhaps it is an extension of the same lot. Either way the settlement of these two women in the same village seems more deliberate than coincidental. After 1813 at least two more women with connections to the Brooks family settled in Hole-in-the-Wall. In 1817 Hannah continued to reside at her two-acre lot, and Amy Brooks, another manumitted slave, acquired one acre with a simple log house and a stable.40 In 1817 Amy was about thirty-five, and she was the mother of at least two children, Lucretia (8) and David (10). It seems that her children’s father did not live with her consistently, as the tax assessments and the 1832 census repeatedly listed Amy Brooks as the head of her household. Perhaps her husband was a slave, a migrant freedman, or a white man, but whatever the case, Amy

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Brooks must have depended on the assistance, sharing, aid, and support of other Brooks women to maintain her household over the next fifteen years.41 Finally, there was Nelly Brooks, a spinster who did not own property but lived with freed woman Lydia Hamilton, who owned four acres in Hole-in-the-Wall.42 Nelly Brooks may have been a tenant at Lydia’s home, or she may have been a family member. Perhaps Lydia Hamilton, wife of Murray Hamilton, was formerly Lydia Brooks, and she and Nelly were sisters. While parents and other adults modeled the reciprocity principle for young African Americans in their communities and in their homes, children likely made their first contributions to the family when they went to work outside the home. On the Eastern Shore, as in other agricultural societies, children were a joy, a responsibility, and an economic resource. As chapter 1 showed, children commonly worked with their parents during the harvest season. But parents did more than bring their children to work: they also sought out separate employment opportunities for their children. In 1817, when he was just nine years old, G. W. Offley was hired out by his father to a Queen Anne’s County employer on a contract for four years. Offley’s work was critical to the family’s dream of maintaining an autonomous household, since his father applied his son’s wages “to pay his house rent.” Offley further remembered that from that first contract until he was twenty-one years old he “never received one dollar of wages,” not because he was not paid, but because his parents collected his wages.43 Both Offley and his white employers accepted that it was his parents’ prerogative to set the terms of his employment. Offley’s experience was commonplace. A survey of labor contracts negotiated between African American parents and white employers and recorded with the Talbot County Court illustrates that African American parents regularly collected their children’s wages. Between 1808 and 1810, and 1822 and 1828, twenty-three African American parents consented to their children’s indenture to a white employer, and in all of these instances parents chose when their children went to work, for whom, and at what price. In one significant instance James Dorsey, father of sixteen-year-old Charles Dorsey, bound his son to Peter Edmondson in 1810 on the condition that Edmondson pay him sixty dollars “in consideration of the faithful services and labour to be done and performed by the said Charles.”44 The

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payment was made to the parents, not to the apprentice, and more significantly Edmondson agreed to pay James Dorsey up front, not as “freedom dues.” Clearly, James Dorsey and Peter Edmondson had determined the market value of five years of labor, and Dorsey, to his credit, demanded that payment in advance. In 1810 the Dorsey-Edmondson contract was unusual in its detail, but by the 1850s, African American parents who recorded these child labor contracts routinely explicated their expectations for payment. The apprenticeship contracts that Charlotte Hemsley negotiated for two of her children were typical. In 1855 she negotiated a contract that required Levi Dukes to make four annual payments that amounted to $150 for seventeen-year-old Charles, her oldest child. For her second child, fifteen-year-old Thomas, Charlotte would receive a total of $195 over the six years of his apprenticeship.45 Parents may have bound their children to labor out of economic necessity, but they also negotiated labor contracts that extended some advantages to their children. In a way, they used contract labor to fulfill their parental obligations to their children. Some parents, for example, used the labor contract to obtain more clothing or an education for their children. In 1809 freedman Ely included a provision in his seven-year-old son Henry’s labor contract that required his son’s employers, Matthew and Elizabeth Greentree, to teach Henry to read and write before his term expired in 1823.46 In at least one case, free parents used a labor contract to document the gradual manumission that they had negotiated on behalf of their children. When Charles and Myrtilla Peck indentured their eleven-year-old son to Thomas Bennet as a house waiter in 1823, Charles affirmed that “it is my earnest wish that my son Charles Peck who at the late Court of Talbot County obtained his freedom from you should remain with you and be bound to serve you until he arrives at the age of twenty one years.” Peck’s statement also revealed his expectations of Bennet as temporary master of his child. He stated that he “had no hesitation in giving the above as he knows you will treat his child well.”47 In all of these cases families that received money or material goods in exchange for their child’s labor inevitably secured a patronage relationship with a white planter. G. W. Offley accepted his responsibilities to his parents and their household, but, as an adolescent, he also looked for opportunities to exercise some independence from his father’s direction. When he was sixteen years old, Offley began accepting contracts for wood chopping. He charged fifty

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cents per cord and even “hired slaves to chop for me nights, when the moon shone bright.”48 According to his memoir, Offley expected that he would be free from this financial obligation to his family when he reached twenty-one, but he also worried about how his parents would react to his claim for independence. Offley remembered that in 1829 his parents could not agree if their son was twenty or twenty-one years old. His memory of the birthday debate makes clear that age mattered because his father would not release him from his obligations to their household before he turned twenty-one. To settle the dispute and speed up his independence Offley visited his manumitted mother’s former masters, who confirmed that he was twenty-one years old in 1829. When he reported his findings to his parents, Offley recalled that his father responded: “Then you are free from me.” Free though he may have been, Offley nevertheless remained in Queen Anne’s County for another year to earn enough money to pay his father the equivalent of “one year’s work to buy him a horse.”49 But soon after, Offley joined the steady stream of young African Americans who each year took to the roads and the waterways and headed for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other parts north and west. Of course G. W. Offley’s freedom from financial obligation came with a price. In leaving his family and eventually the Eastern Shore, he gave up the immediate economic benefits that came from this tradition of familial reciprocity. He could not expect that his parents or siblings would contribute money or labor to help start or support his own autonomous household. Moreover, it could take generations for Offley to recreate these familial networks in a new community. One explanation for why Offley and so many other rural migrants gravitated to African American churches in the cities is that these churches offered their communicants some of the aid and assistance that traditionally came from families. Beginning in the 1780s and 1790s, African American leaders in Philadelphia saw the need for institutions that offered spiritual comfort as well as the material and emotional support that African Americans traditionally received within families. In early national Philadelphia, African Americans could receive food and clothing and other forms of assistance from dozens of different mutual aid associations, including, among others, the Free African Society of Philadelphia (1787), the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas (1793), the African Friendly Society of St. Thomas (1795), and the Daughters for the County Angola Beneficial Association (1808).50 Perhaps even

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more important than material aid, the mutual aid societies offered newcomers to the city the emotional support that they would have expected from family members. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, where slavery and African American mobility had “loosened the traditional bonds of family,” mutual aid societies often functioned like an extended family. The leadership extended parental-like authority over the members, and elder members sometimes acted like parents in their interactions with young people. At least one mutual aid society, the Free African Society, advised and counseled young couples considering marriage. The society devised proceedings for courtship and marriage that included an organizing committee to seek the permission of parents, family, and friends of the couple that intended to marry. Presumably, when family could not be contacted, the committee gave its blessing in their stead.51 What little we know about G. W. Offley’s own ministry among African American Methodists suggests that even in his eagerness to blaze his own trail, he carried his Eastern Shore values of family, autonomy, and reciprocity with him. He spent the bulk of his career assisting free African Americans in their ambition to have autonomous institutions. He settled in Hartford, Connecticut, but beginning in 1847 he played a critical role in the establishment of the AME Zion church in Worcester, Massachusetts. He raised money from within the African American and Native American communities, helped furbish the site, and solicited monetary support from the white elite in Worcester. He also assisted in the organization of the Female Mutual Aid Society in the 1850s. After the emancipation of 1865 he returned to Maryland on a fact-finding mission for the AME Zion to determine the condition of emancipated slaves. And in 1866 he undertook a speaking tour to solicit funds for missionary work in postwar Maryland. When Offley died in 1896, his adopted home of New Bedford, Massachusetts, celebrated not only his high-profile work with the AME Zion, but his less conspicuous efforts to assist African Americans in achieving autonomy. His obituary noted that he “advocated strongly the advisability of colored people having homes for themselves, and through his liberality and help many people in this city were enabled to make homes for themselves.”52

4

Dependency

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Maryland legislature introduced a host of new laws designed to fix the place of free African Americans in the existing social and racial hierarchies. It was a haphazard process that reflected little forethought and stands in stark contrast to the gradual emancipation undertaken in Pennsylvania or the British Caribbean. In 1833, when Parliament emancipated nearly one million Anglo-African slaves within the British Empire, it simultaneously adopted apprenticeship laws that required all former slaves to complete a six-year apprenticeship before acquiring freedom. Parliamentarian George Stanley was among many who insisted that any British scheme for emancipation must guarantee that the newly emancipated slaves would be “orderly and peaceable” in the transition, and that they would fully and positively contribute to the transition’s success. To Stanley the success or failure of the Slavery Abolition Act, the most significant abolitionist legislation in the Age of Revolution, rested on how well the state could balance the slave’s impulse for freedom with the commercial interests of the United Kingdom.

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According to Stanley, a mandatory apprenticeship was the only method for assuring the general public that the newly emancipated would “continue to contribute to the wealth, and strength and commercial prosperity, and maritime power of this great empire.”1 Government-mediated emancipations, like the Slavery Abolition Act, reflected a widely held assumption among lawmakers that the state must rehabilitate slave laborers before thrusting them into the labor market. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic expressed doubt that people who had spent their whole lives in service had the self-discipline to make the “right” choices regarding work, living arrangements, or even family formation. In theory, the six-year apprenticeship afforded planters and government officials an opportunity to socialize former slaves in their new role as hardworking wage-earning, dependent laborers.2 Trinidad slaveholders, among the first in the British Caribbean to replace slave laborers with free workers, argued that to remake their Anglo-African slaves into reliable free workers, the state would need to offer examples of model workers. To that end Trinidad began importing Chinese contract laborers in 1806. Working from the stereotype that Chinese men were disciplined, hardworking, thrifty, and submissive, Trinidadian slaveholders and some British officials expected that these contracted laborers would help stabilize a postemancipation economy while modeling free labor for the AngloAfricans, who were perceived by slaveholders to be incurably lazy and combative. Of course, the plan rested on the premise that Chinese workers in Trinidad would never challenge their status at the bottom of the racial hierarchy or the most exploitive features of the plantation system.3 Maryland never developed a plan of instruction for manumitted slaves. Instead, the state responded piecemeal to social and labor issues as they developed with a series of unrelated criminal and civil laws collectively known as the Black Codes. Like the required apprenticeships built into the abolition acts, Black Codes served to define the legal status of free African Americans while buttressing the racial hierarchy. Black Codes articulated the expectation of the white majority that although they were legally free African Americans were still a subordinate group. More important, Black Codes provided the white majority with a powerful legal tool to enforce this subordination.4 The Maryland government legislated dependence by denying African Americans the right to pursue economic self-sufficiency. As early as 1805

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Maryland prohibited free African Americans from selling (and presumably growing) staple crops (wheat, corn, and tobacco) without a license. In 1831 the government further prohibited free African Americans from selling bacon, beef, pork, oats, and rye without a license from a justice of the peace. Anyone who purchased these products from an unlicensed African American faced prosecution for receiving stolen goods. Additional proposals considered by the General Assembly would have prohibited African Americans from pursuing farming without permission from the county courts. In 1805 the Maryland Senate considered, and then rejected, a bill that forbade freedmen from owning agricultural implements without a license. Two years later the legislature heard a proposal that would have required the white neighbors of free black tenants and farmers to attest to the size of their property and crop yield. County courts would have issued licenses that authorized African Americans to sell only a specified amount of corn, wheat, or tobacco, and required all buyers to indicate on the license what they had purchased.5 The Maryland government justified these restrictions as necessary to prevent freedmen from selling stolen goods “as the production of their own labor,” but the licensure requirement likely had far-reaching effects. The fact is that while an impressive number of freedmen pursued nonagricultural trades such as barbering and butchering, and many acquired leases for small plots of land, few took up commercial farming. License requirements may have deterred freedmen from pursuing small farming and ultimately forced them into the pool of agricultural workers that never seemed large enough for plantation owners. Vagrancy laws and apprenticeship laws were another legal tool to extract labor from free African Americans and ensure their subordination to white masters. As early as 1796 county courts could require free African Americans with no visible employment to post bond with the court or leave the state. An 1825 statute allowed county courts to recover a thirty dollar bond from free African Americans who had no “obvious means of employment.” Those who could not provide proof of employment or pay the bond faced expulsion from the state. Seven Maryland counties, including Talbot, compelled free African Americans who did not pay taxes or work for white employers to labor on the local roads.6 Apprenticeship laws directed at free black children also potentially undermined the efforts of free African American families to support their households. County courts

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had had the authority to contract out poor children as apprentices since the colonial era, and as late as 1780 the legislature reiterated the right of the county courts to indenture any poor child. In 1808 the General Assembly passed new legislation that specifically empowered county courts to apprentice free black children. Children of “lazy and worthless free negroes” could be bound to eligible white masters. Ten years later, the legislature revised the apprentice law to encourage the courts to consult with parents before removing a child from his or her home. After 1818 the county courts could indenture only children who were not already at service, learning a trade, or “employed in the service of their parents.” The law also encouraged court officials to summon the parents of a prospective apprentice in order to “consult and gratify the inclination of the parents in choice of master or mistress.”7 Perhaps the most effective legal tool for enforcing subservience was the racialized criminal code that developed gradually between 1801 and 1837. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Maryland, among many other states, adopted a new penal code that stressed the moral rehabilitation of convicts.8 In the colonial era, the court system punished offenders with branding, maiming, pillorying, and mandating short stints in the local jail, but they relied principally on the whip. Convicted thieves, for example, could expect up to forty lashes at the county whipping post. Judges indiscriminately sentenced men and women, blacks and whites, to corporal punishment. After 1789 the Maryland legislature gave courts the option of administering lashes or sentencing a convicted offender to hard labor on Baltimore City roads.9 In 1809 the legislature significantly revised the criminal code and introduced sentencing guidelines for the new state penitentiary. Initially, Maryland did not establish separate guidelines for free African Americans, and so county courts sentenced both white and free black offenders to the penitentiary. More important, it developed one set of guidelines for slaves and another for free African Americans. For example, the 1809 code exempted free African Americans from corporal punishment. Hereafter, only slaves could be sentenced to the whipping post and courts could administer “any number of lashes, not exceeding one hundred.” Even more threatening, the 1809 criminal code empowered county courts to sell out of state any slave convicted of any crime.10 But in 1817 the legislature revised the penal code again to discourage county courts from sentencing free African Americans to the penitentiary.

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The new law permitted local authorities to punish free African Americans with fines or public whippings. Courts were authorized to send free African Americans to the penitentiary only when the criminal offense carried a penitentiary sentence of at least one year.11 In 1825 the legislature barred all free African Americans from the penitentiary but then reversed itself a year later. Also, as of 1826, the directors of the penitentiary could force African American inmates to labor in the construction of a new penitentiary. Convicts would receive up to thirty dollars for their labor at the time of their discharge from the penitentiary. Finally, the 1826 law required that free African American convicts leave the state when they were released. Any convict found within the state sixty days after his release from the penitentiary was eligible to be sold as a slave for a term of years. After 1835 the courts had the authority to sell as a term slave out of state any free African American twice convicted of crime that carried a penitentiary sentence.12 In Delaware the criminal code underwent similar changes, but by the 1840s both states had settled on a penal code that favored prison terms for white offenders, with lashes and forced labor for free black offenders.13 African Americans were also subject to laws that expressly restricted their rights to speech, assembly, and mobility. In 1806 the General Assembly passed legislation that denied them the right to own a gun or a dog without a license or to participate in “tumultuous” meetings with slaves.14 Even more important, the legislature facilitated the prosecution and conviction of free black defendants by allowing slave testimony against them. In 1801 the legislature extended to slaves the right (or responsibility) to testify against free African Americans charged specifically with theft or with receiving stolen goods from a slave. In 1808 the General Assembly permitted slaves to testify against free African Americans in all criminal and civil cases.15 Neither free African Americans nor slaves could testify against whites. Every addition to the existing criminal code increased the likelihood of an arrest, and changes in judicial procedure, in particular the admission of slave testimony against free African Americans, increased the likelihood of a conviction. Historian James D. Rice has argued for a direct link between the racialized criminal code and rising conviction rates in Frederick County, Maryland. Before 1799 black and white defendants were convicted at nearly equal rates, but between 1800 and 1837, 78 percent of

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black defendants were convicted, as compared with 61 percent of white defendants.16 In sum, Black Codes served to set limits on African American freedom. African Americans were expected to work, but not for themselves. They were expected to make an honest living working for respectable white employers and to avoid the black market in stolen goods. They could make money and live comfortably, but if they made too much money, or lived too comfortably, they would attract the attention of suspicious white neighbors. Those African Americans charged with a crime would have a speedy trial, but not a just one. Convicted offenders would face public humiliation at the whipping post or exile to the penitentiary. The prosecution of Henry Toomey illustrates the precariousness of African American freedom in early national Maryland. Arguably the wealthiest freedman living in Talbot County in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Toomey was twice prosecuted for and convicted of theft. He had purchased his own freedom, and by 1813 he had acquired taxable property worth $290.10.17 He was also an employer and a landlord. In 1815 he hired Demby Fender, another freedman, to drive his carriage and keep his horses, and he leased rooms to other free African Americans.18 By 1826 Toomey owned assets worth $455 and was undeniably the wealthiest free African American in Talbot County. In his lifetime Henry Toomey had been a slave, a freedman, a leaseholder, a taxpayer, a landlord, and an employer. He achieved autonomy for himself and some economic security for his family. He borrowed money against his existing property to purchase more property, and he cultivated profitable relationships with prominent planters. Initially, Toomey encountered little resistance from the black and white neighbors who witnessed his transformation from slave to freeholder, but in 1814 the Talbot County Court convicted him of stealing wooden planks from Nicholas Valliant. He was sentenced to one year in the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore, the maximum penalty for petty larceny.19 In the minds of most white Marylanders, theft was a uniquely black crime.20 The problem of thieving slaves had convinced Eastern Shore planters, and white people more generally, that while some white people stole, all African Americans were predisposed to thievery. In 1797 the vestry of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Talbot County publicly declared its opposition to manumission on the grounds that a free African American

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“had a greater chance of becoming disobedient & a thief than he has of becoming a Christian.”21 Some white planters may have believed that free African Americans stole because they were poor, and others because they were lazy, but by the early nineteenth century, most white Marylanders would believe that free African Americans stole because they were black. In fact, the commonly held assumption among whites that African Americans stole compulsively was a predicate of the Black Codes. All the criminal statutes of the code address some form of theft. Planters vigorously prosecuted free African Americans accused of theft, and, not surprisingly, convictions came readily. In Talbot County, whites accused sixty-eight free African Americans with theft or receiving stolen goods between 1785 and 1831. Of the forty-eight men and women who stood trial, thirty-one were convicted (65%) for stealing, among other things, corn, wheat, sheep, hens, bacon, clothing, and money. Only seventeen defendants were acquitted (35%). The sentences handed down by the court varied widely depending on the value of the goods and the year in which the crime was committed. For example, in 1792, Caesar, a freedman, was sentenced to five minutes in the pillory, fifteen lashes at the whipping post, and a fourfold payment of restitution to Howell Powell for stealing a bushel of corn. In 1811 Ben Tender, also a freedman, was sentenced to four years of hard labor on the Baltimore public roads after the Talbot County Court convicted him of stealing half a barrel of corn valued at $2.50. Ten defendants were convicted expressly of felony theft and sentenced to the penitentiary. The inability of free African American defendants to adequately defend themselves against a charge of felony theft guaranteed that they would make up a disproportionate number of penitentiary prisoners. By 1834 one-third of all new inmates admitted to the penitentiary were free African Americans; in 1839 fully half of all new prisoners were African American. By comparison, in 1805, only 20 percent of the inmates in the Virginia State Penitentiary were African American; in 1832, 28 percent were African American.22 White and black offenders could be sentenced to the penitentiary in Baltimore for felony theft, manslaughter, rape, and receiving stolen goods, among other crimes. However, by 1820 most white defendants charged with felonies or capital crimes avoided the penitentiary or the death sentence by employing a defense counsel.23 Attorneys benefited their clients by carefully weeding out potentially unfavorable jurors and by emphasizing the good character of their clients.24 Character mattered because criminal

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trials inevitably considered the character and reputation of the defendant in the community. Lack of legal representation certainly increased the likelihood that a defendant charged with a felony would be sentenced to the penitentiary. In Talbot County only three of the free black defendants charged with theft and receiving stolen goods appeared before the court with legal counsel, and only one of those defendants was acquitted. Anyone convicted of a capital crime or felony had the right to petition for executive clemency. So Henry Toomey filed a pardon petition with Governor Levin Winder. In 1815, twenty-six convicts from across Maryland applied for pardons. Toomey was one of only two free African Americans to petition the governor that year. His pardon petition was filed by his brother, Anthony Toomey, but supported with testimony from several free African American and white residents, including his former master, Tristram Thomas. Demby Fender, Toomey’s employee, and Kit Davis, another freedman, both claimed in the petition that Sam Harris, a slave who hired out his labor in Easton, had confessed that he stole the planks and put them in Toomey’s barn. Charles Goldsborough and Tristram Thomas, who had each owned Toomey and continued to have professional relationships with him as a freedman, testified to Toomey’s good character. Goldsborough testified that “he always found [Toomey] true, faithful, and honest . . . both as a slave and freeman” and that “his general character is remarkably good.”25 From the governor’s perspective, Goldsborough’s positive testimony of Toomey’s “remarkably good” character was more valuable than the testimonies emphasizing his innocence. Judges, juries, and now the governor put great emphasis on the character question when determining sentencing. As more white Marylanders concluded that all free African Americans were “lazy and worthless” and predisposed to criminal activity, Toomey’s character was a critical factor for the governor in determining whether he should be allowed to return to Talbot County. In 1815 the governor pardoned Henry Toomey, and he returned home to Talbot County. Surprisingly, Toomey’s conviction neither tempered his ambition nor prohibited him from achieving further economic success. He remained in Talbot County, where he continued to add more valuable property to his estate over the next decade. Nevertheless, his high profile put him at risk and made him vulnerable to charges from those who envied or resented his success. In 1826 Toomey was again charged with receiving stolen goods and convicted on the testimony of a slave. Jerry Price, the slave

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who testified that Toomey stole cloth from an Easton store, knew Toomey as his wife’s landlord. Toomey was convicted on that testimony, but Jerry Price eventually confessed that he had stolen the cloth himself. Price also directed the constable to other stolen goods. Nevertheless, the court sentenced Toomey to six years in the penitentiary, the maximum penalty for receiving stolen goods. Toomey’s only stroke of luck was that he was charged and convicted in 1826 for a crime that in 1825 could have resulted in his reenslavement. In 1826 the legislature voided a year-old law that permitted county courts to sell convicted free African Americans as term slaves.26 Once again Henry Toomey’s allies and friends, black and white, sought a pardon for him, but this time the governor, Joseph Kent, refused their petitions. Toomey’s attorney urged his release on the strength of his character and because “his property requires his attention.”27 He urged the governor to focus on the accuser’s weak evidence. He also reminded him that “some men are so prejudiced against people of colour so that they are ready to lay hold of the slightest evidence against them and convict when [they] ought not to be convicted.” Fifteen people, including some prominent planters, signed Toomey’s pardon petition, but it was to no avail. The governor upheld the conviction, and, beginning in 1826, fifty-two-year-old Henry Toomey began his six-year prison sentence. Toomey never returned to Talbot County, which suggests that he either died in prison or was banished from the state. The 1826 statute that ended the brief practice of selling free black convicts as term slaves also permitted courts to expel convicts from the state after they completed their prison sentences.28 Every free African American who witnessed the rise and fall of Henry Toomey understood the lesson to be learned. It did not matter if freedmen achieved economic independence through legitimate or illegitimate trade. Any freedman who exercised too much economic independence posed a threat to white authority. In acquiring property, hiring other free African Americans, and even in keeping a carriage and a team of horses, Toomey behaved like a free man, who identified with white property holders and employers, rather than a freedman, who worked for white property holders and employers. It did not matter that some white planters, including Tristram Thomas and Charles Goldsborough, considered Toomey a model former slave, as long as other whites disapproved of his behavior. When Nicholas Valliant brought his case against Toomey to the Talbot County Court, he enjoyed a decisive legal advantage over the free black

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defendant. In both his 1815 and 1826 trials Toomey was convicted on the testimony of slaves. Had Toomey been a white man, the constable never would have brought the case before the court due to a lack of evidence because neither enslaved nor free African Americans could testify against a white defendant. Even Toomey’s wealth was a liability. His assets and connections with planter elites allowed him to hire a defense counsel, but because all white people presumed that black wealth was ill-gotten, his wealth made him conspicuous and vulnerable to charges of thievery. John Dorrell, another Easton-based African American entrepreneur, experienced for himself the perils of a high profile. In 1810 John Crouch, a laborer, charged Dorrell with stealing a heifer valued at fifteen dollars. If convicted, Dorrell would have served one to fifteen years in the penitentiary. Like Toomey he was sufficiently fearful of the charge to hire an attorney, Anthony Thomas Bullet, to defend him.29 Dorrell was acquitted, but the incident undoubtedly reminded him of how quickly a freedman’s good fortune could change. In 1813 Dorrell began selling some of his assets, perhaps to deflect white attention from his economic success. He sold horses, livestock, a cart, farm equipment, and a variety of personal possessions, including furniture and a “looking glass,” to Josiah Stangasser for fifty-four dollars. In 1814 he parted with the land that he first purchased ten years earlier, selling the two acres of Abraham’s Lot to Peter Harris for another fifty-four dollars.30 Henry Toomey may have considered running away. Courts regularly dismissed charges (“don’t renew”) against accused African Americans because either the suspect or the necessary witnesses could not be found (“non est”). Escape was a viable option for an anonymous free African American agricultural worker, but Toomey had too high a profile to flee undetected. Besides, he was a property owner, and, like other property owners, he was rooted to his community. Finally, even though Toomey had the resources to pay the prepenitentiary penalty for theft (fourfold restitution) that option was not available to him after 1809, when the Maryland legislature mandated that all larcenists serve time in the penitentiary. A conviction— all but certain, given the slave’s testimony—guaranteed Toomey’s sentence to the penitentiary in Baltimore. Twice Toomey exercised his legal right to apply for an executive pardon, an unusual step for a freedman, although the law permitted black or white convicts to petition. Between 1801 and 1829, only eight of the forty-three

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Talbot County petitioners were free African Americans. Equally important, all of the free black petitioners had been convicted of either theft or receiving stolen goods, whereas only thirteen of the thirty-five white petitioners (37%) had been convicted of theft or receiving stolen goods. Few free African Americans petitioned for clemency, either because they were unaware of the option or because they were unfamiliar with the procedure, so it is not surprising that at least three of the freedmen who submitted pardon requests—Henry Toomey, Jacob Gibson, and Moses Smith— owned taxable property and one—Daniel Cooker—was identified as a shoemaker, and he probably had a large white clientele. As in Toomey’s case, property ownership was both an asset and a liability for each of those men. Owning property may have connected them to elite planters who served as patrons and aided them in this moment of crisis, but it also may have been at the center of their conflicts with white neighbors. Free African Americans knew that the law, the courts, and the officers of the courts served the interests of planters, and most took measures to avoid any encounter with the court. At the same time, county courts played a vital role in rural community life, and even in the life of an emerging African American community. Beyond the administration of justice, the courts maintained land and manumission records, an invaluable service to newly manumitted slaves. Henry Toomey had multiple encounters with the clerks of the Talbot County Court before and after his 1815 conviction. He went to the court in 1811 to record the manumission of Memory and Caroline, both of whom he purchased from Tristram Thomas.31 He purchased several acres of land and recorded each of those deeds in the land records. In 1824 Toomey borrowed seventy-five dollars from James Thomas of Kent County and recorded the terms of the loan with the court clerk.32 Not only did the court keep public records, it also administered public relief, a service of potentially vital importance to free African Americans. White residents regularly applied to the courts for debt relief, but in 1795 Isaac Wynn, a freedman, also applied. Like other debtors, Wynn remained in the county jail until he petitioned the court for relief and then surrendered all of his property to his creditors.33 The court also administered the poorhouse, although the administrators only reluctantly accepted freedmen. In 1800, thirty-two residents lived at the poorhouse, and all but three

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of the residents were white.34 Before 1815 the court strictly prohibited free people of color from residing at the poorhouse, but free people of color continued to petition the trustees with requests for relief. For example, Abraham Adams, a freedman, appealed to the poorhouse to accept his “entirely deranged” wife, Fanny, in 1811. The trustees rejected his request because, they said, “the houses are not sufficient to accommodate coloured people,” but they gave Abraham an allowance of sixteen dollars a year for his wife’s support.35 Two years later, Thomas Roden, a freedman, appeared before the poorhouse trustees with a petition from “sundry citizens in the neighborhood of the Trappe [and] an opinion from the Judges of the County Court stating his affliction and requesting to be received into the poorhouse.” Although the trustees refused him admittance on the grounds “that the situation of the poorhouse at present will not admit of coloured persons,” they agreed to pay him sixteen dollars annually as an “out pension.” In 1814 the trustees raised Roden’s pension to twenty dollars, and they finally admitted him in 1815.36 County courts also prosecuted kidnappers who abducted and sold free African Americans in the expanding domestic slave trade. Legislation passed in 1796, 1799, 1810, 1817, and 1824 empowered the county courts to punish kidnappers who attempted to sell free African Americans as slaves or sell term slaves as slaves-for-life. A convicted slave trader could be fined, sentenced to hard labor, or imprisoned. County courts on the Upper Eastern Shore prosecuted several people for “kidnapping, arresting and carrying away free Negroes,” but they had little success. In 1789 the General Court of the Eastern Shore indicted John Cockran of Talbot for “attempting to send out of this state and sell a free Negro male child named Greenberry.” Three years later he was again charged with “attempting to send a free Negro out of this state and sell with her child.”37 In 1817 the Queen Anne’s County Court charged John Leaverton with kidnapping two freedmen, but Leaverton fled the county. In 1818 the Talbot County Court convicted Samuel Briley and William Austin of illegally selling term slaves and free children, sentencing each to seven years in the penitentiary. Briley and Austin petitioned for executive clemency, however, and Governor Charles Goldsborough commuted their sentences.38 Illegal slave sales understandably unnerved slaveholders, who worried about the abduction of their own slaves by kidnappers who would sell them in the “illegal and base trades.” To recover a slave who had been

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illegally kidnapped was a herculean task even for men with enormous resources at their disposal. When planter and slaveholder Hugh Matthews discovered that a term slave in his care was wrongly sold “to Carolina Negro dealers” he sought the assistance of the courts to recover him. In a 1793 letter to William Tilghman, a Talbot County planter, attorney, and Maryland State Senator (1791–1793), Matthews expressed his frustration with a court system that was wholly indifferent to the slave’s fate. Matthews claimed that he had filed a petition with the Cecil County Court to recover the term slave but that “one of the gentlemen” of the court “got wind of it and pushed it off ” to the next session. In the meantime, “one of the lads” involved in the kidnapping fled the state.39 Slaveholder James Hutchings also contacted Tilghman in 1794 to help him undo an illegal sale of “a young Negro man named Jem,” who Hutchings suspected “was sold to a Major Alexander Work of North Carolina.” Hutchings assured Tilghman that Jem “would come to me if he knew his being sold was averse to me,” but he also acknowledged that “we must first know to whom the Negro is sold and where he can be found.”40 Although few white Marylanders supported abolition, many publicly supported efforts to stop the illicit trade in free African Americans. The Maryland Abolition Society petitioned the General Assembly for more stringent antikidnapping laws in 1790, 1815, and 1816. White Baltimoreans organized the Protection Society of Maryland in 1816 to lobby both the General Assembly and the U.S. Congress for more protective legislation. In 1818 the Niles Weekly Standard celebrated their efforts, noting “the Protection Society of Maryland had lately had the glory to release a number of kidnapped black people, and to restore them to freedom and their families. May heaven prosper their work!”41 Black Baltimoreans supported the Protection Society by taking up monetary collections and by organizing patrols to guard their neighborhoods from kidnappers.42 Back on the Eastern Shore, white Methodists had gained a reputation for their active opposition to the interregional slave trade. John Henry and Joseph Mobberly, the managers of the Jesuit St. Inigoes Manor farm in St. Mary’s County, faced the full force of this opposition when they attempted to sell slaves at a slave market in Queen Anne’s County. In 1815 Brother John had brought the slaves to the Eastern Shore so that they could be shipped to Louisiana by an associate of the Jesuits, whom Mobberly knew as someone who “was in the habit of purchasing

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Blacks for planters in New Orleans.” On his landing on the Eastern Shore, Brother John was arrested “by a Methodist who was both a Preacher and a Magistrate, and the Blacks were immediately lodged in Centreville goal.” He was charged with kidnapping, a crime that, according to Mobberly, “had become pretty common on the Eastern Shore.” Brother John, “knowing that the Methodist fever for protecting Blacks under the influence of the late law [against kidnapping], was very high,” paid a fine, abandoned the slaves in Centreville, and returned to the Western Shore. When Brother John Mobberly returned to the Eastern Shore to recover the slaves, he found himself once again “surrounded by Methodists.”43 Kidnapping and illegal sales of term slaves were problems that moved free African Americans and term slaves into political action. In Talbot County, free African Americans led their own dramatic protest against kidnapping and slaveholders who violated the law by selling term slaves as slaves-for-life. In the spring of 1797, Ned, a Talbot County slave, petitioned the county court for his freedom from John Magahey. The court agreed to hear the petition of Ned, who was “alleged to be the slave of one John Magahey,” and ordered Magahey to post a surety to ensure that he would return to court with Ned. Magahey claimed that he did not have ample money to make the bond but agreed to leave Ned in the custody of the sheriff in the Easton jail as his surety. Within a few days, Easton’s enslaved and free African Americans learned of Ned’s detention, and fear spread that Ned would be sold before receiving his hearing in the county court. Ultimately, eight free African Americans and fourteen term slaves marched on the court at Easton for three nights “with intention to prevent [Ned’s] removal and forcibly, to resist any person or persons who should attempt to remove the same.” According to the court minutes, the rioters appeared with “clubs and other unlawful weapons, and to threaten the lives of such persons as should oppose them.” Finally, on June 20, 1797, the court heard and then denied Ned’s freedom petition and then returned him to John Magahey’s custody.44 It is unlikely that the white witnesses to the riot felt any concern about this momentary union between free African Americans and term slaves. In 1797 slaves-for-life, term slaves, and free African Americans routinely worked, socialized, and worshiped with one another. The intermixing of slaves, term slaves, free African Americans, white apprentices, and other

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working people became the new social norm. If free African American laborers posed any challenge to the slave system, it was indirect. An incident at William Tilghman’s plantation suggests that by their very example, African American laborers emboldened slaves to resist their own work regimes. In 1801 Tilghman’s overseer reported that a slave named Ike shouted at the overseer that he “will not draw me any wood unless I or my wife pay him for it.” In a separate incident a slave named Sam attacked the same overseer, swearing that “he is as good as any white man” and that he and the other slaves would not work “until they see their own time.”45 Such occurrences, even if commonplace, did not shake the confidence of slaveholders. Perhaps slaveholders did not worry too much about their mixed labor force because the fact was that few African American laborers ever aided slaves in escape. In fifty years only a handful of free African Americans were ever charged in local courts with aiding an escaped slave. In 1791 the Queen Anne’s County Court charged, but failed to convict, Andrew Reburk for “attempting to seduce Negro slaves to run away with him from their masters.”46 Eight years later, Joshua Shaw was charged with “carrying away a Negro woman now the property of Isaac Jump and for selling spirituous liquors without license.”47 In 1828 the court in Talbot County sentenced Joseph Dixon, alias John Wafers, to five years in the Baltimore penitentiary for “enticing Negro Joshua the slave of William Lowe to run away.”48 The most scandalous escape occurred in 1826 when freedman Phaeton Thomas assisted twelve slaves in their escape from Queen Anne’s County masters.49 Phaeton Thomas’s daring efforts were romantic and noble, but hardly commonplace. The truth is that most free African Americans had too much to lose to participate in this type of criminal endeavor. Slaves, however, had nothing to lose, and so decades before Harriet Tubman began her work as conductor on the Underground Railroad, a slave named Caesar initiated a bold rescue plan that preoccupied Queen Anne’s County planters for many months. In 1794 Caesar broke into the home of Isaac Spencer and stole $115 and then managed to avoid local authorities for more than a year. In 1795 he returned to Queen Anne’s and “carried away one Negro man, one Negro woman, and two Negro children.” He returned once again, “concealed himself in the neighborhood of Centreville,” and then stole away “14 Negro men and women and 11 horses.” A group of white citizens pursued Caesar to Delaware where they captured all of the horses

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and four slaves. Ten slaves, however, remained at large, and, according to the slaveholders, were probably hiding in Salem, New Jersey.50 Slaveholders who employed African American laborers did not worry excessively about free African Americans aiding and abetting runaways. If they had, then certainly they would have made every effort to keep free African Americans off their grounds. They welcomed African American laborers in their labor force, and they even permitted their life slaves and term slaves to marry free African Americans. Some slaveholders even accommodated these mixed marriages, inviting free family members to live at the plantation, or permitting their slaves to live with their free family members off the plantation. The porous barriers between working people may have contributed to more social relations across the color line. In its first Black Code (1796) the Maryland legislature decriminalized mulatto bastardy, revoking the colonial era statutes that punished white women and their mixed-race children with servitude. Decriminalization probably did not encourage interracial relationships, nor did it reduce elite whites’ disapproval of such relationships, but the example of the Ayers-Johns family suggests that it did allow some interracial families to live more openly. In 1822 Margaret Johns, a twenty-eight-year old mulatto, the daughter of Ann Ayers, a white woman, and Hercules Johns, a slave, applied for a freedom certificate before the Talbot County Clerk. A witness testified to the clerk that since infancy Margaret had lived freely in Easton with her white mother, who, “during all the time this deponent knew her, cohabited with a Negro man slave named Hercules who called himself Hercules Johns.”51 The few assault cases brought by free African Americans against their black neighbors were symptomatic of the awkward process of African American community formation in the countryside. The demographic and economic changes documented in earlier chapters of this book thrust hundreds of newly manumitted slaves and their freeborn children into new households, neighborhoods, and work environments, where conflict was perhaps inevitable. Changes in family and household structures brought female authority figures such as wives, mothers, and mothers-inlaw into conflict with one another. Competition for work surely created friction between freedmen. Tensions also increased between those free African American neighbors who leased or owned substantial property and those who barely survived in freedom. Finally, generational conflicts

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between manumitted parents and their freeborn children probably heightened the tension in some households. Even the small community of men and women who worshiped in the new Easton Bethel AME church would not avoid the growing pains. Between 1804 and 1813, twenty-four free African Americans in Talbot County accused other African Americans of assault. Court minutes reveal little about the relationships between the assailants and their victims, but at least one case involved a husband and wife. In 1804 Artridge Dobson, a freed woman, charged her husband, Henry, with “improper treatment” and swore before the Talbot Court that he had threatened her life. The court ordered Henry to appear and respond to the charges, but the court minutes contain no record of Henry’s appearance, suggesting that the couple ultimately settled their dispute outside of court.52 Although domestic disputes rarely went to court, free African American women figured prominently in assault cases as both defendants and accusers. In thirtyseven cases of assault between African Americans, 30 percent of the assailants and half of the victims were free African American women. In twelve of the thirty-seven assault cases (32%), freed women claimed that other freed women had assaulted them. African Americans rarely looked to the courts to settle disputes with either their white or black neighbors. In Queen Anne’s County on the Eastern Shore only forty-seven free African Americans brought suit against white or black neighbors before 1831, and in the majority of these cases, the accusers had been victims of assault. Only the most extreme conflicts between family members, neighbors, and coworkers came before the county courts. Artridge Dobson, for example, probably considered taking legal action against her husband as the last course of action in her dispute with him. In 1804, when Artridge went to court, she was clearly losing her struggle for authority in her household and feared for her safety. As her husband and as a man, Henry was certain of his rights to control Artridge, and he used violence or the threat of violence to assert his mastery over his wife and his household. Perhaps Artridge sought protection from neighbors or family members before she went to the court, but the pressure brought on Henry by his family and friends apparently made little difference as to how he interacted with his wife. The threat of legal action may have been enough to compel Henry to view his relationship with his wife in a new light, as there is no evidence that he was ever convicted of assault.

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Such localized struggles for authority and order represented only one front in a larger social conflict as free African Americans and planters adjusted to the new economic and social realities wrought by the transition from slavery to freedom. In the contest between white employers and free black employees, planters enjoyed a decisive advantage. Armed with a discriminatory legal code, white employers could rely on the county courts to limit the independent actions of free African Americans and to maintain their dependent status. Laws that subjected free African Americans to white employers and generally circumscribed African American freedom had the additional effect of alienating free African Americans from slaves. The legislature sent a powerful message to free African Americans when it allowed county courts to admit the testimony of a slave against a free black defendant. After 1807 slaves were the planters’ allies—or tools—in the larger mission of subjugating and isolating free African Americans. Did slaves have an interest in limiting free African Americans’ advancement? Maybe not, but in Maryland’s system of gradual, compensated manumission, in which all manumissions were individually negotiated, slaves had an incentive to press every advantage available to them. The case of Henry Toomey suggests that some slaves would exploit the vulnerability of free African Americans to protect or advance their own interests. Knowing this, free African Americans had reason to be wary of those slaves not intimately connected to them. The simple fact was that black solidarity across slavery and freedom was too risky for enslaved and free African Americans. Both groups, their very lives dependent on the whims of slaveholders and planters, had reasons to curry the favor of influential whites. Pitting slaves and free African Americans against one another decreased the possibility that the two groups would find a common cause as they had in 1797, when freedmen and term slaves marched together in front of the Talbot County Courthouse. Ironically, the imposed isolation had one potential benefit for free African Americans in Talbot County. Alienation from the larger slave population prompted some wage-earning African Americans to invest directly in the development of free African American communities.

5

Community

In 1817 Robert Goodloe Harper, a former U.S. senator from Maryland, observed that “you can manumit a slave, but you cannot make him a white man.” He offered this judgment as explanation for his support of African colonization. He went on to explain that manumission in Maryland had revealed the true character of the free African American, and it was deficient: “The debasement which was at first compulsory, has now become habitual and voluntary.”1 Free African Americans, he decided, could not be assimilated. Harper expressed his prejudices privately in a letter to a friend, but free African Americans knew what their white neighbors thought of them. African American leaders Richard Allen, David Walker, Daniel Payne, and even G. W. Offley all publicly worried that free African Americans would internalize these white prejudices. In a 1794 address entitled “To those who keep slaves and approve the practice,” the Reverend Richard Allen acknowledged that “the vile habits often acquired in a state of servitude, are not easily thrown.” But Allen also insisted that free African Americans seize every opportunity to define themselves.2

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Map 3. “Talbot County, Maryland” (Baltimore: Hoen & Co., 1878). Map courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

What was the true character of a free African American? What defined, motivated, and inspired him? Allen saw the real character of a free African American as rooted in the Christian values shared by a majority of nineteenth-century African Americans. He urged former slaves and freeborn African Americans to live by simple Christian principles. Be compassionate and forgiving, especially toward your former masters. Be attentive to the needs of African Americans, because as “much depends upon us for the help of our colour—more than many are aware.” Be earnest and hardworking, because “if we are lazy and idle, the enemies of freedom plead it as a cause why we ought not to be free.” Be charitable, “bestowing some part of our substance, or the produce of our labours, towards the relief and support of the poor and needy.”3 Years later, G. W. Offley published his

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memoir, in part, to remind free African Americans that poverty and prejudice did not exempt African Americans from living according to Christian values. He reminded his fellow black Christians that it makes “no difference how poor we are, if we are respectable, honest, and upright, with God, ourselves, and our fellow man.”4 As elsewhere, free African Americans on the Eastern Shore of Maryland grappled with the challenge of self-definition in the face of prejudice. Social relations, work, and material possessions (or the lack thereof ) all contributed to individual and group identity, but, as Reverend Allen suggested, free African Americans also needed to develop their spiritual identities. Allen wanted freedmen to rededicate themselves to Christianity. He believed that only in church would former slaves find a community that celebrated their resilience, affirmed their dignity, and validated their identity as a distinct people with a Christian mission. It was this conviction that inspired Allen to collaborate with other African American Christians from across the Middle Atlantic states to organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816. An AME missionary arrived in Talbot County in 1818, and soon thereafter, the free African American community organized the Easton Bethel AME, the oldest AME church on the Eastern Shore. Within a few years, free African Americans in the neighboring communities of Hole-in-theWall and the newer, poorer community of Ivytown also organized AME worship communities. On the Eastern Shore, as elsewhere, the AME was a spiritual home, but it also served to raise free African Americans’ consciousness about their connections to other freed people across the Middle Atlantic region. For free African Americans on the Eastern Shore the work of building an AME church involved more than constructing a house of worship: it was part of the psychological process by which these former slaves transformed themselves into free African Americans.5 In 1818 the African Methodist Episcopal Church was a young church with a small membership and few assets. It was an urban church, with its roots firmly planted in cities in the Middle Atlantic states. Its leaders could easily have justified concentrating their attention and resources on growing their membership within the African American communities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Washington, D.C. However, Richard Allen, now a bishop, was head of the national church, and Rev. Daniel Coker was leader of the Baltimore congregation, and they may have

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had a special interest in developing missions to rural African Americans. The two men shared a rural heritage: Allen was from rural Delaware, and Coker was from western Maryland. Allen began his ministry traveling on a Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) circuit through Delaware and southern New Jersey before accepting a ministry in Philadelphia in 1784.6 In 1818 Allen and Coker were settled in Philadelphia and Baltimore respectively, but each continued to minister to rural immigrants who came to their congregations in search of spiritual, and perhaps material, support. Inestimable numbers of enslaved and free African Americans of diverse faiths had come to the AME Church from all over the Middle Atlantic region, and Allen and Coker undoubtedly knew that some of their congregants had taken enormous risks for the opportunity to worship in their respective churches. In 1797, three years after Allen opened the Methodist Episcopal Bethel church, Charles Goldsborough, a Talbot County slaveholder, complained to William Tilghman that his slave Bob had escaped to Philadelphia, but that he could be easily tracked if Tilghman could direct the catchers to Richard Allen’s church. According to Goldsborough, Bob was “a strict Methodist, brother to [another slave named] Joe, whom you remember and preaches every Sunday at Richard Allen’s meeting House in 6th St. This I understand is a meeting house for the blacks and well known in Philadelphia. By waiting on Sunday near this house he may easily be arrested.”7 Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, and the other founders of the AME Church accepted the challenge of evangelizing in the countryside, and they were quickly rewarded with new AME worship communities in southern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and, indeed, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The Eastern Shore should have been especially fertile ground for an AME mission. After all, the Delmarva Peninsula was a stronghold of the MEC in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and both Allen and Coker, as former MEC preachers, would have known how to communicate the mission of the AME to African American Methodists. Methodism, however, was not the only influential theology on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Catholics and Quakers also contributed something to the religious education of African Americans. Jesuits had built plantations on the Eastern Shore in the eighteenth century, and the Catholic Church enjoyed some measure of success in converting Maryland slaves.8

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One author has estimated that as many as 20 percent of Maryland Catholics were African Americans. Thomas W. Henry, a former slave who was ordained a minister in the AME Church in 1835, was educated in Catholic and Methodist theologies before joining the AME Church. In his autobiography he remembered: “I was raised in the Catholic faith, and followed that denomination until I was nineteen years old, and was catechized as well as could be reasonably expected from an uneducated boy.”9 One explanation for the Jesuits’ success was their willingness to teach slaves the catechism and to extend the sacraments of marriage and baptism to them.10 Jesuits offered slaves some education and an opportunity to participate as spiritual equals in the worship service. Even in the 1830s some Maryland Jesuits remained committed to a spiritual education for enslaved Catholics. In 1830 Father Aloysius Mudd, superior of the Jesuit White Marsh plantation in Prince George’s County, wanted to establish a novitiate at the plantation with the expectation that the novices could work among “our numerous black family.” Mudd explained that the novices could evangelize among slaves, who were more than adequate “substitutes for the poor, whom according to the practice of the society [of Jesus] should visit in prisons and hospitals.”11 In the eighteenth century the Quakers offered slaves religious education and spiritual equality, but they also went significantly further than the Jesuits by advocating the abolition of slavery. Pennsylvania Quakers declared themselves advocates of abolition in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and Maryland Quakers slowly followed their lead. In 1760 the Quaker general meeting at Third Haven in Easton, Talbot County, declared that “Friends should not in any [way] encourage the importation of Negroes, by buying or selling them, or other slaves.” Six years later, two Quakers, John Woolman and John Sleeper, embarked on a walking tour across the Delmarva Peninsula through Talbot County and into Delaware, denouncing the evils of slavery along the way. By 1785 Caroline County, neighbor to both Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties, became a stronghold for a fervent antislavery Quaker sect known as the Nicholites.12 The campaign to end slavery among Quakers was successful on the Eastern Shore. All Talbot County Quakers manumitted their slaves by 1790, and many continued to participate in Eastern Shore antislavery societies. One particularly ambitious Quaker antislavery activist organized a school for free African Americans in 1804.13 It is unclear how many manumitted slaves

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found a spiritual home in the Third Haven meeting house, but it seems that free African Americans recognized the Quakers as friends of black freedom. In 1783 seven of thirteen African Americans listed in a tax assessment lived within the neighborhood of the Third Haven meeting house in Easton.14 In the 1780s the Methodist Episcopal Church also took up the antislavery cause, and in short time it became the favored church of Eastern Shore African Americans. The popularity of Methodism15 among African Americans stemmed partly from the Methodists’ early formal denunciation of slavery. Incorporated in 1785, the MEC immediately denounced slavery as “contrary to the Golden Law of God . . . and the unalienable Rights of Mankind, as well as every Principle of the Revolution.”16 Early church leaders followed up their condemnation of slavery with reaffirmation of their ministry among the enslaved. At their annual conference in 1787 the leadership of the MEC confronted the question of “What directions shall we give for the promotion of the spiritual welfare of the Negroes?” The participants resolved that ministers and preachers were required “to leave nothing undone for the spiritual benefit and salvation of the Negroes.” Itinerants were urged “to embrace every opportunity of inquiring into the states of their souls, and to unite in society those who appear to have a real desire of fleeing from the wrath to come, to meet such in class, and to exercise the whole Methodist discipline among them.”17 Three years later, in 1800, the participants in the annual conference pledged to set up Sunday schools “for the instruction of poor children (whites and blacks) to read.”18 Methodist itinerants practiced what they preached. Among the most famous itinerant preachers to pass through the Upper Eastern Shore were Freeborn Garrettson and Joseph Everett, two former slaveholders who had manumitted their own slaves when they converted to Methodism. In the 1780s Garrettson and Everett typically met with individual slaveholders to discuss abolition and spiritual redemption, and they also used the occasion to minister to the slaves within the household. Francis Asbury, the first bishop of the MEC, considered Garrettson and Everett genuine Methodist heroes. Asbury, who admired the Quakers for their opposition to slavery, proudly noted in his journals any news of successful antislavery activism among his brethren. In November 1788, Asbury celebrated the itinerant preacher Everett, who, “with no less zeal and boldness [then a Quaker], cries aloud for liberty-emancipation.”19

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On the Eastern Shore, as in other slaveholding societies, Methodist classes, chapel events, and even revivals were segregated. Black and white Methodists only worshipped together on special occasions, such as the “love feast” at Queen Anne’s County that was attended by Bishop Asbury in May 1801. He noted in his journal that “we had a love feast for the whites and blacks: there might have been fifteen hundred people.”20 Segregation notwithstanding, Methodists believed that God could call on any man to preach, black or white, rich or poor. Francis Asbury and other Methodist leaders welcomed African Americans as preachers and deacons. Richard Allen and Daniel Coker were just two among countless other anonymous black preachers traveling around the Middle Atlantic region at that time. Bishop Asbury and other Methodist ministers noticed the black itinerants’ work, and so did local whites. In August 1822, Robert Goldsborough, the Talbot County slaveholder who hired dozens of free African Americans to work at his plantation, made a twenty-five cent “donation at the Negro camp meeting,” presumably a Methodist gathering.21 Another reference to a “Camp Meeting of the coloured people” near Easton also appears in court testimony taken in 1826.22 Quakers and Methodists who preached emancipation and spiritual equality among the races did so in the face of active opposition from Jesuits and Episcopalians. Jesuit Brother Joseph Mobberly insisted that the activism of the Methodists and Quakers had made slaves ungovernable. He found that slaves who had converted to Methodism believed that all slaveholders were ineligible for salvation and, hence, unqualified to govern Christian slaves.23 In 1797 the vestry members of St. Peter’s Parish, an Episcopal church in Talbot County, expressed similar concerns. Slaveholding Episcopalians argued that the Methodist practice of gradual emancipation was “laying a foundation for discontent & disturbances.”24 The Episcopalians believed that term slaves, in particular, were ineffective slaves because they knew that freedom was forthcoming. The Episcopalians further complained that Quakers and Methodists who manumitted their slaves were not as altruistic as they seemed. They charged that Quakers and Methodists only manumitted their slaves for economic advantage, not out of a keen sense of Christian duty. They cited the example of the Quaker James Berry, who had been dismissed from and then later reinstated into the Society of Friends, as an example of someone who used manumission for economic gain. According to the vestry, Berry

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had paid off a debt to his sister-in-law by selling some of his slaves to her. When the sale was complete, he then persuaded his sister-in-law that her Christian duty required her to manumit the same slaves. He convinced her to contract the newly manumitted slaves to him, thereby obtaining “their labor at cheaper rate than when he held them as slaves.”25 Of course, if the vestry’s description of events was accurate, then Berry’s actions, while morally questionable, reflected his business savvy. Manumission for personal economic gain, as practiced by Berry in the 1760s, would be the driving force behind the manumissions of hundreds of slaves in the 1780s and 1790s by slaveholders of all denominations. The Episcopalians and Jesuits levied their charges against the Methodists just as the MEC began a steady retreat from its antislavery heritage.26 While many Methodists welcomed enslaved and free African Americans as congregants, preachers, and deacons, even Bishop Asbury refused to sponsor a black ministry. It was a decision that would fracture the Methodist Episcopal Church. African American deacons and lay preachers could not administer the sacraments, and so seemingly autonomous African American congregations still relied on white ministers to officiate at weddings, funerals, and communion.27 Although they led and directed fast-growing congregations of devoted followers, Richard Allen and Daniel Coker remained second-class citizens within the MEC. Allen had led the MEC Bethel Church in Philadelphia under such restrictions for nearly twenty-five years, but on April 9, 1816, he and his fellow preachers from cities across the Middle Atlantic region resolved to quit the MEC and form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.28 Moreover, the MEC antislavery principal did not extend deep into the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where some Methodists manumitted their slaves in the 1780s and 1790s but just as many purchased slaves during the same period. This divide between slaveholding Methodists and antislavery Methodists would also split the Eastern Shore MEC into proslavery and antislavery camps. The 1819 trial of a Talbot County Methodist convicted of selling a term slave out of state showed the indifference of some white Methodists to antislavery principles. In 1811 Alice Austin, a Methodist, had purchased Lydia from Thomas Harwood, another Methodist. Soon after the sale, the Methodist Society of Talbot County brought both Alice and Thomas before a hearing for their participation in this transaction. The Methodists were not concerned about the sale of Lydia but about

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Lydia’s status at the time of the sale. Did Thomas Harwood sell her as a slave-for-life? If he had, then he had violated the antislavery principles of the MEC. If Lydia was a term slave, anticipating manumission, then the sale was in keeping with the antislavery principles.29 Alice Austin and Thomas Harwood responded differently to the charges levied against them. When brought before the Methodist meeting, Harwood said that “it was in his power to Manumitt the Negro and [he] would satisfy the society.” Accordingly, Harwood appeared before the Talbot County Court on September 29, 1812, to manumit Lydia: a full nineteen months after he had sold her to Alice Austin. Alice was less apologetic in her response. She insisted that she had purchased Lydia from Harwood “for life and she would come out of the meeting [i.e., quit the Methodist Society (church)] rather than give the said Negro up.” Moreover, Alice’s husband, William Austin, charged not only that Alice had bought the slave-for-life, but also that Harwood intended to sell Lydia as a slave-for-life. In 1811 Alice Austin had paid $120 for Lydia, who was then just nine years old. According to her husband’s attorney, this was an “enormous price” for a female slave scheduled for manumission in fifteen years. Alice Austin, he urged, would never have paid $120 for an enslaved child unless she knew that she was buying a slave-for-life.30 African American Methodists who participated in and witnessed the growth of the MEC on the Eastern Shore in the 1780s and 1790s must have been disheartened by the declaration of a fellow Methodist that she would leave the MEC altogether rather than surrender her claim to a slave-for-life. In 1819 there may have been some elderly African American Methodists who remembered hearing Freeborn Garrettson, Joseph Everett, or the African American preacher Harry Orien address crowds of white and black Methodists thirty years earlier. Surely, some of the elderly African American living in Talbot in 1819 owed their personal liberty to the early antislavery campaigns of Garrettson and Everett. Some may have attended the celebrated 1801 love feast that so impressed Bishop Asbury. Some of these older African Americans may have achieved their freedom as a result of their conversion experience. In November 1790, Francis Asbury claimed to have met an Eastern Shore slaveholder who liberated “an old Negro woman because she had too much religion for him.”31 It must have been evident to free African Americans that the same church that had liberated them from slavery and fostered their spiritual

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independence was increasingly ambivalent about extending or preserving their freedom. Within two years of the incorporation of the AME Church, and at about the same time that Alice Austin insisted on her rights to Lydia, an AME minister arrived in Easton. He preached from the back of a horse cart to an audience of free African Americans that included Washington Dorrell, son of butcher John Dorrell.32 Evidently, Dorrell was moved by what he heard. The AME itinerant worked with Dorrell and barber Joseph Chain to organize a prayer group, or a class, for converts. For those who participated, the Easton AME class must have been a powerful experience. In class, manumitted and freeborn men and women studied and encouraged one another in their respective journeys toward a spiritual awakening. But discussion of spiritual matters surely led to friendships and discussions of more earthly matters: work, wages, family, and politics. The class fostered among free African Americans an increased awareness that they constituted a unique community, with interests that were distinct from the interests of slaves and slaveholders. Surely, the 1819 controversy over the sale of Lydia confirmed that the interests of African American Methodists were distinct from and, at times, in conflict with the interests of white Methodists. The Bethel Society, as the prayer group was known, quickly matured into the Easton Bethel AME Church, the oldest AME church on the Eastern Shore. Building an AME church in rural slaveholding Maryland required extraordinary courage and ambition on the part of the founders. Washington Dorrell’s path to leadership in the rural AME church illustrates the history and experience of a first-generation AME preacher and the role played by the AME Church in raising free African Americans’ consciousness about their unique place in a slaveholding society. As leaders of the Bethel Society, Dorrell and Chain faced two challenges in those formative years: to recruit members and to establish a house of worship. Finding new members proved more of a challenge than Dorrell and his brethren may have anticipated. Talbot County had a strong Methodist tradition, and in 1810 nearly 13 percent of African Americans belonged to the MEC.33 Although black membership had declined by 34 percent between 1810 and 1820 (from 916 to 600 members), the decline did not reflect a siphoning of African American Methodists from the MEC to the AME. Four years into its mission, the Bethel Society claimed just twenty-two members.

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It seems that the AME did not appeal to all free African Americans, but to a specific group who shared Richard Allen and Daniel Coker’s call for uplift and autonomy. Enslaved African Americans probably had little choice in where they worshiped, and some slaveholders strictly forbade their slaves to interact with the Bethel Society. Rev. Thomas W. Henry, who served as the minister of the Easton Bethel AME Church in 1859, remembered that a white friend warned him against interacting with slaves. When Henry began his Easton ministry, he asked Dr. Horatio Graves, a white resident, “how [he] might best get along with the people in this part of the States?” He reported, “[Graves told me] to go on with my regular meetings, and, whatever I done, not to make myself familiar with the slaves or go to the people’s houses or quarters.”34 Dorrell’s and Chain’s second objective, to find a suitable house of worship for the Bethel Society, proved considerably easier for these tradesmen. The two had frequent contact with white residents, and a few of their clients supported the Bethel Society in their church-building efforts. According to one account of the history of the church, Joseph Chain bought a carpenter shop from a Quaker and altered it to make it a suitable house of worship. Within a few years, however, his creditors seized the property as payment for outstanding debts. When Chain’s creditors auctioned the property, a court clerk who was “in sympathy with the organization” purchased it and then deeded it back to the Bethel Society.35 Within two years of acquiring the property, the trustees had built “the building called the ‘bethel church’.”36 In 1830 the five trustees of the Bethel Society, Jacob Howard, William Benson, John Dobson, William Dobson, and Pere Dobson, articulated their ambitions for the church in the Talbot County land records. They pledged to “erect or build thereon a house or place of worship for the use of the members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the USA.” They further explained the guidelines that would govern the church. The ministry at Easton Bethel would be appointed “by the general conference of the ministers and preachers of the said African Methodist Episcopal Church or by the annual conference authorized by the said general conference to preach and expound God’s Holy Word therein.” If one of the trustees died, a new trustee would be elected by the adult male members “in order to keep up the five trustees forever.”37

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As in AME churches in Baltimore and Philadelphia, the Easton Bethel AME Church allowed only adult male members to hold leadership positions. The AME Church did not expressly forbid slaves from serving as church leaders, but the Easton church was organized and led by freedmen who likely followed the precedent set by the trustees of Philadelphia Bethel and Baltimore Bethel, where slaves were welcomed as members but not as leaders. Every AME church drew its leadership from the growing populations of what could be called elite free African Americans. In Philadelphia, the black elite were readily distinguished by their wealth, their leadership positions within the black churches and mutual aid societies, and their increased involvement in the abolitionist movement.38 As early as twenty years before Reverend Allen separated his congregation from the MEC, black entrepreneurs and self-employed freedmen already represented half of the trustees.39 This class divide was just as evident in the Baltimore congregation. Between 1825 and 1853, 85 percent of the Baltimore Bethel AME class leaders (twenty-eight of thirty-three) were men identified as skilled or semiskilled laborers; only five class leaders were identified as common laborers.40 Seventeen of the twenty-one founding fathers, trustees, and early preachers of Easton Bethel appear in public records as property owners and heads of households.41 They were not wealthy men, but they were not as poor as some rural African Americans. Nine of the twenty-one leaders appeared as owners of taxable assets before 1832, and the average value of their individual estates was never more than $135. Some men owned real estate, livestock, and tools; some, like Abraham Dobson, owned large quantities of livestock and other taxable property without land; and still others had no assets at all. Even Washington Dorrell claimed only $57 worth of taxable property in 1826, considerably less than the $74 average. Two trustees, Dorrell and Perry Sprouse, resided on lots in Easton “near Bethel Meeting House.” Another, Adam Hercules, who served as a Bethel trustee in 1820, leased a lot at Ivytown, a neighborhood that in 1824 would sponsor another AME class. But as many as eleven of the Easton Bethel founding fathers did not own enough assets to appear in tax records before 1832.42 All but four of the twenty-one church leaders listed in various records between 1818 and 1831 appear as free men in public records. Most of the original leaders of the Bethel Society were older manumitted men. Nace Gibson was typical. Born in 1772, he was manumitted from slavery

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sometime before 1812 and was fifty-five years old when he served as a trustee in 1827. Edward Adams, also a former slave, was forty-eight years old when he served as a trustee in 1827. Washington Dorrell’s youth made him exceptional among the leaders. Although Dorrell spent most of his youth as a term slave, he was a free man, only twenty-seven years old, when he joined the Bethel Society in 1818.43 The leaders of the Easton AME church were also family men. Eleven leaders, including Washington Dorrell, were identified as heads of households. In 1820 his household included himself, an adult woman (presumably his wife), and four children under fourteen. Since at least 1826, the Dorrell family had lived in a small, framed house on an Easton lot that was “near Bethel.”44 His household, along with the households of the other ten leaders, may have contributed as many as sixty-two men, women, and children to the Easton Bethel AME Church each week. Moreover, because the free black population of Talbot County was quite youthful (one-third of the free African Americans were under age ten in 1832), Easton Bethel likely bustled with youthful energy. Among the sixty-two people related to the Bethel leaders, twenty were children under age ten, the sons, daughters, and extended family of the incorporators, trustees, and preachers. Those children matured with a powerful image of free African American men as patriarchs and community leaders. Some of these young boys, the first generation of freeborn African Americans, would inherit their fathers’ property and leadership positions. In the trustees these young men had a distinct “model of black manhood” that stressed leadership as well as Christian piety.45 Certainly, young Josiah Dobson benefited from his intimate knowledge of the Easton Bethel AME Church. In 1831, when his father, John Dobson, served as a trustee, Josiah was an impressionable twelve-year-old. His father would later become a preacher for the church, and by 1851, Josiah would follow his father’s example and serve as a trustee for Easton Bethel AME Church.46 Or perhaps young Josiah was following the example of an uncle: beginning in 1820, four different Dobson men (Abraham, John, William, and Perry) served as trustees and preachers for the Easton Bethel AME Church. The AME Church denied female members formal leadership roles within the organization, but women were undoubtedly active and influential members of this congregation. At Baltimore Bethel AME female members were consistently in the majority between 1825 and 1853.47 At

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Philadelphia Bethel AME female members exercised considerable moral authority over the congregation. They shared with their male coreligionists the expectation that the AME church would exhibit a respectable image to wider Philadelphia. Women also assumed the responsibility of regulating morality within their congregations. Women who suspected fellow churchgoers of immoral or questionable behavior could bring the wrongdoers before a disciplinary committee that had the power to strip them of their membership.48 In policing their sisters, the dutiful women of Philadelphia Bethel played a critical role in defining “acceptable behavior” for all of its members. Establishing and maintaining a standard of acceptable behavior for free African Americans was an important objective of the leaders of the AME churches in Baltimore and Philadelphia. For men like Richard Allen, independence from the MEC was an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how ably African American Methodists could uphold and defend the Christian faith. Prohibited from achieving leadership in the MEC, they needed to go elsewhere to fulfill their personal ambitions and to prove their abilities. Black elites in Philadelphia and Baltimore were “concerned with acceptability to the larger white society,” and black churches, led by the black elite, readily instructed other free African Americans in acceptable behaviors.49 To demonstrate their self-reliance, free African Americans organized dozens of mutual aid organizations, moral improvement societies, and schools for free African Americans in early national Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and elsewhere. In Baltimore free African Americans organized fraternal societies and the Mental and Moral Improvement Society of Bethel. Rev. Daniel Coker, leader of the Sharp Street Church in Baltimore, spearheaded a campaign to educate African American youth in 1809.50 Nearly all of the African American societies organized in early national Baltimore drew their leadership from the most prominent members of the black churches.51 The Easton Bethel AME Church enjoyed steady growth under the leadership of men like Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain. What began as a prayer group for nine men grew into a congregation that included twenty-two members in 1822, and the AME annual conference of that year counted 330 AME members across the Eastern Shore. In 1824 the annual conference recognized a distinct Easton circuit with 543 church members.52 The men and women at Easton Bethel probably deserve some credit for

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this growth. Philadelphia-based ministers were rightly fearful of traveling to slave states, and so the responsibility for building the AME Church on the Eastern Shore would have fallen to local members. Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain probably assisted in organizing new prayer classes in other free African American neighborhoods. By 1824 an AME class existed at Hole-in-the-Wall, a community that, like Easton, had a fair share of free African American property owners.53 In 1817 the African American community at Hole-in-the-Wall included ten property owners, and by 1832, nearly half of the property owners listed in the tax assessment were free African Americans. Hole-in-the-Wall was unique among African American communities in Talbot County because five of the ten property owners listed in the 1817 assessment were African American women. It seems extremely likely that that these women were instrumental in bringing an AME class to this community, and it is interesting to imagine how they influenced the life of the church. Initially, the trustees of Easton Bethel exercised some authority over these new AME classes, but by 1826 the trustees of Easton Bethel were in conflict with at least one of the new classes. The conflict between the trustees and Adam Hercules began when Hercules organized an AME class in neighboring Ivytown without the express permission of the Easton Bethel trustees.54 Hercules, a freedman since at least 1813, had been a trustee of Easton Bethel in 1820, but he had since resettled in Ivytown, where he had purchased a lot. It is unknown why the Easton Bethel trustees did not approve of the Ivytown group, but it is clear that the tension was high between the two. The Easton-Ivytown conflict was severe enough that the respective church leaders requested Bishop Allen’s intervention. Writing from the 1826 annual conference in Baltimore, Allen instructed that the Ivytown class should return “to the Church in Easton, and that no class shall meet at Ivorytown but the class that was formed for the aged and infirm.” He appealed to both congregations to “let all hardness and ill thoughts be done away [so] that your preachers and people will strive to pull together for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.”55 The conflict between the Easton and Ivytown congregations was not an isolated event, or an event peculiar to the rural AME. Bishop Allen contended with a very public defection from the Mother Bethel that, like the Easton-Ivytown split, highlighted the heterogeneity of early free African American communities. The event that prompted the Philadelphia

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defection was the expulsion of parishioner Jonathan Tudas, a freeborn African American who had joined the Bethel community in the 1810s. In 1820 the trustees of the church convicted Tudas of sexual misconduct for fathering an illegitimate child and summarily dismissed him from the church. Tudas protested, and his protest resonated with a handful of other members who disagreed with the verdict. The disaffected congregants left AME Bethel and proceeded to build a new congregation, the Wesley Church, but Jonathan Tudas also publicly challenged the leadership of Richard Allen and the trustees. He published a pamphlet in which he implied that Allen had mishandled the finances of Bethel AME. Bishop Allen denounced the defectors and insisted that church members could not legally secede from Bethel without the consent of the AME hierarchy. Allen claimed the defection was illegitimate and at one point insisted that the Wesley Church was not a separate church at all but another prayer group or class. His haughty directives to the Wesley Church only widened the breach, and Allen never succeeded in recovering his lost parishioners.56 Historian Albert Raboteau has argued that such discord within and between African American congregations was ordinary and even necessary in these formative years.57 Manumitted African Americans wanted fellowship, but not at the expense of hard-won autonomy. Richard Allen struggled to balance these values. He knew experientially why African Americans preferred local control of their prayer groups and congregation. After all, he had led the fight for the independence of African American Methodists from the MEC. At the same time, he longed to merge the AME Church with the other African American Methodist denominations in the region, the Union Church of Africans (Wilmington, Delaware) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York City). Neither of these denominations shared Allen’s dream of a single African Methodist denomination. Union and Zion valued independence and local control more than unity. The African Americans at Ivytown did not want to start their own denomination, but plainly they wanted independence from the Easton Bethel trustees. Although Adam Hercules did not explain why he and the other Ivytown Methodists separated from Easton Bethel, it is possible that money and class factored into their decision. Both the Ivytown and the Easton congregations included African Americans who owned property, but the Ivytown congregation was slightly poorer than the Easton congregation.

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In 1817, when Ivytown first appeared in the assessment records, it claimed only two black property owners and no white residents. It remained an exclusively black neighborhood into the 1830s, and even at that time, Adam Hercules was one of only two African American property owners in the community. Simply put, the free African Americans at Ivytown were not like their coreligionists at Easton. They were not tradesmen but agricultural workers. Ivytown was a distinctive place, and its residents had different needs. Adam Hercules and those who would lead Ivytown AME no doubt wanted to worship in a church that reflected the values of the Ivytown African American community. Bishop Allen handled the Easton-Ivytown split with more tact than the Bethel-Wesley split. He directed the Ivytown congregation to return to Easton Bethel, but he never implied that the defecting congregants were malcontents. Instead, he acknowledged that both parties had legitimate grievances by making reference to the hard feelings and ill thoughts among them. In any case, the Ivytown class dismissed the bishop’s request to return to the Easton church. In time, the class that splintered from Easton became Queen Esther AME Church, the second-oldest AME church in Talbot County. Joining the AME Church brought Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain into a larger community of free African Americans that spread across the eastern seaboard. Chain and Dorrell regularly attended the Baltimore annual conferences, and in 1820 the conference admitted Chain as a preacher “on trial.” Two years later the conference honored him with the title Deacon of the Eastern Shore Circuit.58 As deacon, Chain was second only to Jeremiah Miller, elder in charge of the Eastern Shore Circuit. In 1827 Washington Dorrell also accepted two leadership positions in the AME Church. First, his Easton congregation made him a trustee. At thirty-five, he was among the youngest of the trustees in the AME organization. Later, at the AME annual conference in Baltimore, his superiors accepted him on trial as a preacher.59 Without local preachers like Dorrell and Chain, the AME Church never would have matured into the first black institution to serve African Americans nationwide. Although the axis of AME power originated in Philadelphia and Baltimore, the men and women who participated in rural prayer classes played central roles in forwarding the AME mission.

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In his 1891 history of the denomination, church historian Rev. Daniel T. Payne conceded that the mother churches lacked both the revenue and the manpower to support the rural Methodist societies organized by the first generation of AME missionaries.60 Contending with chronic shortages of funds and clergy, the early church relied on men like Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain, who went to annual conferences seeking appointments as preachers on trial in rural congregations. Temporary positions often became permanent when the conference failed to appoint regular clergy to rural churches.61 If Philadelphia Bethel AME Church was the heart of the AME Church, men like Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain were the arteries that carried the mission and kept it viable in the countryside. In the decade after his conversion, preacher Washington Dorrell witnessed remarkable changes in the free African American community that his father John Dorrell helped create. His father was among a handful of former slaves who settled in Easton, rented property, established businesses, and built independent households. That generation of freedmen laid the foundations for African American communities in Easton, Trappe, Hole-in-the-Wall, and Ivytown. Washington Dorrell inherited his father’s legacy and made his own contribution to those communities and their development. In forwarding the missionary efforts of the AME Church in the countryside, Dorrell nurtured those clusters of independent black households as they matured into communities. When Dorrell accepted a position as an AME preacher, he became part of a second generation of AME preachers charged with shepherding the classes and small congregations established by the founders of the AME denomination. Preacher Dorrell led the Easton Bethel AME Church until at least 1830, when he may have moved to another church or even joined the traveling preachers in their missionary efforts. He left his family, his friends, and his community a legacy of inestimable value.

6

Recession

In 1826 Isaac Maccary was one of the most economically privileged free African Americans on the Eastern Shore. In 1808, when he was fifty-two years old, he acquired from Mary Rakes a small farm of 26.5 acres. Over the next twenty-four years, he and his wife, Memory, made several improvements to their property. They replaced a dilapidated “Negro hut” with a “tenant house,” and they built a dwelling house that tax assessors valued at fifty dollars in 1832. They also kept cattle and hogs, and steadily increased their livestock over time. In 1826 seventy-year-old Isaac decided to retire, and so he called on his eight children to support him in his old age. His son Samuel prepared a contractual agreement by which he would pay Isaac fifty dollars annually “for the better support and maintenance of his father.” In exchange for this promise of financial support, Isaac conveyed to his son the use of the “premises” occupied by the Maccarys since 1808. Isaac gave his daughter Grace “one acre of the said lot whereon the house she formerly lived in is erected,” and he instructed Samuel that his other children were all to receive “equal proportion of the residue of the said lot.”

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Samuel may have been the oldest Maccary son, but James ultimately assumed the duties of family patriarch. In 1832 Isaac and Memory lived with their son James, his wife, Mary, and their six children, William, Lureina, Milly, Samuel, Mary, and Elizabeth.1 Settled into a comparatively comfortable retirement surrounded by loved ones, Isaac Maccary had time to reflect on his life and his young grandchildren’s future. He was a savvy man who had accomplished much with his freedom, and he no doubt recognized that his grandchildren would not enjoy the same opportunities he had. Isaac and Memory, who had escaped slavery amid an economic boom, had opportunities to own land, livestock, and other forms of taxable property. They had many employment options and access to affordable housing on the Eastern Shore. They earned enough wages to acquire real estate and perhaps purchase (and thereby free) enslaved family members. Isaac’s white neighbors did not stand in his way, and at least one, Mary Rakes, sold him the land that was the foundation for his autonomy and prosperity. But the high tide that had lifted the economic fortunes of the Maccary family in the 1790s had receded somewhat by 1807 and then had abated completely by 1820. An economic recession that began in the 1810s persisted into the 1820s, eliminating countless jobs. In the 1830s waves of Irish and German immigrants heightened competition for what work remained. Wages stagnated, and as a result, free African Americans had less money to buy real property or loved ones from slavery. Those who could afford to buy land or loved ones likely encountered more hostility from white neighbors than Isaac had years earlier. If they did not already know it, Maccary’s grandchildren would soon learn that white attitudes toward free African Americans wavered between ambivalence and outright hostility in the 1830s. The economic troubles began with the decisive victory of the United Kingdom over the French and Spanish navies at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. The defeat of Napoleon empowered the English Parliament to reassert its control over Atlantic trade. After 1805 the Royal Navy actively patrolled Chesapeake Bay and the larger Atlantic seaboard, searching merchant vessels suspected of harboring British deserters or carrying supplies to Napoleon’s forces in Europe.2 The Royal Navy had already impressed hundreds of sailors from American vessels when in June 1807 the HMS

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Leopard seized four sailors from the USS Chesapeake. This particular violation of American neutrality prompted President Thomas Jefferson to pass the Embargo Act of 1807 that closed U.S. ports to exports and restricted imports from Great Britain. The act devastated commercial agriculture. Exports plummeted and the whole American economy faltered. American wheat exports declined by 90 percent between 1806 and 1808, and the total value of goods shipped from Baltimore ports dropped by an estimated 75 percent in two years.3 American merchants tried to temper their losses by increasing trade with the Caribbean and opening new markets in southern Europe. These measures worked in the short term. In 1808, 60 percent of the flour exported from the United States went to the Caribbean, and an additional 30 percent went to the Iberian Peninsula.4 But the decision on the part of the United States to declare war on Great Britain in the summer of 1812 aggravated the economic situation. In January 1813 the Royal Navy blockaded Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River, and then it sent raiding parties that in May 1813 reached as far north as Havre de Grace at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. In August 1814 the British occupied, and then burned, Washington, D.C. The following month the Royal Navy bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor. In December 1814 the Treaty of Ghent was ratified, and the War of 1812 ended. Peace in Europe effectively ended the transatlantic trade that had fueled the decade-long grain boom in the Middle Atlantic states. As European grain production rose after 1815, the price of grain steadily dropped to prewar lows. British farmers enjoyed healthy harvests between 1809 and 1812, and Parliament enacted import tariffs, known as the Corn Laws (1815), to further encourage this agricultural recovery. American farmers saw the link between European peace and the domestic economic recession. In an 1819 letter to an Easton newspaper, one planter bemoaned the fact that in Europe “thousands have exchanged implements of war for those of peace. From consumers they have become producers, and our farm products are not needed. . . . Our income will be reduced.”5 Farmers in the Middle Atlantic states could take comfort in the fact that the trade between Baltimore and the Caribbean remained brisk even after 1815, but Portugal and Spain, like Britain and France, also closed their doors to American grain farmers when European agriculture rebounded.

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Ironically, European markets were closing just as grain production surged in the Middle Atlantic and Chesapeake area. Before the wars, grain production was concentrated in southeastern Pennsylvania and the Delmarva Peninsula, but by the 1810s, grain production had spread to northern Virginia. In the 1780s, hundreds of farmers had migrated to northwestern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania to open grain farms, and by the 1810s these new farms were fully operational. The market for foodstuffs was saturated, and with more ground under cultivation, Eastern Shore planters worried about the impact of lower prices and stiffening competition on their own profit margins. Established planters knew that twenty years of intensive grain agriculture had significantly eroded the soil. They wondered if they could continue to produce either the quantity or the quality of wheat for which they had gained fame.6 In 1818 Edward Lloyd lamented that farmland of the Upper Eastern Shore was “nearly exhausted” and “our agriculture is sinking to its lowest stage of degradation.” In 1821 Frisby Tilghman complained to James Hollyday in Natchez that even the most “industrious and attentive” farmers “can make nothing and that farming on the Eastern Shore is scarcely worth pursuing.”7 Grain planters faced another crisis in 1819, when a nationwide commercial panic prompted banks across the United States to restrict credit and to call in loans. Incapable of paying their debts, many planters and small farmers lost their slaves and their land. John Kennard, who in 1814 wanted to hire a “Negro man who understands the farming business,” applied for debt relief in 1817.8 Eastern Shore planters were discouraged but not hopeless. Planters debated among themselves the question of how best to face the new economic reality.9 Robert Henry Goldsborough and other elite planters joined the Maryland Agricultural Society, an organization that promoted scientific agriculture. Members experimented with new field-management techniques, adopted new crops, diversified their livestock, and rewarded innovation. The Eastern Shore chapter of the Maryland Agricultural Society hosted exhibitions and awarded prizes to farmers for exceptional production or new agricultural inventions. In the 1820s and 1830s new transportation networks also contributed to the revival and diversification of Eastern Shore agriculture. The contest between Baltimore and Philadelphia to dominate the flour-milling industry provided much of the impetus for this new construction. Maryland deliberately invested in turnpikes in

Figure 3. A Plea for Charity, 1817. This newspaper notice illustrates the depth of economic hardship in rural Talbot County after the War of 1812. Noting the growing number of citizens suffering “from the great scarcity of the common necessaries of life,” concerned citizens propose a meeting of all “charitably disposed persons” to discuss strategies for poverty relief. For the Republican Star. To the Humane and Benevolent Citizens of Talbot County. February 4, 1817, Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser. Courtesy of University of Vermont.

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the 1800s, railroads in the 1820s, and steamships in the 1830s, all for the purpose of connecting grain-growing regions to Baltimore. The arrival of the railroad lowered the cost of shipping grain to Baltimore mills (and thereby increased profits for farmers). It also encouraged truck farming. In the 1830s and 1840s, Eastern Shore farmers still planted grains, but they also planted strawberries for urban markets and developed a commercial oyster industry. Resettlement in the Deep South was another option for those Maryland planters who had the resources and the temerity to undertake it. Cotton production boomed during the Napoleonic Wars, and prices continued to rise steadily until the Panic of 1819. Cotton prices collapsed after the panic, and they remained unsteady through the 1820s, but westward migration continued, and cotton production still increased even as prices fluctuated wildly. Some of the most prominent planter-slaveholders moved their plantation operations from the worn-out farms of the Eastern Shore to the virgin lands of the Deep South. Planter Edward Lloyd VI moved two hundred slaves from his Maryland estate to open a new plantation in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1837.10 Fellow planter James Hollyday transported his slaves to a start-up plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, a process that apparently took time and a certain amount of cooperation from the slaves. Soon after Hollyday settled in Natchez, he sent his cousin and a slave named Emanuel back to Maryland to collect the remainder of his slaves. In an 1819 letter to his mother, Hollyday predicted that “his black majesty” Emanuel would receive “a hearty welcome” from the slaves who would “rejoice in the opportunity of getting accurate information of their relatives and connexions here.” At the same time, he worried that Emanuel “had the power to speak many things against the country [Mississippi] and a word from one of their own colour will be very apt to outweigh all the persuasion that can be used by a master.”11 Maryland planters unwilling to make the move to the Deep South could subsidize their lifestyles by selling surplus slaves to the new class of interstate slave traders, scornfully known as “Georgia men.” Slaveholders had been reluctant to sell their slaves in the interstate slave trade as long as Maryland agriculture thrived, but attitudes changed in the 1820s, and slaveholders who were once disdainful of slave traders now eagerly sought their services. Why the change? One reason is that Maryland was rich in labor by the 1820s. The state had a large and diverse labor supply that

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included slaves-for-life, term slaves, free African Americans, child laborers, and, increasingly in the 1830s, Irish and German immigrant laborers. Even more important was a change in attitude toward hired labor. The experience of the past thirty years had taught Maryland employers that in certain industries hired labor was as good as, if not better than, the labor of slaves-for-life. Just as John Beale Bordley had predicted, Marylanders had discovered the benefits of the mixed labor system and embraced it. Slaveholders had never been reluctant to sell their slaves for cash, but now the best prices for slaves came from the cotton-growing regions of the Deep South, not the grain-producing regions of the Middle Atlantic. Beginning in the 1820s, Maryland slaveholders employed professional slave dealers to broker these sales and transport their slaves from the Upper South to the Mississippi Delta. Over the next forty years interstate slave traders would forcibly transport more than one million enslaved African Americans. Frederick Douglass, who lived near Austin Woolfolk’s “grand slave mart” in Baltimore, reported in his narrative that Baltimore-based slave traders routinely sent agents “into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival through the papers, and on flaming handbills, headed ‘cash for negroes’.” Slave dealers also advertised in Eastern Shore newspapers for “A few families of Negroes, For which the highest price in cash will be given.” Even the comparatively small town of Easton in Talbot County sponsored an annual slave auction that was regularly attended by slave dealers and Deep South planters in the 1820s.12 Woolfolk stationed a full-time agent at Easton, and in just one slave-buying season, the agent paid slaveholders more than $22,000 for ninety-three slaves.13 Between 1819 and 1832, Woolfolk shipped 2,288 enslaved African Americans from Baltimore to New Orleans: 38 percent (876) of those men, women, and children had been purchased by Woolfolk’s Eastern Shore agent.14 The economic storm hit Baltimore and Philadelphia early and hard. Restricted trade and finance meant unemployment, underemployment, and a general narrowing of employment opportunities for free African Americans. Commerce and construction had drawn hundreds of free African Americans from the countryside to these cities throughout the 1790s and 1800s. Sailors, dockworkers, and tradesmen, who had enjoyed robust wages throughout the 1790s, experienced a steady decline in income and work after the 1807 embargo. However, it is arguable that African American artisans suffered more than others as they lost work, wages, and social

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status. In the 1800s, and even the 1810s, African American tradesmen were a small but visible component of urban workforces. In Philadelphia in 1816 roughly one in fifteen free black men identified himself as an artisan, including shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, and painters. In Baltimore, nearly 70 percent of the free African American men listed in the 1810 directory identified as skilled laborers. However, by 1820 the economic recession, combined with rising racial prejudice, forced many free African Americans out of their trades and into a fast-growing pool of unskilled day laborers.15 In 1819, 63 percent of the free African American heads of household were listed in the Baltimore directory as unskilled laborers, up from only 28 percent in the 1810 directory. Reduced wages and chronic underemployment forced many urban African American families to seek public assistance. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society reported in 1801 that free African Americans, who in the 1790s had been “universally employed,” now solicited the agency for employment assistance. Others went to the city almshouses where they could obtain free clothing, meals, medical care, and temporary shelter. In 1827, 20 percent of almshouse residents in Baltimore were free African Americans. After the Panic of 1837, they made up 25 percent of the residents.16 The recession also had lasting demographic consequences for urban African American communities. Free African Americans consistently had higher death rates than whites and slaves, but black mortality rates soared in the 1820s and failed to improve in subsequent decades. Most free African Americans lived in overcrowded and insalubrious neighborhoods in Baltimore, and they were disproportionately affected by cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849.17 Of course, unemployment affected all working people, but it seems that it affected black and white laborers differently. In Baltimore, for example, skilled white workers may have been underemployed and underpaid throughout the 1820s, but they continued to practice their respective crafts and were not forced into the pool of unskilled day laborers. In the 1819 Baltimore city directory 80 percent of white household heads identified as either skilled or unskilled tradesmen, compared with just 37 percent of African Americans. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, an 1838 study of black tradesmen prepared by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society concluded that “23 percent of 656 skilled artisans did not practice their skills because of ‘prejudice against them’.”18 The study indicates that, in the context of a

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wartime labor shortage, white and black tradesmen worked alongside one another without incident, but when confronted with rising unemployment, white skin became a precondition for employment. In the 1820s and 1830s, thousands of Irish and German immigrants settled in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and these newcomers allied with native whites to resist working alongside or competing against former slaves for work. Initially, white workers peacefully petitioned for segregated crafts or workspaces. White carters in Baltimore organized themselves and submitted a petition to the Maryland General Assembly in 1828 urging the legislature to prohibit free blacks and slaves from working as draymen on the grounds that they were “more easily influenced by temptations to steal, less influenced by the desire of maintaining an honest reputation, and . . . less fear[ful] of the operations of the law than white people.”19 Employers and the state responded with a laissez-faire defense, insisting on the right of employers to hire whomever they wanted at wages determined by an unregulated labor market. One outcome of this indifference to the economic concerns of white workers was an increase in racial violence. In Baltimore a mob of white Republican artisans attacked Federalist opponents of the War of 1812 in the summer of 1812, and then they turned on wealthy employers and unskilled workers. The mob attacked merchants (suspected of being British sympathizers), grain ships (destined for Britain or British allies), and free African American and Irish laborers. The riot, which lasted two months, opened a Pandora’s box of racial and class antagonism that would not be contained for decades and earned Baltimore the moniker “Mobtown.”20 Years later, in 1838, another white mob attacked the Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest African American Methodist church in Baltimore. In 1841 the editors of an antiabolitionist newspaper anticipated that “one hostile movement on the part of the negroes and their comrades, the abolitionists, would probably do more toward thinning the colored population than ten years’ labor of all the colonization societies put together.”21 Rural African Americans also experienced hardships, as a generation of free African Americans who had prospered for two decades working for wages in the countryside now watched their economic opportunities shrink. Talbot County offers a dramatic example of how they experienced the cycle of boom and bust in the countryside. In 1813 the wealth of rural freedmen rivaled and at times surpassed that of African Americans in

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Baltimore. The free African Americans in Talbot County were among the wealthiest in the state. The county also claimed the largest number of free African American property owners. According to the 1813 assessed persons list, 102 free African Americans, roughly 5 percent of the free black population in the county, owned real property. The population of free African American property owners in Talbot County was larger in both absolute numbers and percentages than that of the City of Baltimore. But, beginning in 1814, economic prospects worsened considerably for free African Americans. Between 1813 and 1826, the number of people who owned taxable property decreased by more than half. Six years later free African Americans in Talbot County were among the poorest in Maryland. After 1832 free black property owners in Baltimore enjoyed six times the wealth of the wealthiest freedmen on the Eastern Shore. Even among Eastern Shore counties there were great disparities in wealth, and African Americans in Talbot County fared poorly when compared with their neighbors in Kent, Caroline, and Queen Anne’s counties. In five Eastern Shore counties the number of black property owners increased, but the number of propertied freedmen in Talbot County stagnated after 1813.22 Such rapid and dramatic economic decline inevitably affected the structure and development of African American neighborhoods. In Philadelphia high unemployment resulted in more racial segregation and a steady decline in the number of free African Americans who owned personal property in the 1830s and 1840s.23 In both Philadelphia and Baltimore free African Americans who had once lived in largely interracial neighborhoods increasingly settled closer to the churches that were the social and intellectual centers of African American communities. Economic recession also had an impact on Eastern Shore communities, although in a different way.24 In the case of Talbot County, small villages like Trappe and Hole-inthe-Wall experienced steady growth in their white and black populations between 1804 and the 1810s. By 1817 the number of free black households in Trappe had increased from six to fourteen; the number of white households increased from thirty-one to thirty-nine. Similarly, in Hole-in-Wall the number of free black households grew from four to twelve, so by 1817 free African Americans represented 39 percent of the property owners. After 1817 the total number of black and white property owners in both communities declined, but not in the same way. Trappe lost mostly black property owners; as a result, by 1832 only 22 percent (ten households) were

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free African Americans. By contrast, Hole-in-the-Wall lost mostly white property owners. Although the number of African American property owners also declined from a high of twelve down to eight between 1817 and 1832, the more significant decline in white ownership resulted in a community in which 47 percent of the property owners were African American. Talbot County was losing white residents, presumably to the cities or to the Deep South, but white out-migration was not a problem confined to a single county on the Eastern Shore. White residents had been leaving the Upper Eastern Shore for decades. By the 1830s those who stayed behind could not help but notice the effect of white flight on the demography of the Eastern Shore. In 1790 the white populations held slim majorities in Talbot (55%) and Queen Anne’s (53%) counties, but over the next twenty years, the white population declined to the point that the ratio of whites to blacks in Queen Anne’s County was one to one in 1810. By 1830 the majority of residents in both counties were African American. Moreover, the shrinking population of slaves and white residents meant that free African Americans constituted a more significant portion of the population on the Eastern Shore with each passing year. In 1790, 1,076 free African Americans resided in Talbot County, compared with 4,777 slaves and 7,231 whites. That is, only 8 percent of the residents were free African Americans, compared to 37 percent slaves and 55 percent whites. By 1830 the free black population had doubled, the slave population had decreased by 13 percent, and the white population had decreased by more than 20 percent. In 1830, 20 percent of Talbot County residents were free African Americans, 34 percent were slaves, and 46 percent were white.25 Queen Anne’s County experienced a similar change. In 1790 only 3 percent of the residents in the county were free African Americans, while 43 percent were slaves and 53 percent were white. Forty years later, 20 percent of the residents in Queen Anne’s County were free African Americans, 34 percent were slaves, and 46 percent were white. By 1860 free African Americans outnumbered slaves, and they constituted 19 percent of the total population of the Eastern Shore.26 African Americans dominated the workforce of the Eastern Shore. They did not compete with Irish or German immigrants for work, wages, or housing, a fact that likely explains the lack of interracial violence in the countryside. Interracial violence happened, but it was not endemic, and it did not worsen in the 1820s and 1830s. In a span of fifty years the courts

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in Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties heard fewer than forty cases of assault and battery involving free African Americans. In a majority of these cases both the assailant and victim were African American. The handful of cases involving interracial violence suggests that disgruntled whites vented violence on African American property owners. Richard Jones, for example, assaulted James Tolson, a freedman, in 1825 when he refused to explain how he acquired a bundle of goods. In 1816 the Talbot County Court sentenced Robin, a freedman, and his daughter Poll to the county jail after they assaulted a white man who attempted to steal their geese.27 Presumably, free African Americans who had white patrons (employers or landlords) could have expected some protection against such harassment, but patronage did not guarantee safety. Judy Parrot, a freed woman, made arrangements with Frances Parrot to live in a “hut” on the plantation of Frances Parrot’s stepson, Benjamin Parrot, but her connections with the Parrot family did not protect her from harassment. Benjamin sold his plantation to Frederick Kemp, and the new owner moved to evict Judy from the hut. Initially, Frances Parrot supported Judy and refused to evict her, “contrary to the wishes of the plantations’ owners.” Judy’s fate was ultimately decided when Frederick Kemp and another youth forcibly evicted her by setting fire to her hut.28 If free African American communities on the Eastern Shore contended with less violence than urban African American communities, they also coped with fewer resources. In Baltimore and Philadelphia the desperately poor could avail themselves of the services provided by almshouses, mutual aid societies, and various charities, but rural African Americans did not have access to these social safety nets. Talbot County had a poorhouse, and the Talbot County Trustees of the Poor did administer pensions to a few impoverished and disabled African Americans, but the trustees would not admit African Americans to the almshouse because it was “not sufficient to accommodate coloured people.” The trustees did not explain how the poorhouse was insufficient, but they were adamant and in at least one case refused a court order to admit a freedman.29 The poorhouse began admitting African Americans by 1815, but the rules for admission were inconsistent. Some African Americans who applied for relief were admitted, others were denied without explanation, and still others, including Richard Johns, were given the option of residing at the poorhouse or accepting a pension ($20 annually). In at least one case, the trustees authorized a

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pension and then demanded institutionalization. In 1813 George Warner, a free man, applied to the trustees of the poorhouse for financial support for an orphaned girl. A tenant farmer who leased fifty acres of land and owned livestock, Warner was a prosperous freedman, and the trustees did not hesitate in accepting his request. But they only offered him an annual pension of $1.50.30 Later, the trustees increased the amount to $2, but by 1815 they stopped payment and ordered Warner to “surrender her to the poorhouse.” When he resisted, the trustees ordered the poorhouse overseer to “go after and bring from George Warner the child of Charlotte Cooper deceased to be taken care of at the poorhouse.”31 Although the trustees did not specify why they wanted Warner to return the girl, one possibility is that it was more advantageous to the county to bind her to a white master than to pay Warner to support her. At best, the poorhouse was an unreliable resource for rural African Americans. At worse, it was a tool for coercing labor from poor children. White and black families that came to the poorhouse in the economic crisis of the 1820s were less likely to get a cash pension and more likely to get a lecture on the benefits of indenturing their able-bodied children to local employers. In Baltimore the almshouse had routinely indentured orphaned children to local employers in the 1800s and 1810s, but the number of children placed with employers surged in the 1820s, an indication of the economic stress on poor families.32 Historically, the Talbot County Court had apprenticed more white children than black. In the 1820s that was still true, but apprenticeship as a labor institution changed in two important ways. First, after 1822 the apprenticeship contracts for white boys were less favorable than they had been in the 1800s and 1810s. In the 1810s, the majority of white boys apprenticed by the Talbot County Court were teenagers who were apprenticed voluntarily to master craftsmen with their parents’ consent and input. By comparison, the Talbot County Court apprenticed seventy-five white boys in the 1820s, and half of these were involuntarily apprenticed. At least one boy was a poorhouse resident, and eleven others were identified as orphans or fatherless (“illegitimate”). Children apprenticed in the 1820s were also younger than those apprenticed earlier. Half were younger than fourteen. Moreover, a greater percentage of white and black children were apprenticed to farmers rather than master craftsmen in the 1820s. Between 1808 and 1810, only 10 percent of the white male apprentices went to farmers, but between 1822 and 1828, 30 percent did. Six

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boys had been apprenticed to house carpenters between 1808 and 1810, but only one boy was apprenticed to a house carpenter after 1822.33 The second significant change in apprentice labor was its racialization. In 1809 the typical apprentice was a sixteen-year-old white teenage male who was bound with the consent of at least one parent to a master craftsmen. Between 1808 and 1810, the court apprenticed sixty-one white children and only nine black boys (and no black girls). Even as late as 1828, apprenticeship remained a path to a skilled profession for white teenage boys. By 1849 the typical apprentice was an eleven-year-old black teenage male who was bound with or without parental consent to a planter to do unspecified agricultural labor or domestic work. African American children had made up 40 percent of the apprenticed labor workforce in the 1820s, already significantly disproportionate to their population. By the 1850s, 74 percent of the apprenticed laborers were African American (sixty-two of eighty-three apprenticed children between 1849 and 1861). In 1856 the Talbot County Court apprenticed six white boys and eleven black boys. The three white boys were identified as orphaned or indigent or as poorhouse residents and apprenticed to farmers. Two of the three white boys who were voluntarily apprenticed by their parents would serve master craftsmen. By comparison, the court apprenticed all of the black boys as farm laborers or housekeepers with or without parental consent.34 Economic tumult took a toll on families, and especially laboring families, but it is also evident that some free African Americans were well positioned to weather the economic storm. In particular, freeborn African Americans, those born to parents manumitted in the 1780s and 1790s, had reached adulthood in the 1810s and 1820s and now stood to inherit their parents’ wealth. To be certain, it was not substantial wealth, but it was enough to distinguish the freeborn from the newly manumitted, who exited slavery without cash or capital. Tax assessments indicate that even in the late 1810s and 1820s freeborn African Americans began their working lives with a substantial material advantage over the newly manumitted. Freeborn people typically appeared in tax assessments for the first time in their twenties, but manumitted property holders typically did not accumulate enough taxable property until they were in their forties. Among the real property holders who appear in the 1817 tax assessment record, the manumitted property holders were, on average, twenty years older than the freeborn property holders.35

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On the Eastern Shore the privileged freeborn included men like William Boston. Born free in 1788, he benefited from the economic foundation laid by an earlier Boston, a manumitted slave born in 1742. The elder Boston never acquired land, but by 1804 he owned livestock and personal possessions worth £31 Maryland currency that made it possible for the younger William to invest in land.36 Similarly, James Bantom Jr., born free in 1794, acquired his own property from elders at the young age of twenty-three, when he appeared as the owner of a lot near Trappe. Martin Bantom, also freeborn, was twenty-eight when he appeared as a property owner in the 1817 tax assessment. He would reappear in the 1822, 1824, 1826, 1830, and 1832 tax assessments. These men probably enjoyed some economic stability because of the labor and sacrifices of older members of the Bantom family, including James Bantom Sr. and Joseph Bantom, who also owned property at some time between 1813 and 1825.37 Finally, Phil Chaplain acquired land in 1804 that was occupied continuously by members of the Chaplain family through 1832.38 Although the overall number of free African American property owners declined between 1804 and 1826, most propertied freedmen managed to pass their property to their freeborn heirs. This persistent property ownership contributed to the stability of African American families and African American communities. Twenty-six percent of the eighty-three African Americans who appear in the 1813 tax assessment had held their assets since at least 1804. Similarly, in 1825 as many as 55 percent of the African Americans who owned taxable wealth had held that property since 1817 or earlier. Thirty-three of the sixty-one families, 54 percent, that appeared in the 1824 assessed persons list, including the Adams, Dorrell, and Chain families, had owned that property for at least twenty years.39 Material privilege did not shield African Americans from rising racism. Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, young men traveled to Baltimore and worked on the docks or in construction, but in the 1820s they probably worked alongside white workers who openly advocated a segregated workforce. White Marylanders had always been ambivalent about free African Americans, even as they embraced free labor, but in the 1810s and 1820s white attitudes toward free African Americans hardened. The War of 1812 did not revive the radical Spirit of ‘76 that had moved some revolutionary era slaveholders to manumit their slaves. If anything, the alliance between African Americans and the British military during

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the War of 1812 confirmed the suspicion of many white Marylanders that African Americans were aliens: aliens with treasonous thoughts and the disposition to act on them. Nearly five thousand slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area fled to the British Navy during the War of 1812, and at least two hundred of these refugees were trained, organized, and integrated into an existing battalion of three hundred Royal Marines. Officially, the British military did not encourage slave rebellion, but it also did nothing to dissuade slaves from joining their ranks. The British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies reminded the Chesapeake commander to welcome any escaped slaves who requested enlistment, emphasizing that “you are in no case to take slaves away as Slaves, but as free persons whom the public become bound to maintain.”40 Seaman Charles Ball, a slave passing as a freedman, spoke with escaped slaves aboard a captured British vessel in 1813 and discovered men and women whose “heads were full of notions of liberty and happiness in some of the West India islands.”41 Even slaves who did not join the British military made white residents uneasy, and certainly, it did not help that the Maryland government acknowledged their vulnerability to slave rebellion. In organizing men into militia units, the Maryland government recruited “from those parts of the state least exposed to danger, not only from the British, but also from the Blacks who it appears have created considerable disquietude in many sections of the state.”42 What remained of the anemic antislavery movement in the 1810s joined forces with a nascent colonization movement after the War of 1812 to promote gradual emancipation with resettlement. African American resettlement in Africa or the Caribbean was put forth as a benign solution to the unsettled problems raised by black freedom. Colonization promised peace of mind to slaveholders, who were more convinced than ever that free African Americans posed a threat to their security. It also promised former slaves the opportunity for self-determination in an imagined African American republic. The Maryland legislature in its 1817–18 session endorsed the work of the American Colonization Society, and over the next fifteen years it adopted five resolutions urging the United States Congress to enact measures for African American resettlement.43 Colonization gained momentum in the 1810s and 1820s, but only in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) did Maryland make a concerted effort to realize a Maryland colony in Africa. In the aftermath of the rebellion,

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Eastern Shore planter Robert Henry Goldsborough made his own case for colonization. In a petition that he drafted, reportedly at the request of his “Fellow Neighbors,” he echoed the increasingly universal concern that free African Americans “are the immediate incentive that frets the slave population to rebellion.” He acknowledged the degraded state of free African Americans, who “constitute an intermediate order of beings between the citizen and the slave whose conditions here can never be bettered.” More surprisingly, he referred to free African Americans as “the foe all around you—in your fields, in the streets, under your window, in your parlour, in your bedchamber,” prepared to ally with the slave population to ambush the white citizenry.44 Considering his frequent encounters with free African Americans at his plantation and in Easton, Goldsborough could claim legitimately that free African Americas were everywhere. But knowing something of his lifestyle, it seems far-fetched that he felt personally threatened by them. After all, he trusted freedman Joseph Chain to shave him with a straight razor, and he allowed the butcher John Dorrell to bring cleavers and knives to the plantation where his slaves labored. Goldsborough’s petition suggests that he suffered from selective negrophobia; he trusted the freedmen he knew, but remained wary of those he did not. It was a common affliction among Maryland employers, particularly in the countryside where free African American laborers routinely worked alongside enslaved laborers. So what was Goldsborough’s solution to the problem of an internal enemy? Invoking public safety, he proposed stricter regulation of their mobility but little else. He urged the state to prevent the emigration of African Americans into Maryland, and he echoed the call of other slaveholders in Maryland and elsewhere who wanted to make settlement in Africa a precondition for future manumissions. He further recommended that existing free African Americans could choose to move to Africa or stay in Maryland, but that those who stayed should seek the sponsorship of “substantial American citizens.” Presumably, Goldsborough’s status as a planter, former state legislator, and former U.S. senator qualified him as a “substantial American” and that he would offer up bonds to keep the freedmen he knew and trusted in his neighborhood—his Negroes. He also wanted the legislature to ban “inclusive assemblages” of free and enslaved African Americans, including worship gatherings. And, curiously, he called on the legislature to expunge from its Black Codes all laws that were unnecessarily severe and to replace them with unspecified “salutary provisions.”45

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The legislature’s response to the Nat Turner Rebellion, “An Act Relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” codified some of these suggestions, but it offered few immediate solutions to the imagined problem of African American violence. The law focused almost exclusively on the problem of African American mobility, with the single exception of a provision that required free African Americans to obtain a license to own a gun. It prohibited alien freedmen from migrating into the state, and it imposed fines on employers who knowingly hired freedmen from out of state. The law did not expel free African Americans, but it absolutely frustrated their travel. Any freedman who left the state for more than thirty consecutive days could be denied readmittance, although freedman could be exempted from this provision if, before their departure, they notified local authorities of their intent to return. Wagoners, sailors, and other freedmen who traveled with their white employers were exempt from this provision, as were freedmen traveling back and forth between Maryland and Cape Palmas, Liberia, the colony organized by the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS). The new law also prohibited African Americans from gathering to worship without a white authority present, but again it made important exceptions. It exempted the African American churches in Baltimore and Annapolis as long as they received the “written permission of a white licensed ordained preacher [to congregate], and dismissed before 10 o’clock at night.” It is not clear that this provision was ever enforced, but if it was, then it seems that the same exemption was granted to other African American churches, as there is no evidence that the state closed any African American church.46 But why not forcibly expel free African Americans and settle the security question once and for all? Virginia actually offered a working model for expulsion that Maryland could have adopted. In the aftermath of Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800) the Virginia legislature seriously considered the resettlement of its free African American population, but ultimately settled on expulsion. The legislature discussed schemes that included resettling free African Americans in British West Africa and the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase, but neither was implemented. The British would not accept colonists associated with a rebellion, and President Jefferson would not accept people of African descent in a land that he imagined reserved for white farmers. Instead, the legislature adopted a series of expulsion laws that effectively stunted the growth of the free African American population over the next half-century.

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In 1806 the Virginia legislature required all newly manumitted slaves to leave the state or petition the legislature, or the county courts after 1816, for permission to stay. The rate of manumission steadily declined after 1806. In Loudon County, for example, the manumission rate dropped by 80 percent between 1790 and 1806 (sixty-three petitions filed) and between 1806 and 1818 (nine petitions filed). One explanation for the decline is that expulsion laws discouraged manumission. Slaveholders manumitted slaves with the expectation that they could replace them with more economical laborers. Slaveholders had little incentive to manumit slaves when they had no assurance that they could replace a slave with a hireling. Slaveholders, like slaves, also knew that petitioning for residency was not just a formality. The legislature and county courts denied petitions, and the whole procedure provoked great anxiety among petitioners.47 Another explanation for the declining manumission rate is that the expulsion laws discouraged African Americans from purchasing their own freedom. Slaves who had to choose between slavery among family and friends in their natal homes or freedom in exile without family and friends were less inclined to seek manumission by self-purchase.48 Over time, the enforcement of expulsion laws, combined with declining rates of manumission, achieved their desired affect. On the eve of the Civil War, Virginia had more slaves and fewer free African Americans than any other Chesapeake state. Only 10 percent of African Americans in Virginia were free, compared with nearly 50 percent of African Americans in Maryland, 70 percent in Delaware, and 78 percent in the District of Columbia.49 An expulsion policy might have worked in Maryland in the 1830s. Nat Turner’s Rebellion had mobilized white support for colonization, and the newly incorporated Maryland State Colonization Society (1831–32) provided the infrastructure to implement a resettlement scheme. But rather than expelling free African Americans the legislature adopted new policies that served only to keep alive the shared wish of employers that, with enough regulation and proper enforcement, former slaves would become dependent laborers. Maryland could have followed the Virginia example of depopulating the state of free African Americans by rigorously enforcing the expulsion laws, but Maryland, and in particular planters like Robert Henry Goldsborough, did not really want to expel free African Americans. Instead, what Goldsborough and other rural employers wanted was

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to use the threat of expulsion (or re-enslavement) as a coercive tool to push “good Negroes” into the arms of white employers and “shiftless Negroes” out of the state. Someone like Goldsborough, a legislator, planter, slaveholder, and employer of free labor, doubly benefited from “An Act Relating to Free Negroes and Slaves” and every subsequent act that reiterated the expectation of free African Americans’ dependence on white employers. The legislation addressed his security concerns by expelling free African Americans from out of state or unknown African Americans and simultaneously addressed his labor concerns by giving “good” African Americans incentive to seek him out for employment or patronage. Moreover, in choosing this path in 1832, the legislature lost its chance to expel free African Americans. In the 1800s and 1810s, free African Americans were auxiliary laborers in a slave economy, but within a generation, free African American workers were indispensable, an integral part of the labor force. Employers would not willingly part with them. Years later, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia (1859) motivated Maryland slaveholders to issue new calls for the expulsion of free African Americans, but once again employers roundly resisted. As Barbara Jeanne Fields concluded in her 1985 analysis of this debate over expelling free African Americans in the 1850s: “The perennial movement to colonize free black people in Africa failed for a number of reasons internal to the movement itself—the resistance of black people themselves, the absence of a serious financial commitment—but the most important reason was that, whatever white Marylanders might say or think about the danger and mischief of the free black population, the economy of the state could not dispense with them.”50 To African Americans the efficacy of the colonization movement was less important than its existence. It symbolized the white majority’s total abandonment of the antislavery movement. At the height of its influence in the Middle Atlantic states, the antislavery movement achieved three monumental public policy victories with the support of allies variously motivated by religious principles, political ideals, and economic ambition. Antislavery activists had successfully pressed the U.S. Congress to stop the transatlantic slave trade; convinced many slaveholdings states, including Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, to liberalize manumission laws; and, most famously, lobbied the Pennsylvania legislature to adopt

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gradual emancipation. But the antislavery movement failed to convince white Americans to adopt policies that would promote economic opportunities for former slaves, such as providing education or job training, even at a time when many white Americans readily acknowledged that doing so would accelerate assimilation. Even in comparatively progressive Pennsylvania, former slaves acquired such social services only through the private initiative of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and other benevolent associations. In the 1820s white Americans still expected former slaves to improve their condition by their own initiative, but now they also insisted that only in an undeveloped African colony could free African Americans achieve their fullest potential. African Americans insisted that they had a right and a responsibility to fight for full freedom in their home country. They denounced colonization because it denied them the right to self-determination in America and because they recognized that colonization advocates included not just lapsed emancipationists but also slaveholders who wanted to remove free African Americans to protect their slaveholding interests. Equally galling, the American Colonization Society formed in 1817 in Philadelphia only reluctantly consulted African American leaders who had expressed an interest in emigration. African Americans vigorously opposed the American Colonization Society, but most also defended the right of individual African Americans to choose emigration. After all, free African Americans had always understood mobility as integral to freedom and voluntary migration as a legitimate act of self-determination. It is also clear that African Americans looked more favorably on other African American–led colonization programs. In the 1810s Bishop Allen publicly endorsed Captain Cuffee’s mission to bring Christianity, commercial farming, and legitimate trade to Africa. He also gave encouragement to his friend Rev. Daniel Coker, cofounder of the AME Church, as he prepared to lead an AME mission to Liberia in 1820. Bishop Allen enthusiastically supported an emigration plan to Haiti, going so far as to recruit settlers, and in the 1830s he expressed excitement about African American–led emigration initiatives to Canada. What attracted Bishop Allen to emigration? One explanation is that it resonated with his personal experience as an itinerant and missionary. Undoubtedly, he was delighted that pious, self-reliant men like Paul Cuffee

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and Daniel Coker would bring African American Christianity to Africans and African-descended people throughout the Atlantic world. Another explanation is that the political and economic realities of the 1810s and 1820s forced him to take emigration seriously. He could see that the emancipation impulse had died in America and that the United States would not extend full citizenship to free African Americans anytime soon. He also worried about how the economic and social unrest of the 1820s would affect African American youth. He knew that the next generation would not enjoy the same opportunities that he had. In exploring emigration, Bishop Allen conceded that perhaps African Americans would only experience full citizenship, racial equality, and unfettered economic opportunity as ex-patriots living in Haiti or Canada after it adopted emancipation.51 Richard Allen spoke eloquently and passionately about colonization, but he did not win many adherents to the cause. Ordinary African Americans respectfully listened to Paul Cuffee, Richard Allen, and Daniel Coker, but they were not persuaded. In fact, a majority of free African Americans throughout the Middle Atlantic region fiercely resisted colonization on principle. By the 1820s, the opposition had organized an anticolonization movement with a distinct leadership that included among others William S. Watkins, a freeborn African American living in Baltimore. In an 1829 editorial published in the abolitionist newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation, Watkins articulated the principal arguments against colonization. He stated that free African Americans had a right and a responsibility to continue the fight for emancipation and civil rights in America. Leaving at the present moment would guarantee the ascent of slavery and prohibit the possibility of full citizenship for those who stayed behind. Most important, he proclaimed that free African Americans were a chosen people, selected by God to carry on the emancipation struggle, even as white Christians abandoned it. Watkins acknowledged that free African Americans would face perils and experience disappointments in America, but he also assured them that “if ever there was a people who could look up to Heaven with unshaken confidence for protection, it is that people whose sufferings are not the consequences of their crimes. . . . We have one straight forward course to pursue–one marked out by the hand of unerring wisdom. This course we intend to pursue, without giving ourselves any uneasiness to the issue.”52

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The anticolonization movement thwarted the best efforts of the colonization agents to recruit settlers with a simple but effective strategy. Volunteers followed agents of the American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society as they walked through the cities and towns looking for new recruits, and once an agent had pitched resettlement and left, the anticolonization volunteers stepped forth to present their own arguments against emigration. The leadership of the MSCS regularly complained to the Maryland legislature that every agent returned from a recruitment drive convinced that he had recruited one hundred families to emigrate, but never more than half came to Baltimore Harbor on the scheduled day of departure. Anticolonization volunteers had dissuaded the others, changing their minds with what the MSCS labeled “abolition doctrine.” On at least one occasion anticolonization volunteers met the émigrés at the docks, boarded a ship bound for Africa, and successfully persuaded half of the passengers to disembark.53 William S. Watkins asked his black countrymen, “Why should we abandon our firesides, and every thing associated with the dear name of home—undergo the fatigues of a perilous voyage, and expose ourselves, our wives and our little ones, to the deleterious influences of an uncongenial sun, for the enjoyment of a liberty divested of its usual accompaniments, surrounded by circumstances which diminish its intrinsic value, and render it indeed ‘a dear earned morsel’?”54 Watkins knew that most African Americans would not abandon their family, friends, or natal culture, but a fraction of his countrymen did leave “home” for Liberia, the West Indies, and Canada. Nearly one thousand freeborn and manumitted African Americans went with the MSCS to Cape Palmas, Liberia, between 1836 and 1857. It is worth considering what motivated these emigrants: Why did they go? What did they expect to find? How well did Cape Palmas meet their expectations? In truth, many did not go by choice. A significant number of the Cape Palmas settlers were manumitted on the condition that they leave the United States. In May 1838 the schooner Columbia carried thirty-six passengers to Cape Palmas; of these, twenty-nine were former slaves manumitted by Georgia slaveholders. The slaveholders had paid the MSCS to resettle them.55 Still others may have left for Africa with the hope or expectation that their voluntary migration might leverage slaveholders into manumitting family members who remained enslaved. A letter from

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Jacob Gibson to the MSCS suggests that this was his own family’s experience. In 1834 Jacob Gibson and his wife, Rebecca, emigrated with seven of their children from Talbot County to Cape Palmas. In 1835 Jacob wrote from Africa to John H. B. Latrobe, president of the MSCS, and Rev. William McKenney, an MSCS agent, to request assistance in recovering the enslaved children left behind. He pleaded, “I will be ten thousand times obliged to you, if you will make an effort to get my children free, and sent out to me. Neither of you, perhaps, know the pain a father feels at being separated from his offspring.” It is hard to imagine why Gibson would have voluntarily left his children in Maryland, unless he expected they would soon follow. Perhaps he had struck a deal with a slaveholder or with the MSCS that his children would be manumitted after his successful settlement in Africa. In 1839 nine more members of the Gibson family arrived in Cape Palmas from Caroline County, Maryland, although it is unclear if any were Jacob’s children.56 Those who emigrated voluntarily hinted at their expectations and hopes in letters sent home. The MSCS published these letters as propaganda, and so they must be read critically. But the MSCS also balanced accounts of happy settlers with a nearly equal number of accounts of unhappy settlers. For example, in 1837, the MSCS published a “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” a profile of eight colonists and their experiences. It reported matter-of-factly that half of those profiled regretted their choice and wanted to return to America. One settler had enjoyed noteworthy success as a farmer and was a “well-behaved, moral man, and very capable of managing the business in which he was engaged,” but the MSCS conceded that he was nevertheless “determined upon returning to the United States, and solemnly declares he would rather live a slave in America, than a freeman in Africa.”57 Letters drafted by contented settlers reveal something of their expectations of the Cape Palmas settlement. Generally, they wrote with satisfaction about opportunities for education, civic participation, religious freedom, and liberty from white oversight. Fifty-year-old Stepny Harper, who emigrated from the Eastern Shore with his wife, Ann, and two small children, aged eight and six months, mentioned his good health and his chance to be a “voter.” Thomas Jackson, who arrived with his wife, Milly, in 1832, reported with pride that he had been appointed an associate judge. Another colonist wrote that he would return to America when “a black

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man can have his liberty so far as to have a seat in Congress.” William Polk stated he felt “safe” in Cape Palmas, and he “had no wish to return to stay, unless I could be looked upon as a white man. This I know is not possible.” Eliza Jane Wilson, who emigrated from Queen Anne’s County, wrote to her father of her family’s good health, the pleasant weather, and the ease with which she substituted palm oil for lard in her cooking. She also wrote, “Here I can come and go as I please and there is no one to trouble or trample me.” Levi Norris of Calvert County similarly indicated his relief at being able to work and live without the “frowns of a white man.” Jacob Gibson discussed the “good church” in his Cape Palmas community and his children’s education. Thomas Jackson also wrote of the pleasure of hearing some of the children read. In its “Brief History of Individual Colonists” the MSCS included an unnamed family with five daughters who “are constantly attendant on the school.”58 The fate of children was a recurring theme in letters, and with good reason, as children made up a significant portion of the emigrants. Between December 1832 and December 1835, five vessels carrying a total of 286 passengers arrived safely in Cape Palmas. At least 126 of these passengers (44%) were children under the age of fourteen. In 1832 the ship Lafayette sailed from Baltimore to Cape Palmas with 146 passengers, including 63 known children under age fourteen (44%). Eliza Jane Wilson arrived at Cape Palmas with 37 other passengers, including 20 children (51% of the passengers). Children made up 60 percent of the passengers (16 of 27) on the schooner Harmony in 1835.59 It seems that parents went to Cape Palmas with the hope or expectation that their children would have a better future in Africa than in America. Levi Norris wrote that “those that would want to raise their children as white people do in America, this is [the] very place to do it; for a man that comes out here don’t only free himself, but a generation.”60 Cape Palmas promised parents the opportunity to give their children what they needed to determine their own futures: liberty, education, and, perhaps most important, land. Free African Americans knew that landownership was the key to self-determination.61 The MSCS noticed that the promise of future landownership in America was one of the most compelling arguments of the “abolition doctrine.” In its 1839 report to the Maryland legislature agents of the MSCS reported that anticolonization volunteers would tell prospective emigrants “that their right

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to the land they cultivate, is better than their owner’s, for they have earned it by their labour on it.”62 Those who migrated to Cape Palmas were not willing to wait for that “right” to materialize in Maryland. Stepny Harper wrote that he was “well satisfied with the land” in Cape Palmas, and Jacob Gibson reported that the “soil has the appearance of being good.” Gibson owned a five-acre lot and was pleased with its “situation and soil.” Levi Norris reported, “Every thing I plant in my lot seems to grow well.” He had built a “decent frame house” and was pleased with it, knowing it was “more than I would have got if I had remained in America.” Eliza Jane Wilson reported that since her arrival, seven months earlier, her “house is nearly done and produce planted around it.” The family with five daughters in constant attendance at school arrived in Cape Palmas with fifty dollars and applied their capital to the construction of a “good dwelling house.” The family owned property “in town” and a small farm “under good cultivation,” and the family was “entirely free from debt.” According to the MSCS, the family’s patriarch “declares that he is very glad he removed to Africa, is better situated than he ever was, or hoped to be in America.” Another family was comparatively “poor and destitute,” but they still claimed a good home, acreage under cultivation, and ample food. They were content, according to the MCSC, because they “are well clothed and fed” and “nearly free from debt.”63 Landownership, and all that it promised, enticed some African Americans to Cape Palmas. It was not the only factor, but it may have been the deciding factor for many of the emigrants, and especially Eastern Shore emigrants. After all, some of these men and women probably had known individual members of that generation of self-made African American men and women who, by their own industry and faith, had rescued themselves and their loved ones from slavery and built homes, churches, and free African American neighborhoods. In other words, emigrants like Levi Norris wanted a chance at Isaac Maccary’s life. Norris knew he would not have it in Calvert County, Maryland, in the 1830s, but perhaps he could have his chance in Cape Palmas. Two years after his arrival in Cape Palmas, Norris reported to skeptics and friends back home that, for the first time, “I stand on my own ground, and no man can say, stand off, for I am better than you.”64

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What the settlers knew was that legal freedom was not enough. Two generations of free African Americans had lived and worked in agriculture, shipping, and a variety of other industries in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Most had working relations with white men and women, and some had personal relationships with white neighbors. Some were raised in mixed-race families, and many grew up in interracial neighborhoods, either in the country or the city. In 1790 or 1800 free African Americans had good reason to think that they had an ownership stake in Maryland even if they were not full citizens. Their lived experience told them as much. But after 1815 everything was different. The generation of African Americans who grew up after the War of 1812 learned that legal freedom guaranteed little.

Conclusion

Just prior to the Civil War, the Methodist minister John Dixon Long offered his opinion on the status of free African Americans in Maryland: They have to take the raking fires from three batteries. The slave envies them. The poor white man is jealous of them lest they encroach upon his assumed rights and privileges; and the large slaveholder hates them, as their very presence puts notions of freedom in the minds of his slaves. They are expected to please every body, which is a very difficult matter. They are the scapegoats of southern society. If any crime is committed, and the perpetrator is not discovered, it is laid to the free negro. If he commits a crime, and it is proved on him, he is sure to get the full penalty of the law. If he steals from the white man, he goes to the penitentiary; which is right. If the white man steals from him, he goes clear; which is wrong. If he is lazy, he is a nuisance; if industrious, and lays up money, he is accused of dealing with slaves; if he conducts himself properly, he is proud and wants taking down a little. His wife and daughter may be insulted by rowdies, and he must hold his tongue. Yet for intelligence, industry, economy, and morality, he is far superior to

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the third class of slaves. His wife and children are his; his body is his own. He can remove to a free State or go to Africa. Partial liberty is better than pampered slavery. Considering his antecedents and circumstances, he has met the expectations of all reasonable men. Many of them are lazy, but it must be remembered that laziness is a contagious disease in the South. My advice to all young enterprising free colored people of the Southern States is, to leave for the free States, Canada, or Liberia.1

Long was an abolitionist and a native of the Lower Eastern Shore. In his narrative he claimed to have traveled throughout the state in the 1840s “in private to bear my testimony to masters against slavery, and in public to labor for the salvation of slaves.” He was satisfied with this mission until the 1850s, when anti-abolition sentiment grew to a fever pitch. He worried about the impact on his sons, who were beginning “to imbibe the common prejudices of slave society—hatred of work and of slaves.”2 And so he relocated to Philadelphia, “the city of brotherly love,” expecting to raise his children in a culture that shared his liberal and abolitionist values. What he wrote about the state of African Americans in 1857 could have easily applied to free African Americans in 1837. Had John Beale Bordley lived to see the Maryland that John Dixon Long described, he would have been bewildered. It was not what he had predicted. If Conway and Flora, Joseph Chain, or Washington Dorrell, or any of the other members of the manumitted generation had known what was to come, they might have made different choices for the sake of their children and grandchildren. But they could not have known, and everything about their respective situations gave them reason to hope that the lives of their children and grandchildren would be as rewarding as their own. In the Age of Revolution, the impulse to emancipate resonated throughout the Atlantic world. In the United States it was strongest in Pennsylvania, but slaveholders in other parts of the country also felt it. In the absence of a national mandate for or against emancipation, states and individuals made situational choices. Looking across the patchwork of emancipation schemes implemented in the early republic it is evident that a consensus emerged among American emancipators: a peacetime emancipation must balance human rights with property rights. It is a consensus clearly articulated by William Tilghman, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in

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his now well-known decision to deny an expedited emancipation to a term slave named Peggy. In 1815 Tilghman explained, “I know that freedom is to be favoured, but we have no right to favour it at the expense of property.”3 Gradual, compensated emancipation struck that balance between human rights and property rights, and for that reason it was the method widely adopted in the Atlantic world, not only in Pennsylvania (1780), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804), but also in the British Caribbean (1833) and Spanish Cuba (1880). Any emancipation tells us something about the values, ambitions, and expectations of the emancipators and the emancipated. Political ideology, global economics, and religion are all routinely cited in emancipation studies as variables that inspired emancipation and shaped the social lives of former slaves. Studies of emancipation in the early republic address one or all of these themes to some degree. What has been missing from studies of emancipation in the early republic is an understanding of these emancipations in the context of America’s transition to a free labor system. In general, the history of emancipation in the early republic does not address the impact of African American freedom on the economy, the formation of a laboring class, employers’ attitudes toward working people, or the emerging free labor ideology that was so central to American identity by the middle of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, discussions about the merits of free labor versus slave labor in the 1780s and 1790s did not generate the same visceral reaction that they did later in the 1850s, but the discussions happened, and they were influential in some circles. On the eve of the first emancipation “free labor” was just an idea without expression in the United States. The early republic emancipations gave life to the idea and tested its merits. Equally important, it was in the process of converting slaves into free laborers that white Marylanders developed expectations for free labor (and slavery) that would last to and through the Civil War. Emancipation tested people’s assumptions about laboring people and a free labor system. How manumitted slaves responded to these tests mattered, but in most of the emancipation states (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey) the test was fixed from the start. The twenty-plus years of term slavery required of African Americans in these states was a clearly articulated method for creating a dependent, racialized labor force. It was a system for making a working class, or perhaps more accurately, a caste, that was routinely

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enforced in courts of law (hence Chief Justice Tilghman’s dilemma). In all of the emancipation states the transition was linear and absolute. Slaveholders could stall, but they could not reverse emancipation. In Maryland no one manumitted a slave under the threat of emancipation. There, manumission was gradual, compensated, and voluntary. Initially, Maryland slaveholders made the transition from slaveholders to employers in the 1780s and 1790s without any meaningful guidance or support from the state. The Maryland legislature did not explain or dictate to slaveholders how to make slaves into contented, self-motivated hirelings. Moreover, the fact that slavery remained viable, even as the labor system absorbed more free workers, meant that it was slaveholders who set the early rules and expectations for a free labor system. In that context it is not surprising that slaveholders had a vested interest in establishing a free labor system that was friendly to slavery. In Maryland the free labor system unfolded with fewer restraints than it did in other parts of the United States or the larger Atlantic world. To be sure, Maryland slaveholders would have agreed with emancipators in Pennsylvania or New York or the British Caribbean that they had a critical role to play in the transition from slavery to free labor. John Beale Bordley, William Tilghman, and others presumed that those who already commanded labor had the responsibility and the power to bring a working class into being. At the same time, a diversity of notions about work and freedom informed each individual’s notion of what a free laborer should be. Economic theory mattered, but so did republican ideology and individual religious convictions. Above all else, the switch from slave labor to free labor involved a leap of faith on the part of emancipators. Everyone had expectations, but there were no guarantees. Perhaps what is most remarkable about the transition from a slave labor system to a mixed labor system on the Eastern Shore is that it happened because a generation of emancipators believed that work could be incentivized. What the exact incentives were had yet to be determined, but in the 1780s and 1790s, those who manumitted their slaves were willing to explore options beyond the whip or the threat of sale. This libertarian impulse in the 1780s and 1790s offered a narrow window of opportunity for the newly manumitted to inform the meaning of free labor in early republic Maryland. The newly manumitted responded rationally to the work choices put before them. In the 1790s, when work

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was plentiful, they exercised their freedom to accept, negotiate, or walk away from a prospective employer. On the Eastern Shore free African American laborers filled the geographic and employment voids created by an exodus of landless whites, craftsmen, and artisans, who left the countryside for Baltimore or the Deep South. Most free African Americans worked for wages in agriculture, but some worked in an emerging rural service sector as butchers, barbers, or wagoners. Those who could not find steady employment in the countryside (especially young women) went to the city to work. Others pieced together a livelihood migrating between employment sectors in the countryside and the city. Migration was planned, and when young African Americans left the country for the city the decision to leave was probably not personal but instead directed by family interests. Often African American families made the choice to send one or two family members to work in the city, while the remainder stayed behind on the Eastern Shore. Those who could find steady employment on the Eastern Shore used their wages to buy land or lease housing with the intent of putting some physical distance between themselves and their employers. They took up residence in emerging African American enclaves like Ivytown and Holein-the-Wall, or they rented housing from other free African Americans. Wage work also had consequences for family life. Few individuals were economically self-sufficient, and most relied on family labor to maintain much-prized autonomous households. Individual family members sacrificed their personal ambitions for the good of the family. Initially, the white majority did not impede these developments, and local governments facilitated the transformation of the newly manumitted into free workers. Free African Americans went to the court to record lease agreements and deeds of manumission, to obtain poor relief, and to apply for the Certificates of Freedom that facilitated migration in a free labor market. Some free African Americans also used the courts to settle disputes with their white or black neighbors as well as with family members. One unanticipated outcome of the transition from slave labor to free labor on the Eastern Shore was a free African American community with more social layers than one might expect in a rural society. Some African Americans were manumitted and others were freeborn. Some owned property and were rooted in Eastern Shore communities, while others were propertyless and rootless. African Americans who enjoyed a steady

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income, taxable assets, an autonomous household, and a family united in freedom rooted themselves in the Eastern Shore and contributed to community development. They developed a consciousness about themselves and their place in Eastern Shore society, and they joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church because that particular religious group gave expression to their ambitions. Another group of African Americans remained economically insecure, and, as a result, they never established permanent roots in Easton, Ivytown, or any of the other free African American neighborhoods. Or maybe it was because they could not establish permanent roots that they did not have a secure economic base. Either way, some Eastern Shore free African Americans did not find steady employment, and so they were constantly in motion, working when they could find work, living at the job site, separated from family members, who no doubt remained divided between slavery and freedom, and worshiping in the Methodist Episcopal Church. It was this group that left for Baltimore, Philadelphia, or even Cape Palmas. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland the seasonal rhythms of commercial agriculture shaped the lives and attitudes of free African American workers. Wages provided free African Americans with the food, shelter, fuel, and clothing that they needed to sustain themselves in freedom. The type and availability of work determined where people lived, how they related to their spouses or parented their children, and how they managed their leisure time. Importantly, the experience of working for wages also informed free African Americans’ attitudes. The possibility of wage work set or tempered their ambitions and shaped their family values, their work ethic, their sense of justice, and their sense of self. Working for wages gave rise to distinctive attitudes toward work, family, time, and even status. These values were manifest and reinforced in the family (the concept of reciprocity), in the free black neighborhoods (Easton, Trappe, or elsewhere), and, most especially, in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Certainly, by the 1820s, these free African Americans had developed a consciousness about themselves as a free, laboring people in a slave society. In the 1790s, when the Eastern Shore enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity, planters and slaveholders were content to let the high tide lift many different boats. The mixed labor system they had willfully created benefited them. Free labor was common on the Eastern Shore, and, even as Maryland received thousands of wage-working immigrants from Ireland

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and indentured workers from Germany, wage-working African Americans dominated the free labor workforce of the Eastern Shore for generations. As early as the 1820s planters had decided that free African American laborers were irreplaceable, and it is for this reason that men like Robert Henry Goldsborough wavered between tightening the screws on their mobility and adding “salutary provisions” to the Black Codes. Goldsborough knew that he needed these workers, and he also knew that he needed to handle these workers differently. He needed to offer incentives to attract men to his plantations, including wages, housing, work opportunities for wives and children, or work that gave the free worker more autonomy or responsibility than a slave, such as truck farming. Goldsborough did not want more slaves, but if he had he could have readily purchased an ablebodied young person at the annual Easton slave auction, an auction that facilitated the transportation of hundreds of Maryland slaves to the Deep South each year. What he wanted was a compliant workforce, free men and women who worked contently, supported their families on meager wages, kept the peace with their white and black neighbors, and accepted their place in the social and racial hierarchy. Goldsborough’s expectations were no different than those of employers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, or a New England mill town. Similarly, the first generation of free African American workers had much in common with their peers in other parts of the United States. The common fate of working people everywhere was one of poverty, insecurity, exploitation, and vulnerability to employers and market forces beyond their control. When that same high tide of prosperity receded in the 1810s and 1820, so too did planters’ ambivalence about the free African Americans. The world that John Dixon Long described in 1857 had its origins in the 1810s and 1820s. With less wealth to share and more people to share it with (notably immigrant laborers and a fast-growing population of freeborn African Americans), employers claimed there was a greater need to define labor relations and the social order. Now race mattered, and whites used racebased arguments to rein in the freedom of free African American laborers. Maryland began instituting the system of labor control that in Pennsylvania and the British Caribbean was integral to emancipation. Maryland legislated dependence, denying free African Americans the right to rise above their hireling status to join the shrinking population of yeomen farmers. Hereafter, planters and the state reserved the right to coerce labor out of

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free African Americans by means of vagrancy laws, forced labor on public works projects, and a racialized apprenticeship system. The arrival of thousands of European immigrants in Baltimore aggravated the condition of free African American laborers everywhere. White workingmen wanted (but did not get) segregated workforces, and so they found other ways to preserve and protect the “assumed rights and privileges” of whiteness.4 Initially, they used violence to enforce racial separation, but popular culture also helped to define the differences between wage-earning whites and blacks. Edward Clay’s printed parodies of free African American life, and the minstrel shows that were enormously popular with white working men, elevated whiteness. In other words, the collective evidence proved that African Americans had failed the test of manumission. Free African Americans did not fail to ascend to the ranks of the yeomanry because the regime barred the possibility, the argument went; they failed because they were instinctively lazy, untrustworthy, and predisposed to criminal activity. They were hopeless, and no amount of freedom would ever enable them to rise above their low status. The American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society seized on this idea. Both organizations appealed for funding on the grounds that wage-earning white people would only be able to get a toehold in the middle class when wage-earning African Americans were removed from the workforce. Colonization advocates never succeeded in convincing either the federal government or the Maryland legislature to exile free African Americans, but thereafter transportation remained a threat that hung over them for the duration of the antebellum period. By 1820, African American freedom was under siege, and the gains of the 1780s and 1790s were steadily rolled back. Employers, slaveholders, and white workingmen all had a vested interest in curtailing free African Americans’ progress. But John Long Dixon proposed that slaves also envied their free African American neighbors and that perhaps slaves would undermine free African Americans’ progress. It is an idea worth considering. The evidence from the Eastern Shore of Maryland suggests that slaves and free African Americans did not act as a single “community” and, more important, that their interests diverged with the transition from slavery to freedom. Certainly, emancipation was a shared interest of all African Americans, but it is also true that in freedom African Americans

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developed different priorities and new values. The importance they placed on maintaining autonomous households and the expectation of reciprocity in the maintenance of those households are two examples of distinctly free African American values commonly held by former slaves on the Eastern Shore and elsewhere. It is also irrefutable that the values often associated with the uplift theology of the nineteenth-century African Methodist Episcopal Church (piety, thrift, and industriousness) were distinctively free African American values, born of free African Americans’ experience with racial prejudice. The free African Americans on the Eastern Shore evidently shared these values. Then again, it does not seem that living by the code of moral uplift put free African American laborers in conflict with slaves. What is more likely is that free African American laborers adopted these values in part to distinguish themselves from slaves in the eyes of the white majority. Wage-earning African Americans, like wage-earning whites, quite rightly wanted to be treated differently than slaves, and so it should not be surprising that they looked to set themselves apart from slaves. It is equally logical that a wage-earning African American who presented himself to a prospective employer as a pious, thrifty, and industrious worker gained some advantage in doing so. After all, this is what employers’ wanted. It is no coincidence that those most involved in the Easton African Methodist Episcopal Church were also among the most affluent and socially mobile free African Americans on the Eastern Shore. Adopting a new cultural framework for freedom probably did not determine success, but it could, and did, help, even in a slave society. The triangulation scenario described by John Long Dixon in 1857 ended on November 1, 1864, when the Maryland legislature unconditionally emancipated the 87,000 slaves remaining in Maryland.5 Slaveholders and employers knew the end was near as early as 1862. That year the federal government extended a compensated emancipation to District of Columbia slaveholders that forced Maryland slaveholders to imagine their future without slaves. African Americans too had forced the issue. Maryland slaves escaped to the “free territory” of the District of Columbia and to the Union Army, and thousands of free African American men ran away from their jobsites to enlist in the Union Army’s black regiments. In the spring of 1864, the superintendent of black recruitment in Maryland reported to his superiors about the consequences of such recruitment for

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the agricultural economy. He noted that “whenever the U.S. gets a soldier, somebody’s plow stands still.”6 On the Eastern Shore, slaveholders clung tenaciously to the mixed labor system that had served their economic and social interests so well for more than fifty years. In the same week that Maryland emancipated its slaves, former slaveholders appeared before county courts to apprentice more than 2,500 newly emancipated African American youths.7 Eyewitnesses reported that planters brought children to the local courts by the wagonload. Some of the children were legitimate orphans in need of guardians. Others, including infants and toddlers, were so young that the claims of apprenticeship were meaningless, but most were adolescents or teenagers, old enough to earn decent wages. Across the state the county courts ignored the protests of African American parents and abolitionists who questioned the legitimacy of enforcing apprenticeship laws that predated emancipation in Maryland. County courts actually expedited the process by extending their time in session: the Talbot County Court apprenticed 300 children in just nine days.8 The federal government acted quickly to put an end to the whole sordid business, but it was a chilling moment for the thousands of slaves making the transition to freedom.9 It was also the last gasp of planter power. The plantation elite of the Eastern Shore never again exercised exclusive control over African American laborers. Emancipation, combined with the opening of the American West, broke plantation agriculture in the 1860s and 1870s. Eastern Shore grain growers could not match the largescale, capital intense grain production underway on the Great Plains, and so they focused on perishables and converted some of their grain acreage to orchards. Fishing, long an individual or family pursuit, was also commercialized in the 1870s and 1880s. Men now harvested millions of bushels of crabs and oysters for urban markets. Commercial fishing expanded with critical investments in the infrastructure of the Delmarva Peninsula. In the 1870s a long-anticipated railroad line was completed, connecting communities on the bayside of the peninsula to Elkton, Maryland, on the Pennsylvania border, as well as Dover and Wilmington, Delaware. Also in the 1870s, the Army Corps of Engineers undertook a massive public works project, dredging and broadening the harbors on the Lower Eastern Shore, stimulating more steamboat travel between Baltimore and multiple Eastern Shore ports. Improved trade networks made it possible for

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an Eastern Shore orchard man to ship tomatoes, blackberries, and peaches to urban kitchens in a single day. Much later, in the 1920s, gristmills converted grains to chicken feed, and a new poultry industry developed on the Eastern Shore.10 The new trade networks of the 1870s and 1880s married Baltimore capital and industry with Eastern Shore agriculture and, by extension, its underemployed, unskilled, low-wage workforce. Gilded Age railroad barons invested heavily in oystering and built canning facilities on the Eastern Shore. Men, women, and children worked for meager wages, shucking and canning oysters that were then packed into barrels and transported either to the train station or the recently dredged harbors. Railroad cars carried the packed produce northward, while steamboats headed to Baltimore, the District of Columbia, and Norfolk. Working people also used the railroads and steamboats to access work across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and, especially, in industrial Baltimore and Philadelphia. On the Eastern Shore some African Americans routinely migrated between jobs in agriculture, the seafood industry, and manufacturing, working seasonally in the orchards, on the water, at the emerging shipyards, and in factories.11 Meanwhile, the same capitalists who poured money into canning and commercial seafood discovered the natural beauty of the Eastern Shore. Railroad, oil, steel, manufacturing, and merchandizing moguls came from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the Eastern Shore to fish, boat, swim, and otherwise relax, spurring the construction of luxurious beachfront resorts in the 1880s and 1890s.12 Tourism effectively commercialized the work of domestics, bringing men and women out of planters’ estates and into hotels and hunting lodges as waiters, cooks, and housekeepers. Migration, agriculture, and exploitive labor practices remain significant determinants that shape life and work on the contemporary Eastern Shore. Seasonal migration remains an important factor in the economy of the Eastern Shore, but in new and unexpected ways. In 1952 the four-milelong Chesapeake Bay Bridge became the latest transportation innovation to connect the peninsula to the mainland. Since then cars have replaced steamboats and railroads, and each year more than twenty million tourists cross the Bay Bridge to visit the picturesque colonial-era towns of St. Michaels, Oxford, Chestertown, and Easton and well-developed Atlantic beaches along the Lower Eastern Shore (most famously, Ocean City).13

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Along the way, they stop to shop at one of the many outlet malls, eat lunch at their choice of chain restaurant, and spend money on seasonal activities and attractions as well as accommodations. Curiously, Eastern Shore employers annually import numbers of students from Europe on temporary work/travel visas to work in the hotels, restaurants, shops, and amusement parks. Tourism now employs thousands of unskilled, low-wage seasonal workers, and tourist industry workers cope with many of the same challenges posed to agricultural workers of an earlier time. Tourism, like agriculture, is a seasonal industry. The work is often part time, unskilled, and low paying, with little opportunity for professional development or advancement. Also, like agriculture, tourism is subject to fluctuations in the global or national economy, and a downturn in the economy that prevents travel inevitably leads to unemployment or underemployment in the tourist sector. Commercial agriculture also continues to have a place on the Eastern Shore. Corn, wheat, and soybeans are grown in large quantities by commercial farmers in Talbot, Dorchester, and Caroline counties. Those who farm smaller family acreage continue to truck produce to the Maryland mainland, and many of these farmers have adopted eco-friendly agricultural practices, such as raising organic fruits, vegetables, and beef. Municipalities are deeply aware of the inextricable link between agriculture and the environment, and a number of Eastern Shore counties that derive tax revenue from farming and tourism have adopted land-use plans that stress a balance of agricultural and environmental interests.14 The University of Maryland at the Eastern Shore (a historically black college) has also developed degree programs and research institutes that leverage the region’s agricultural and environmental uniqueness. The student population is majority African American in ethnicity but geographically diverse, with students coming from communities on both sides of Chesapeake Bay. Many of them study the theory and practice of agricultural and environmental sciences with scholars and professionals affiliated with the Maryland Fish and Wild Life Cooperative Research Unit, the Coastal Ecology Teaching and Research Center, and the Center of Excellence in Food, Science, and Technology. Since the early 1970s, the poultry industry has eclipsed all other agricultural pursuits on the Eastern Shore. Chicken is the modern cash crop of Maryland, and like other cash crops it has come under attack for destructive

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environmental policies and exploitive labor relations. In the 1990s the poultry industry raised the ire of farmers, environmentalists, and, most especially, Eastern Shore watermen, who watched their earnings plummet as chicken manure poisoned the waterways of the Eastern Shore and destroyed the crab and oyster populations of Chesapeake Bay.15 The poultry industry in Maryland has also attracted the attention of labor-rights organizations, given that the industry thrives on the labor of unskilled, unorganized workers, including African Americans and many more unskilled, uneducated, and undocumented Latin American immigrants, who do not complain too loudly about their poverty-level wages or hazardous work conditions for fear of dismissal or deportation. National labor organizations, including the United Food and Commercial Workers, have allied with religious organizations to raise public awareness about the exploitive labor practices in the Delmarva poultry industry.16 The union’s protest is simple and direct: the exploitation of contemporary undocumented workers “drags down wages, benefits, and working conditions for all workers.”17 It is a message that would have resonated with the early republic’s white workingmen, who made similar arguments about African American hirelings. Similarly, contemporary religious leaders of diverse faiths have challenged the exploitive labor practices of chicken “factories” with the zeal of nineteenth-century Methodist itinerants. Contemporary ministers evangelize among the chicken workers, and also challenge their largely white and affluent congregants to consider the human cost of food harvested by an exploited workforce. Like a nineteenth-century abolitionist who urged his consumers to buy produce made with free labor, an Episcopalian priest working to improve the lives of chicken workers carried raw chickens into church one Sunday and challenged his congregation to “see the fingerprints that are on this chicken.”18 Regrettably, it is easy to draw comparisons between the plight of undocumented workers in 2010 and the free African Americans who labored on the Eastern Shore two hundred years earlier. Historians have long considered Maryland a place that adapted to the social and labor problems posed by African American freedom with “a middle temperament.” Maryland was a “middle ground” between slavery and freedom for most of the nineteenth century, decidedly neutral on labor issues, but periodically pushed to extremes. Similarly, contemporary Maryland has a reputation among the

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angriest advocates of restrictive immigration policies as being a place that is too friendly to “illegals.” For now, the state has not adopted especially repressive policies toward undocumented immigrants, and Baltimore and a few other Maryland communities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities.”19 The “sanctuary city” is the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth-century “personal liberty law.” Just as antebellum abolitionists and friends of African American freedom refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, sanctuary cities refuse to enforce controversial federal immigration policies. Police departments in self-chosen sanctuary cities enforce local and state laws, but they do not question suspects about their immigration status or otherwise do the work of federal immigration and customs officers. But times are changing, and the Maryland legislature feels pressure from its citizenry to address what is commonly known as the “immigrant problem.” The 2008 financial panic and subsequent rise in unemployment aggravated the already precarious condition of middle-class Americans, who for years had struggled with declining wages and rising costs for housing, food, and fuel. It is a familiar recipe for social discontent, and, unsurprisingly, some of the public’s anger has been directed at undocumented workers. Avoiding a direct challenge to employers, the Maryland legislature has not devised new labor laws that protect workers (citizen or immigrant) but has chosen to follow the familiar path of making it harder for low-wage workers to live and work in Maryland. In 2009 the Maryland legislature barred immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses if they could not show proof that they entered the United States legally.20 The driver’s license is to the modern worker what the Certificate of Freedom was to nineteenth-century African Americans. Without it an individual will have fewer employment and housing opportunities and may actually be wary of moving beyond a familiar neighborhood where he or she feels comparatively safe. How the working poor cope with the indignities of wage work varies across place and time, but it is easy to imagine the exploited workers of the poultry industry adopting many of the same strategies used by early republic free African Americans. Most have clustered together in neighborhoods designated by whites as “immigrant neighborhoods” or “Hispanic neighborhoods,” just as early republic African Americans clustered in Ivytown, Trappe, and Hole-in-the-Wall. If they knew about the African

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American workers whose families were divided between slavery and freedom, contemporary undocumented workers would no doubt empathize, as many of them have also left spouses and children behind in their native countries. Some Latin American women have followed the tradition of nineteenth-century African American hucksters, selling packed lunches or homemade baked goods at the sites where day laborers gather to wait for work. Some of these women are also mothers of American-born children. Like the freeborn African Americans of the nineteenth century, these American-born children of undocumented migrants will experience work and freedom differently than did their rootless parents. In the present, as in the early republic, exploited laborers have looked to their church for material and spiritual support, for education, and to nourish their beleaguered souls; and, evidently, they have allies in the faith community. But perhaps the most extraordinary similarity between contemporary undocumented immigrant workers and the manumitted working men and women of the early nineteenth century is that both groups recognize themselves as stakeholders in their societies. Answering to the charge that illegal immigrants were ruining Maryland, a Mexican worker responded to a reporter, “Look around at this plaza. See how much life we Latinos have created here. That’s my bank. There’s my insurance agent. That’s where I buy my groceries. . . . I am helping this community grow. We all are. Just look around!”21 Had anyone asked, Joseph Chain and Washington Dorrell and countless other free African Americans laborers would have expressed similar thoughts. All around them was evidence of their contributions to the economic growth of the Eastern Shore. These men would have pointed to the harvested wheat, bundled and ready for transport to gristmills in Philadelphia and Baltimore, or the butchered meat prepared to suit the culinary tastes of clean-shaven Eastern Shore patriarchs and their dinner guests. They would have proudly pointed to their elderly parents, their spouses, and their children, all of whom they purchased from slavery after years of laboring to raise the ransom. Some would point to their freeborn children and grandchildren with gratitude that they had been spared their own childhood suffering. They would have expressed hope for their futures. Certainly, Joseph Chain and Washington Dorrell would have pointed to their own neighborhoods in Easton and Trappe and the single-framed houses, “Negro huts,” and tenements that they had built with their meager

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earnings. Finally, they could point to the Easton Bethel AME Church and the Ivytown Queen Esther AME Church, two churches that continue to serve the faithful. Of course, no one did ask, and so free African Americans lived, worked, and worshiped on the Eastern Shore in relative obscurity, never expecting anyone to notice why it all mattered.

Notes

Preface 1. Wilson J. Moses, “Black Communities in Antebellum America: Buttressing Held Views” Reviews in American History 25 (1997): 557–63. 2. W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) is a noteworthy exception, a very creative approach to transatlantic community formation among black seamen. More typical are discrete histories of free African American communities in the tradition of Gary Nash’s pioneering work, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). See, for example: Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk Virginia, 1790–1860 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1664–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). 3. On the subject of the British emancipation, see: William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1975); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean

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(Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1997); Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); and Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. Scholarship that treats American emancipation as a labor problem includes: Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); James D. Schmidt, Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815–1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); and Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5. The economic impetus for emancipation has been well explored by Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderland in Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); T. Stephen Whitman in The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); and John Joseph Condon, Jr., in “Manumission, Slavery, and Family in the Post Revolutionary Rural Chesapeake: Anne Arundel County, Maryland, 1781–1831” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2001). 6. This book is partly a reaction to a historiography that has been narrowly focused on ideological and political questions about the early republic emancipations. See, for example, Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); David Nathaniel Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderland, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and numerous articles and dissertations on the manumission process. 7. Paul Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grains (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain: Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2001); Lorena S. Walsh, “Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620–1820” Journal of Economic History 49 ( June 1989): 393–406; Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Live in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993): 170–99; Jean B. Russo, “A Model Planter: Edward Lloyd IV of Maryland, 1770– 1796” William and Mary Quarterly 49 ( January 1992): 62–88; and Christine Daniels, “Alternative Workers in a Slave Economy: Kent County, Maryland, 1675–1810” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1990). 8. Studies of agricultural wage work in early Pennsylvania have provided me with important models, in particular the work of Lucy Simler, especially “The Landless Worker: An Index of Economic and Social Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 114 (1990): 163–99; and Carl Douglas Oblinger, “New Freedoms, Old Miseries: The Emergence and Disruption of Black Communities in Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1780–1860” (PhD diss., Lehigh University, 1988). 9. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 63–89. Historian Seth Rockman also takes issue with the “dual labor system” model and applies the term “hybrid-labor system” to describe what I have called a “mixed labor system.” Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

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Introduction 1. On the origins of the plantation economy, see Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grains (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); on the Lower Eastern Shore see, Jean Elliott Russo, “ ‘Fifty-Four Days Work of Two Negroes’: Enslaved Labor in Colonial Somerset County, Maryland,” Agricultural History 78 (Autumn 2004): 466–92. 2. Patrick W. Carey, Catholics in America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 10–13. 3. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 86. 4. Ross M. Kimmel, “Free Blacks in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (Spring 1976): 19–25. 5. Clemens, Atlantic Economy, 147. 6. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 60. 7. On emerging wheat markets, see Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain: Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2001); Clemens, Atlantic Economy; David Klingaman, “The Significance of Grain in the Development of the Tobacco Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 268–78. Bayly Ellen Marks, “Economics and Society in a Staple Plantation System: St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1790–1840” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1979) offers another case study of the economic and social impact of diversified agriculture. 8. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 62–64. 9. Clemens, Atlantic Economy, 198–204. 10. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 29–30. 11. Keith Mason, “Region in Revolt: The Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1740–1790” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 120–22. 12. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 128–29. 13. Russo, “Fifty-Four Days,” 476–77. 14. Walsh, “The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications, William Mary and Quarterly, 58 ( January 2001): 158. 15. John Kelly Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 186–90. 16. Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa; Who was a Slave about Two Years in Maryland; and Afterwards Being Brought to England, was Set Free, and Sent to his Native Land in the Year 1734 (London: Richard Ford, 1799), 20. 17. Clemens, Atlantic Economy, 61. 18. Alan Kulikoff, “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 226–59; Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 19. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove, 61–64. 20. Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1933), 161–70. 21. On slave-work regimes, see Lorena Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the America, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 170–99. 22. On the differences between rice, tobacco, and wheat production, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 146–59 and 164–75; and Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society,” 177.

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23. Ernest McNeill Eller offers a full history of naval operations in the Chesapeake in The Chesapeake Bay in the American Revolution (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1981). 24. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 72–93. 25. Harold T. Pinkett, “Maryland as a Source of Food Supplies during the American Revolution,” Maryland Historical Magazine 46 (September 1951): 159, 163–64. 26. Elizabeth Cometti, “Inflation in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 7 (1951): 234. 27. Letter of Blake Corsica to Governor Lee, July 27, 1780. Journal and Correspondence of the Council of Maryland, Archives of Maryland, 1780–1781, vol. 45, p. 32. 28. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 238. 29. Ibid., 331. 30. Ibid., 245. Revolt in the Lower Eastern Shore is the subject of Ronald Hoffman’s A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 31. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 123. 32. Carey, Catholics in America, 13–15. 33. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 334. 34. William H. Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1796– 1820 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1984), 41. 35. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 120–22. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 168–69. 36. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society,” 187–88. 37. Governor and Council (Sale Book) 1786–1788, MSA S964–2. 38. William L. Calderhead, “Slavery in Maryland in the Age of the Revolution, 1775–1790” Maryland Historical Magazine, 98 (Fall 2003): 311. 39. Quote in T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007), 32. See also 24–25 and 31. 40. Council to Nathan Nicholson, February 16, 1778. Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1 January 1777 to 20 March 1778, Archives of Maryland, vol. 16, p. 501. 41. Frederick Emory, Queen Anne’s County, Maryland: Its Early History and Development (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1950), 255–60. The first reference to the Talbot poorhouse appears in Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–3, 1786, p. 3. 42. Hollyday Papers 1677–1905, MHS MS1317, Richard J. Earle to Henry Hollyday, April 18, 1787, reel 3, p. 708. 43. Louis Maganzin, “Economic Depression in Maryland and Virginia, 1783–1787” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1967), 71. 44. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 120–40; Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society,” 189–91. 45. For more on Baltimore’s transformation, see T. Stephen Whitman, “Slavery in Early National Baltimore and Rural Maryland,” in The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Early National Baltimore, chapter 1 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 8–32; Christopher Phillips, “Slavery and the Growth of Baltimore,” in Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860, chapter 1, Blacks in the New World series (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 7–29; and Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 46. Cited in Mason, “A Region in Revolt,” 381. 47. Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 49–82; Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 430.

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48. Jean B. Russo, “A Model Planter: Edward Lloyd IV of Maryland, 1770–1796,” William and Mary Quarterly 49 ( January 1992): 62–88, 85–86. 49. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 10–11; and Rockman, Scraping By, 27. 50. Kenneth Carroll, “Religious Influences on the Manumission of Slaves in Caroline, Dorchester, and Kent Counties,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (Fall 1961): 176–97. 51. Calderhead, “Slavery in Maryland in the Age of the Revolution,” 305–6. 52. Lathan A. Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790, vol. 2 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 328–29. 53. Delaware also experienced a surge in manumissions after the American Revolution, but Delaware planters did not blend slave labor with free labor. Instead, planters employed free black workers in grain cultivation and slaves in other industries. See Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865, Carter G. Woodson Series in Black Studies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 69–74. 1. Work 1. Eastern Shore General Advertiser, January 18, 1814. 2. John Beale Bordley, Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1801). 3. General Assembly House of Delegates (Assessment Record) 1783, MSA S1161–80, Queen Anne’s County, Corsica District, John Beale Bordley, p. 45. 4. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 388, 389, and 390. 5. Ibid., 388. 6. Christine Daniels, “ ‘Wanted: A Blacksmith who understands Plantation Work’: Artisans in Maryland, 1700–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (October 1993): 766. 7. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 389. 8. Ibid., 389 and 390–91. For more on the cottage system, see Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1988), 106–43. 9. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 392. 10. Ibid., 391 and 393. 11. Ibid., 391, 393, 394, and 395. 12. Lucy Simler, “The Landless Worker: An Index of Economic and Social Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104 (April 1990): 172–74, and 165. 13. G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence and Impact, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1997), 22. 14. See Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure, 117–23, for a description of enclosure procedure. 15. John E. Crowley, “ ‘In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry’: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House,” Winterthur Portfolio 32 (Summer–Autumn, 1997): 169–88, 182–85; Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure, 130–32. 16. Thomas Chamberlain’s accounts with his hired laborers were documented in a memorandum book (1789–1790) that was maintained by Chamberlain and a separate account book that was maintained by Robert Lloyd Nicols, an executor of Chamberlain’s estate. Both books are part of the Sarah D. Griffen, Clyde Griffen, and Margaret Thibault Collection of Goldsborough Family Papers located at the Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, Maryland. Chamberlain’s memorandum book is inventoried as “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (MSA SC 2085-B4-F1). The executor’s record is located in a folder that contains three account books and is inventoried as “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (MSA SC 2085-B4-F12). The

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Notes to Pages 27–32

collection descriptions do not detail the contents of the folders or otherwise indicate that these record sets contain documents that pertain to the estate of Thomas Chamberlain. Therefore, I have decided to cite these two account books as “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), and “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate) to clarify for the reader that this record set actually holds documents pertinent to hiring practices on the estate of Thomas Chamberlain. 17. Talbot County Register of Wills (Wills, Original), 1785–1794, MSA C1925–4, Thomas Chamberlain, 1790, p. 175–82. Also, Heads of Families of the First Census Taken in the Year 1790, Maryland (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), 114. 18. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, February 12, 1790. Payments in this account book are in Maryland currency and expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence. 19. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, July 27, 1790. 20. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, August 26, 1790. A note in the account book indicates that planters generally paid five or six shillings per diem for reaping “in this part of the country.” 21. “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate), MSA SC 2085-B4-F12, p. 5. 22. Richard Tilghman IV to William Tilghman, August 9, 1799, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659 (box 14, folder 10). 23. “Agreement between Robert Lloyd Nicols and Bennett Shields,” MSA SC 2085-B35-F11, January 7, 1811. 24. Papers of the Tilghman Family, Georgetown University Libraries, Special Collections, Colonel Richard Tilghman, account C, folio 73 (Family Expenses), folio 140, 152, 156 (Overseer James Wilkins), folio 97, 106 (Overseer David Lesage), and folio 125 (Overseer William Ring). 25. Payments to former slaves, including Daph, are listed in “RLN Account Books, 1786– 1810” (Chamberlain Estate), MSA SC 2085-B4-F12, p. 15. 26. “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate), MSA SC 2085-B4-F12, p. 5. 27. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, January 15, 1790. 28. Payments to Flora are recorded in “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1. Walsh, “Slave Life,” 187. 29. Chamberlain instructed his executors to apprentice all the enslaved children under fourteen, but he did not name the children. Talbot County Register of Wills (Wills, Original), 1785– 1794, MSA C1925–4, Thomas Chamberlain, 1790, p. 175–82. 30. Daniel, Isaac, Peter, Kitt, Bett, Hannah, and Poll were all free African Americans hired by Chamberlain and his executors, but none of them were mentioned in his will, and none received legacies. 31. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, May 30, 1789; April 25, 1790; and April 27, 1790. 32. Richard Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 49–82. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 430. Jean Butenhoff Lee, Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 253. Russo, “Edward Lloyd, Model Planter,” 85. 33. My description of hiring practices on Upper Eastern Shore plantations is based on analysis of five account books. The Richard Tilghman ledger is part of the Tilghman Family Papers, 1793– 1940 (MS 2600) housed at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. The other account books are part of the Sarah D. Griffen, Clyde Griffen, and Margaret Thibault Collection of Goldsborough Family Papers (MSA SC 2085) housed at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis.

Notes to Pages 32–36

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34. In 1800 Richard Tilghman appeared as the head of a household that included two white women and fifty-eight slaves. Population Schedule, Second U.S. Census, Talbot, Maryland, 75. 35. Richard Tilghman, ledger (1790–1806), MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 59. Payments in the Tilghman accounts are in Maryland currency and expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence. 36. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 124. 37. Lois Green Carr and Lorena Walsh, “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 175–88. 38. The slaves belonging to Robert Lloyd Nicols are listed in an 1815 inventory that appears in “RLN Account Books, Inventory, 1808–1809, 1815–1818,” (MSA SC 2085-B4-F3). Hereafter, I will cite this book as “RLN Account Books, Inventory.” To compare the sex ratios of Eastern Shore plantations with plantations in Virginia, see Richard Dunn, “After Tobacco: The Slave Labour Pattern on a Large Chesapeake Grain-and-Livestock Plantation in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, Early Modern Atlantic Economy, chapter 12 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 361. 39. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 68 (Old Grace), p. 25; (Negroes Memory and Nan), p. 10 (Negro Eve). See the accounts of Betty Greenfield, a white spinner, and Nan, a black spinner. Richard Tilghman, ledger, p. 98 (Betty Greenfield) and p. 25 (Nan). 40. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, pp. 68, 25, and 10. 41. “RLN Account Books, Inventory,” MSA SC 2085-B4-F3, September 1815 and August 1816. 42. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 25. 43. Walsh, “Slave Life,” 187. 44. “RLN Account Books, Inventory,” MSA SC 2085-B4-F3, April 1818 (Foster); June 1815 (Grace); August 1818 (Howard); and June 1815 (Downes). 45. Walsh, “Slave Life,” 187. 46. “RLN Account Books, Inventory,” MSA SC 2085-B4-F3, August 1816; “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Account), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, p. 10. Robert Henry Goldsborough’s accounts were documented in an account book that is divided into two parts. The front of the book includes a record of accounts with tenants, merchants, and hired laborers, and I will cite references to this part of the book as “Goldsborough Accounts.” The back of the book includes a record of cash payments arranged by date. I will cite this half of the book as “Goldsborough Cash Accounts.” This account book has been inventoried as “Thomas Chamberlaine Account Book, 1818– 1821” in the Sarah D. Griffen, Clyde Griffen, and Margaret Thibault Collection of Goldsborough Family Papers located at the Maryland State Archives (MSA SC 2085-B3-F3). It is unclear why an account book with entries from the 1820s was linked to Thomas Chamberlain, who died in 1790. The book details grain production at Plain Dealing, a Talbot County farm owned by Robert Lloyd Nicols but evidently managed and maintained by Robert Henry Goldsborough after Nicols died in 1815. The account book is one of several records in the collection that document Goldsborough’s management of the farm and its tenant ( Jeremiah Valiant). I have decided to cite “Thomas Chamberlaine Account Book, 1818–1821” as “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts) and “TC Account, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts) to clarify for the reader that this account book is the source for all information about Robert Henry Goldsborough’s hiring practices. 47. These payments to Greenberry appear in “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 10, 16, 17, 18, 30, and 31. 48. For example, Joseph Caldwell paid taxes on “work steer” and Edward Delehay on “yoke oxen.” Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–10, 1817, Election District 2, Caldwell, p. 6; MSA C1831–11, 1817, Election District 3, Delehey, p. 10.

168

Notes to Pages 36–42

49. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–11, 1817, Election District 3, Abraham Dobson, p. 7. 50. The seven sawyers were James Dobson (1823), Chester Sewell (1823–24), Pompey Gibson (1823), Isaac Gray (1823–24), Abraham Denny (1823), and the team of Jere Banning and Toby Martin (1821–22). “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085B3-F3, pp. 14, 21, 24, and 23. 51. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, John Dobson and Chester Sewell, p. 21. 52. Daniel Caul worked for Tilghman between 1793 and 1799. Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 8. 53. See Daniels, “Wanted,” 750–53. Richard Tilghman hired six white carpenters, eight white blacksmiths, and six white brick makers between 1790 and 1806. 54. Kelly’s account appears in Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, pp. 26, 37, and 51. 55. Jacob Ross did not have an account with Goldsborough, but he appeared repeatedly in the cash accounts. For his collection of money from tenant Jeremiah Valliant and Captain Vickars, see “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 1 and 5. 56. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 1, 2, and 9. 57. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, p. 4. 58. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 1, 5, and 8. 59. Dickson J. Preston, Talbot County: A History (Centreville: Tidewater Publishers, 1983), 144–53. 60. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, p. 10. 61. Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser, January 21, 1817, p. 4. 62. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–1, 1804, Election District 1, John Dorrell, 40. 63. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA SC1880–43, 1809, p. 105 ( John and Maria Webster to John Dorrell). Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–4, 1804, Election District 1, John Webster, 33. 64. Values taken from the Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–9, 10, 11, and 12, 1817, Election Districts 1, 2, 3, and 4. 65. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–7, 1813, Election Districts 1, John Dorrell, p. 3. 66. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C-6, 1804, Election District 3, Isaac Maccary, p. 21; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, James Pritchart, p. 26. 67. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, Sam Demby, p. 9; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, Joseph Bantom, p. 2. 68. In Baltimore, African American property owners also constructed tenant homes or took in boarders. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 102. 69. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–13, 1826, Election District 1, Henry Toomey, p. 42. 70. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1832–3, 1832, Election District 3, Isaac Mackary (Maccary), p. 24. White property owners also built “tenant” or “tenement” houses that they leased to free African Americans. Richard Ray, for example, built three tenement houses at his lot on Aurora Street in Easton. See Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–13, 1826, Election District 1, p. 36.

Notes to Pages 42–52

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71. Totals compiled from analysis of free African American property owners listed in Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA SC1831–9, 10, 11, and 12, 1817, Election Districts 1–4. By comparison, Emma Jones Lapsansky found that in 1838 Philadelphia 10% of the black population in Philadelphia owned 70% of the African American community’s wealth. See Lapsansky, “ ‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 96. 2. Migration 1. Kenneth L. Carroll, “An Eighteenth-Century Episcopalian Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission of Slaves,” Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 145. 2. T. Stephen Whitman and Barbara Jeanne Fields have both argued that Maryland slaveholders felt more threatened by African American mobility than by slave revolt. T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007), 127; Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 71. The Black Codes are analyzed more fully in chapter 4 of this book. 3. Whitman, Challenging Slavery, 32. 4. Ibid., 98–99. 5. “An Act to prohibit the transportation of absconding slaves to Hayti, or elsewhere,” Archives of Maryland, 1824 Session Laws, chapter 85. On Virginia law, see Whitman, Challenging Slavery, 189. 6. James Hollyday to William Tilghman, August 15, 1797, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659. 7. “An Act to prevent the inconveniencies arising from slaves being permitted to act as free,” Archives of Maryland, 1787 Session Laws, chapter 33; “An Act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” Archives of Maryland, 1796 Session Laws, chapter 67, section 17; “A further supplement to an act, entitled, An act to prevent the inconveniences arising from slaves being permitted to act as free,” Archives of Maryland, 1822 Session Laws, chapter 115, section 6, “Exception.” 8. “A Further additional supplement to an act, entitled, An act relating to negroes,” Archives of Maryland, 1807 Session Laws, chapter 164. 9. “An Act to prevent the unlawful exportation of Negroes, and Mulattoes, and to alter and amend the Laws concerning Runaways,” Archives of Maryland, 1817 Session Laws, chapter 112, section 6. Also, “A supplement to an act entitled, An Act to prevent the unlawful exportation of negroes and mulattoes, and to alter and amend the laws concerning runaways,” Archives of Maryland, 1824 Session Laws, chapter 171, section 1. 10. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855 (New York: Dover, 1969), 286. 11. Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 14–15. The government of Delaware adopted antikidnapping laws in 1787, 1789, and 1793, and the Virginia legislature passed antikidnapping laws in 1788. See Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 85–86; and Tommy S. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790–1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 99. 12. The Baltimore County Court issued 350 certificates between 1810 and 1816. The 350 certificate bearers represented only 4% of the free black population of Baltimore in 1820. Leroy Graham, “Manumitted Free Blacks in Baltimore, 1806–1816,” Maryland Magazine of Genealogy 5 (Spring 1982): 8–22.

170

Notes to Pages 52–58

13. In Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties both the county court and the office of Register of Wills recorded Certificates of Freedom. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), Jacob, 1805, MSA C1843–1, p. 169. In 1807 the Queen Anne’s County Clerk issued the first “official” freedom certificate to Harry in 1807. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1366–1, 1807, p. 1. 14. On average 39 free African Americans applied for certificates each year between 1800 and 1829 in Talbot County, but in 1807, 120 applied for certificates, and in 1819, 119 applied for certificates. 15. See Donald Sweig, introduction to Registrations of Free Negroes (Fairfax, Virginia, 1977), 3; and Howard Bodenhorn, “A Troublesome Caste: Height and Nutrition of Antebellum Virginia’s Rural Free Blacks” Journal of Economic History 59 (December 1999): 980. 16. Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 252. 17. Essah, House Divided, 113 and 110–11. 18. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–35, William Frazier to Thomas Cole, 1794, p. 259. Cole’s freedom certificate was the first I found recorded in Talbot County records. 19. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–1, John Maccary and Levin Maccary, 1814, pp. 75 and 74; Grace Maccary and James Maccary, MSA C1843–2, 1818, pp. 77 and 90; Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Maccary Family, p. 30. 20. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Maria Pipes and Peter Pipes, 1827, p. 55; Eliza Pipes, 1828, p. 59; and Henny Pipes, 1829, p. 65. 21. G. W. Offley, A Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley, a Colored Man, Local Preacher and Missionary (Hartford, Conn., 1859), 11. 22. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790– 1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 110. 23. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joseph Martin, 1831, p. 97. Talbot County Court Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Jacob Gibson, 1822, p. 19 and 49. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joe Boyer, 1832, p. 130. Jacob Gibson, Joe Boyer, and Joseph Martin were all quite young when they applied for their first certificates; they were twenty-two, twentythree, and thirty years old, respectively. Their youth affirms the argument that young people were more likely to seek certificates to facilitate migration. 24. Emily Green’s letter to the Talbot County Register of Wills is a miscellaneous document that was tucked into the Account of Sales. Talbot County, Register of Wills, Accounts of Sale, 1818–1821, MSA C 1818–20. Melvin Patrick Ely cites additional examples of free African Americans or their employers requesting copies of freedom papers by mail in Virginia. Ely, Israel on the Appomattox, 253. 25. “An Act, entitled, An additional supplement to an act, entitled, An act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” Archives of Maryland, 1805 Session Laws, chapter 66. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 61–62. 26. “An act relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” Archives of Maryland, 1831 Session Laws, chapter 323, section 2. 27. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joseph Martin, 1831, p. 97, and Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joe Boyer, 1832, p. 130. 28. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 18. 29. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 12. 30. Percentage compiled from Graham, “Manumitted Free Blacks in Baltimore,” 8–22. 31. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 94, esp. footnote 4; Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, 21.

Notes to Pages 59–65

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32. Nash, Forging Freedom, 136. 33. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, 55–56. See Stephen Vincent, “Southern Origins, ca. 1760– 1830,” Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765– 1900, chapter 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–25. 34. See Christopher Phillips, “The Dear Name of Home: Resistance to Colonization in Antebellum Baltimore” Maryland Historical Magazine 91 (Summer 1996): 194. “Report of the Committee on Colored Population,” House of Delegates, Public Documents, February 26, 1840, MSA SC M3171, pp. 1125–26. 35. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 283. 3. Family 1. See, for example, Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750– 1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Wilma Dunaway, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. For a brief history of coartación, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (2007): 659–92. 3. Notwithstanding the terms of the Pennsylvania Act of Abolition, approximately 67% of the male term slaves and 75% of the female term slaves in Philadelphia were released from slavery after they reached twenty-six years of age. Gary Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 164–65. 4. Petition of Charles L. Gardiner [Gardner] to the County Court, St. Mary’s County, Maryland, May 20, 1833, Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, Series 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1777–1867, part B (Maryland), reel 5, frame 0778. 5. T. Stephan Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 96. Historian Jessica Millward found that 83% of the manumission deeds filed in Anne Arundel County between 1785 and 1808 similarly required a term of service before freedom. See Millward, “ ‘A Choice Parcel of Country Born’: African Americans and the Transition to Freedom in Maryland, 1770–1840” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), 202. 6. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 101 and 134–35. 7. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Elisha, 1827, p. 116. 8. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Anne Reese, 1837, pp. 188–89. 9. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1800–1802, MSA C1880–39, George Dawson to Peter and Rose Chesnor, 1801, p. 80. 10. “An Act to ascertain and declare the condition of such Issue as may hereafter be born of Negro or Mulatto Female Slaves, during their servitude for Years, and for other purposes therein mentioned,” Archives of Maryland, 1809 Session Laws, chapter 171. Talbot County Court Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, 1827, Mary Ann Jones, 114.

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Notes to Pages 65–74

11. William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave) (Springfield, Mass.: L. M. Guernsey, 1853), 5. 12. On the development of the business of slave trading, see Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 13. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1794–96, MSA C1880–35, Robert Lambdin to negro George Kersey, 1795, p. 221. 14. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1800–1802, MSA C1880–39, James Earle, Jr. to negro Richard Bowlin, 1802, p. 435; George Dawson to Peter and Rose Chesnor, 1801, p. 80; and Robin Chamberlain to negro Richard Bowlin, 1802, p. 434. 15. Rev. Noah Davis, A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, a Colored Man. Written by Himself at the Age of Fifty-Four (Baltimore: J. F. Weishampel, Jr., 1859), 29. 16. Ibid., 31. 17. Ibid., 37–40. 18. T. Stephen Whitman explains the relationship between the price of children and the timing for purchase and manumission in Price of Freedom, 134–36. 19. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1823–25, MSA C1880–55, John Tilghman to negro David Barnett, 1824, p. 66; Talbot County Court (Land Records), 1828–30, MSA C1880–58, Samuel Roberts to negro Hestor Benson, 1828, p. 111. 20. Offley, Narrative, 4. 21. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 133. 22. Davis, Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, 31, 57, and 58. 23. Edmond Kelley, A Family Redeemed from Bondage; Being Rev. Edmond Kelley, (the Author,) His Wife, and Four Children (New Bedford, Mass.: The Author, 1851), 11. 24. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1806–8, MSA C1880–42, Sarah Hollyday to Nanny Occomy, 1808, p. 467, and Sarah Hollyday to Jack, 1808, p. 468. 25. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1800–1802, MSA C1880–39, George Dawson to Peter and Rose Chesnor, 1801, p. 80. 26. See Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 557–58. 27. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 84–87. 28. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–1, Caroline Haskins, 1814, p. 123, Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Anna Haskins, 1827, p. 54, and Joe Haskins, 1822, p. 23. Other Haskins family members who filed for Certificates of Freedom include, Perry Haskins, MSA C 1843–1, 1810, p. 84, and Esther Haskins, 1812, p. 78. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–1, Benjamin Haskins, 1811, pp. 44–45; Joseph Haskins, 1817, pp. 61–62; Rachel Haskins, 1811, pp. 42–43; Rachel Haskins, 1826, p. 52; Daphne Haskins, 1817, p. 80; and Violet Haskins, 1833, p. 82. 29. Alan Kulikoff, “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 243–44, and 255. 30. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), 38. 31. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 303. Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 132. 32. “An Act Relating to the People of color in this State,” 1831 Session Laws, chapter 281, section 9.

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33. Greenbury Nicols and the ten members of his household were included in the 1832 Census of Negroes. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Greenbury Nicols Family, p. 14. 34. Fourth U.S. Census 1820, Talbot County, Maryland; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore City, Maryland. Fifth U.S. Census, 1830, Talbot County, Maryland; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore City, Maryland. 35. Offley, Narrative, 5–6. 36. Shepard Krech III, Praise The Bridge That Carries You Over: The Life of Joseph L. Sutton (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 448–52. 37. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–2 (1798); C1831–4, 5, and 6 (1804); C1831–6 and 7 (1813); C1831–9, 10, 11, and 12 (1817); and C 1831–13, 14, and 15 (1826). Talbot County Board of County Commissioners (Assessment Record) 1832–96, MSA C1832–1, 2, 3, and 4 (1832). Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List) 1812–30, MSA C1825–1 (1813), C-1825–6 (1822–24), C-1825–7 (1825, 1830). 38. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1813–14, MSA C1880–46, Henry Nicols to Robert Moore, administrator for Grace Brooks, 1814, p. 504 (details terms of ninety-nine-year lease). Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1804, Election District 3, MSA C1831–6, Grace Brooks, pp. 5 and 6, and Ned Brooks, p. 5. Ned Brooks, Population Schedule, Second U.S. Census, Talbot County, Maryland, 1800, 76. 39. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1813, Election District 3, MSA C1831–8, Hannah Brooks, p. 3. 40. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1817, Election District 3, MSA C1831–11, Hannah Brooks, p. 3, and Amy Brooks, p. 3. 41. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1832, Election District 3, MSA C1832–3, Amy Brooks, pp. 1 and 3. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Amy Brooks Family, p. 32. Amy Brooks’s family included herself (50 years old), Lucretia Brooks (23), David Brooks (20), and ten-year-old George Brooks. 42. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Lydia Hamilton/Hambleton, p. 39; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1826, Election District 3, MSA CM 985–14, Lydia Hamilton, p. 13. 43. Offley, Narrative, 7. 44. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1804–12, MSA C1870–2, Charles Dorsey to Peter Edmondson, 1810, pp. 205–6. 45. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1840–53, MSA C1870–7, James, Charles, and Thomas Hemsley to Levi Duke, 1855, pp. 39–44. 46. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1804–12, MSA C1870–2, Henry to Matthew and Elizabeth Greentree, 1810, pp. 180–81. 47. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1822–40, MSA C1870–6, Charles Peck to Thomas Bennet, 1823), p. 50. 48. Offley, Narrative, 8. 49. Ibid., 7 and 8. 50. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 60. 51. Erica R. Armstrong, “Negro Wenches, Washer Women, and Literate Ladies: The Transforming Identities of African American Women in Philadelphia 1780–1854” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000), 43. 52. Eugene B. McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton, eds., From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 162.

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Notes to Pages 83–86

4. Dependency 1. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 135. 2. Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1983), 14–38; Michael Craton, “Reshuffling the Pack: The Transition from Slavery to Other Forms of Labour in the British Caribbean, 1780–1890,” chapter 18, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1997), 356–413. 3. Anne Marie Lee-Loy, “The Chinese Are Preferred to All Others: Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Chinese in Trinidad and British Guiana,” Asian Studies Review [Great Britain] 27 (2003): 219. 4. This chapter focuses on the legal code as a tool for creating a class of dependent laborers. It is not an analysis of criminal activity on the Eastern Shore and does not include a discussion of the crime rate or white criminal activity. 5. “An Act to prevent free negroes from selling any corn, wheat or tobacco, without having a license for that purpose from a justice of the peace,” 1805 Session Laws, chapter 80. “An Act relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” 1831 Session Laws, chapter 323, section 9. The 1805 proposal that would have required freedmen to acquire a license to own farm implements was part of a larger bill that required freedmen to apply for a license to own guns and dogs. See David S. Bogen, “The Maryland Context of Dred Scott: The Decline in the Legal Status of Maryland Free Blacks, 1776– 1810,” American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990): 404–7, esp. footnotes 97 and 101. 6. “An Act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” 1796 Session Laws, chapter 67. “An additional supplement to the act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” 1825 Session Laws, chapter 161. “An act relating to Public Roads in Talbot County,” 1825 Session Laws, chapter 196. 7. “A further supplement to an act, entitled, an Act for the better regulation of apprentices,” 1808 Session Laws, chapter 54, section 2. “An act authorizing the Judges of the Orphans Court to bind out the Children of Free Negroes and Mulattoes,” 1818 Session Laws, chapter 189. In 1811 Delaware passed a similar law that empowered the county courts to indenture free black children if their parents could not prove their ability to maintain them. See Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 116–17. 8. On prison reform in early America, see Adam J. Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 9. “An Act for the more effectual punishment of criminals, Laws of Maryland,” 1789 Session Laws, chapter 44. According to James D. Rice, “The Wheelbarrow Act empowered justices to sentence those convicted of assault, manslaughter, petty larceny, sodomy, breaking and entering (excluding burglary), receiving, forgery, or perjury to work on the roads, although they could also choose to impose the old punishments.” James D. Rice, “Crime and Punishment in Frederick County and Maryland, 1748–1837: A Study in Culture, Society, and Law” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1994), 369. 10. Sentencing guidelines for the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore are included in “An Act concerning Crimes and Punishments,” 1809 Session Laws, chapter 138, especially section 9. The 1809 legislation permitted courts to sentence slaves to the penitentiary, but the legislature banned this practice in 1818. 11. “A Supplement to the act, entitled, An act concerning Crimes and Punishment,” 1817 Session Laws, chapter 72. 12. “A further act and additional supplement to an act, entitled, “an act concerning crimes and punishments,” 1825 Session Laws, chapter 93. “An Additional Supplement to the Act concerning Crimes and Punishments,” 1826 Session Laws, chapter 229. “An Act concerning crime and punishment,” 1835 Session Laws, chapter 200, section 3.

Notes to Pages 86–93

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13. See Essah, House Divided, 111. 14. “An Act to restrain the evil practices arising from negroes keeping dogs, and to prohibit them from carrying guns or offensive weapons,” 1806 Session Laws, chapter 81. 15. “An Act respecting free negroes,” 1801 Session Laws, chapter 91. “A further supplement to the act, entitled, An act relating to servants and slaves,” 1808 Session Laws, chapter 81. 16. Rice, “Crime and Punishment,” 288. 17. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–49, William Melay to Henry Toomey, 1816, pp. 220–24. 18. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record) 1826, Election District 1, MSA C1831–15, Henry Toomey, p. 99; Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, Toomey (box 17, folder 2). 19. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–9, 1814, p. 124. 20. Whites in Pennsylvania also associated African Americans with property crimes. Between 1780 and 1800, 75% of the African Americans prosecuted in Philadelphia courts were accused of property crimes. See Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 249–55. 21. Kenneth L. Carroll, “An Eighteenth-Century Episcopalian Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission of Slaves,” Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 143. 22. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–9, 1792, p. 3; Talbot County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1857–14, 1811, p. 97. Marvin E. Gettleman, “The Maryland Penitentiary in the Age of Tocqueville, 1828–1842,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (September 1961): 277. Robert M. Saunders, “Crime and Punishment in Early National Virginia: Richmond, Virginia, 1784– 1820,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 ( January 1978): 33–44, 43fn25. 23. James D. Rice, “The Criminal Trial before and after the Lawyers: Authority, Law, and Culture in Maryland Jury Trials, 1681–1837,” American Journal of Legal History 40 (1996): 457. 24. Rice, “Criminal Trial,” 464 and 470. 25. I am grateful to Dr. T. Stephen Whitman for providing me with his database of Maryland Pardon Papers, 1787 to 1827. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, 1815, Toomey (box 17, folder 2). 26. 1825 Session Laws, chapter 93. 27. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–26, 1826, Toomey (box 26, folder 73). 28. 1826 Session Laws, chapter 229. 29. Talbot County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1857–14, 1810, p. 44. Although the court clerk did not identify John Crouch by race, Crouch may have been a freedman, because many free black men were identified as “laborers.” 30. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–46, John Dorrell to Josiah Stangasser, 1813, p. 521; and, John Dorrell to Peter Harris, 1814, p. 518. That property was later returned to black ownership when Samuel Gibbs, a freedman, acquired it in 1833. 31. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–44, Tristram Thomas to Henry Toomey, 1811, pp. 520 and 521. 32. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–55, Henry Toomey to James Thomas, 1824, p. 416. 33. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–35, Isaac Wynn schedule, 1795, p. 403. Wynn’s property consisted of household goods and farm tools, including scythe blades, an axe, and a hoe. Wynn’s tools suggest that he was a smallholder or tenant. 34. Population Schedule. Second U.S. Census, Talbot County, Maryland, 1800, 80. Two of the three black residents were slaves and may have worked at the poorhouse. 35. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings) 1792–1847, MSA C1899–1, p. 83. In 1813 the trustees limited Fanny Adams’s pension to ten dollars a year. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings) 1792–1847, MSA C1899–1, p. 91.

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Notes to Pages 93–102

36. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings) 1792–1847, MSA C1899–1, pp. 95, 101, and 114. 37. General Court of the Eastern Shore (Criminal Docket) 1786–1795, MSA S476–2, John Cockran, September 1789 and April 1791. 38. Queen Anne’s County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1387–3, 1817, p. 45. Leaverton was charged along with Philip Coursey and Peregrine Peters. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–19, Samuel Briley (box 19, folder 44), and William Austin (box 19, folder 23). 39. Hugh Matthews to William Tilghman, November 30, 1793, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659 (box 16, folder 21). 40. James Hutchings to William Tilghman, May 20, 1794, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP MS659 (box 10, folder 8). 41. Niles Weekly Standard, May 9, 1818. 42. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790– 1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 230–31. 43. Brother Joseph P. Mobberly, Society of Jesus Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., “Diary Part 1,” (box 1, folder 1) pp. 111–13. 44. Talbot County Court (Court Minutes), MSA C1891–6, 1797, pp. 34, 35–36, and 39. 45. John Valliant to William Tilghman, January 13, 1801, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP MS659 (box 14, folder 10). 46. Queen Anne’s County Court (Minutes), MSA C1451–13, 1791, p. 13. 47. Queen Anne’s County Court (Minutes), MSA C1451–14, 1799, p. 66. 48. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–11, 1828, p. 41. 49. Queen Anne’s County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1387–3, 1826, p. 377, and Queen Anne’s County Court (Minutes), MSA C1451–20, 1826, p. 151. 50. Maryland State Papers (Series A) 1795, MSA S1004–106, “Petition to the Governor from Sundry Inhabitants of Queen Anne’s County,” August 15, 1795. 51. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–22, Margaret Johns, 1822, p. 131. 52. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–8, 1804, p. 292. 5. Community 1. “A Letter from General Harper, of Maryland, to Elias B. Caldwell, Esquire, Secretary of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color, in the United States with Their Own Consent” (Baltimore, 1817), reprinted in Eric Robert Papenfuse, The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), 100. 2. Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen. To Which is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793: With an Address to the People of Colour in the United States Written by Himself. Electronic Edition. Documenting the American South. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000. 3. Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, 55 and 59. 4. G. W. Offley, A Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley (Hartford: S.n., 1859), 20. 5. On Black Theology, see Timothy L. Smith, “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” Church History 41 (December 1972): 497–512. On the origins of the AME Church and identity, see William H. Becker, “The Black Church: Manhood and Mission,” in African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (New York: Routledge, 1997), 177–200.

Notes to Pages 103–106

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6. On Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, and their history with the MEC, see Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000), 140–51 and 232. On Daniel Coker and the founding of the AME Church, see Daniel Alexander Payne, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1891; repr., New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1969), 88–89. 7. Charles Goldsborough to William Tilghman, June 9, 1797, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659 (box 11, folder 24). 8. On the Jesuits in Maryland, see Thomas Richard Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1634–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Peter C. Finn, “The Slaves of the Jesuits in Maryland,” (MA thesis, Georgetown University, 1974). Records for the St. Inigoes plantation in St. Mary’s County are extensive and well used, but there is no comparable set of records for the Jesuit plantations on the Eastern Shore. 9. Jean Libby, From Slavery to Salvation: The Autobiography of Reverend Thomas W. Henry of the AME Church ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 6. 10. Libby, From Slavery to Salvation, 67–68. Talbot County baptismal and marriage records include the names of slaves baptized and married by Jesuits. 11. “Fr. Aloysius Mudd detailed description and evaluation of White Marsh as a site for Novitiate,” July 29, 1830, Archives, Maryland Province, Society of Jesus, Special Collections, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (box 62, folder 18). 12. Quote appears in Kenneth L. Carroll, “Religious Influences on the Manumission of Slaves in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot Counties,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (1961): 176–97, 178. On the Nicholites, see William H. Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769–1820. (Wilmington: Published for the Peninsula Conference of the United Methodist Church by Scholarly Resources, 1984), 8–9. On Talbot County Quakers and manumission, see Kenneth L. Carroll, “An Eighteenth-Century Episcopalian Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission of Slaves,” Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 139–50. 13. Cited in Kenneth L. Carroll, “Voices of Protest: Eastern Shore Abolition Societies, 1790– 1820,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84 (Winter 1989): 350–59. On Bartlett’s school, see 355–56. 14. General Assembly House of Delegates (Assessment Record) 1783, MSA S1161–99, Talbot County, Third District, pp. 5 and 11. 15. The Methodist movement began as an evangelical movement within the Anglican Church but evolved into a distinct denomination in 1784, the Methodist Episcopal Church. As an evangelical movement and a formal denomination, Methodism relied on itinerant preachers who organized “societies” of Methodist disciples who would study scripture in classes organized by the itinerant. These societies grew into established churches within the MEC denomination. For more on the origins of the Methodist denomination in early America see Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton University Press, 2000). 16. Quote taken from Andrews, Methodists, 125–26. 17. Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America, from 1773 to 1813, Inclusive (New York: Daniel Hitt & Thomas Ware, 1813), 104. 18. Ibid., 147. 19. Francis Asbury, Journal and Letters, vol. 1, ed. Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton (London: Epworth Press, 1958), 581–82. 20. Asbury, Journal and Letters, 296. Dee Andrews argues that desegregated love feasts were uncommon. The MEC decided early to segregate such events when “black participation reached what whites perceived to be a critical mass.” Methodists, 133–34. 21. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Account), p. 11. 22. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–26, 1826 (box 26, folder 73). 23. Finn, “Slaves of the Jesuits,” 109 and 71.

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Notes to Pages 106–112

24. Carroll, “Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission,” 144. 25. Ibid., 142. For more on James Berry and his antislavery activities, see Kenneth L. Carroll, “The Berry Brothers of Talbot County, Maryland: Early Antislavery Leaders,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84 (1989): 1–89. 26. Andrews, Methodists, 126–27. 27. Harry V. Richardson, Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as It Developed among Blacks in America (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976), 66. 28. Ibid., 67–75. 29. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–19, William Austin, 1819 (box 19, folder 23). 30. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–19, William Austin, 1819 (box 19, folder 23). 31. Asbury, Journal and Letters, 655–56. 32. This account of the origins of Easton Bethel AME Church comes from a broadside published by the congregation at the end of the nineteenth century, “Brief Church History of the Bethel AME Church, Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, 1818–1900,” MSA M1390. I have compared the details of this account with information found in other church histories and Talbot County government records, including the Land Records and Church Charter Record. 33. Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Years 1773 to 1813, vol. 1 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane), 1840. 34. Libby, From Slavery to Salvation, 51. 35. “Brief Church History,” MSA M1390. 36. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–57, Abraham Dobson (trustee) to Joseph Chain, 1827, p. 73. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–58, Henry Catrup to Joseph Chain, 1829, p. 427. This last document indicates that in 1820 Catrup had granted a ninetynine-year lease to the Bethel Society trustees, but I could not find such an indenture. 37. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–59, James and Susan Parrott to Jacob Howard, William Benson, John, William and Pere Dobson (trustees), 1830, p. 400. 38. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 5–15; and Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 265–67. 39. Nash, Forging Freedom, 148n35. 40. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790– 1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 139. 41. Henry Newman, A. Harris, A. Harkless, and Levi Henry were all listed in the “Brief Church History” as “incorporators” of the church, but I could not find any of them in the public records. I have inferred that Joseph Stevens and William Benson were freedmen because they were listed as trustees of the Bethel Society in the 1827 deed. All of the other leaders appear in two or more public records. 42. Information about the assets of the trustees is compiled from Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List) 1813–1816 and 1822–1824; and, Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1813, 1817, 1826, and 1832. 43. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–1, Nace Gibson, 1812, p. 77, and Edward Adams, 1809, p. 72. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–2, Washington Dorrell, 1819, p. 117. 44. Washington Dorrell, Population Schedule, Fourth U.S. Census, Talbot County, Maryland, 1820, 12. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1826, MSA C1831–14, Election District 2, Washington Dorrell, p. 9.

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45. Becker, “Black Church,” 180. 46. John and Josiah Dobson appear in the Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes), 1832, MSA C1841–1, p. 12. “J. Dobson” is listed among the earlier preachers of the Easton Bethel AME Church in “Brief History,” and Josiah Dobson appears as a trustee in Talbot County Court (Church Charter Record), MSA C 1845–1, January 7, 1851. 47. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 139n65. 48. For examples of that process at work in the Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, see Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 65–69. 49. Emma Jones Lapsansky, “ ‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 107. 50. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 163–64. 51. Ibid., 172–75. 52. Payne, History, 24 and 42. 53. The Hole-in-the-Wall AME class was mentioned in the minutes of the 1824 AME Annual Convention. Payne, History, 42. 54. Ivytown is listed as both Ivytown and Ivory Town in nineteenth-century records. Ivytown is the contemporary spelling, and I have opted to use modern spellings of all the town names, including Ivytown. 55. Richard Allen’s letter to the Easton Bethel AME Church appears in Payne, History, 49. 56. Richard S. Neuman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 210–37. 57. Albert J. Raboteau, Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 92–94. 58. Payne, History, 19 and 34. 59. Ibid., 49. 60. Ibid., 52–53. 61. According to the brief history published by the Easton Bethel AME Church, the local trial preachers served the church from 1818 until 1849, when J. Edward Hawkins was appointed the first “regular pastor.” 6. Recession 1. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–8, 1813, District 3, pp. 13 and 14. The names of Isaac Maccary’s eight children are listed in the deed of land issued by Isaac Maccary (Mackery) to Sam Maccary (Mackery). Talbot County Court (Land Records), 1826, MSA C1880–56, p. 450. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes), 1832, MSA C1841–1, Isaac Maccary, p. 30. 2. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 176. 3. Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain: Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2001), 276. 4. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 274. 5. The quote appears in Dickson J. Preston, Talbot County: A History (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1983), 171. 6. Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820.” In Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the

180

Notes to Pages 121–129

Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, 170–99. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 194–195, and 198. 7. Letter from Frisby Tilghman to James Hollyday, February 18, 1821, Hollyday Papers, 1677–1905, MHS MS 001317, reel 4, p. 196. 8. The Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser, January 21, 1817. 9. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 206. 10. Preston, Talbot County, 190–91. 11. Letter from James Hollyday to Mrs. James Hollyday, April 26, 1819, Hollyday Papers, 1677–1905, MHS MS 001317, reel 2, p. 120. 12. The Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser, April 28, 1818. William Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy: Austin Woolfolk, A Case Study,” Civil War History 3 (1977): 198. 13. Jack Lawrence (Calvin) Schermerhorn, “Against All Odds: Slavery and Enslaved Families in the Making of the Antebellum Chesapeake,” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2008), 69. 14. William Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy: Austin Woolfolk, a Case Study,” Civil War History 23 (September 1977): 200–201. 15. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 149. 16. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790– 1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 179. On the almshouse and its services, see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 198–213. 17. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 180–81. 18. Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn and Socio-economic Decline,” Journal of Social History 5 (Spring 1972): 185. 19. Cited in T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 156–57. 20. Paul A. Gilje, “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the Anglo-American Mob Tradition,” Journal of Social History 13 (Summer 1980): 551 and 556. 21. Quote appears in Rockman, Scraping By, 257. In Philadelphia a white mob attacked an African American neighborhood over a three-day period in August 1834, destroying a black church and fatally injuring at least one freedman. 22. James W. Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860 (New York: Columbia University, 1921), 184. 23. Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” 187 and 189–190. 24. On Philadelphia, see Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 93–120. On Baltimore, see Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 104–9. 25. First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth U.S. Census, 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, Talbot County, Maryland; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore City, Maryland. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 15 and 60. 26. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 70. 27. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–25, 1825, Richard Jones (box 25, folder 99). Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–9, 1816, p. 161 (conviction of Robin and Poll). Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, 1816, Robin and Poll (box 17, folder 94). 28. The burning of Judy Parrot’s hut is detailed in a pardon appeal for Frederick Kemp. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, 1815, Frederick Kemp (box 17, folder 32). 29. In 1813 a judge ordered the trustees to commit Thomas Roden, a freedman who suffered from an unstated affliction, but the trustees refused (apparently without consequences), offering

Notes to Pages 130–139

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instead to issue an annual pension of $16 to Roden. The pension was increased to $20 in 1814. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings), MSA C1899–1, 1792–1847, pp. 95, 101, and 114. 30. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–12, 1817, District 4, George Warner, pp. 7 and 15. 31. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings), MSA C1899–1, 1792–1847, pp. 94–95, 109, and 111. 32. Rockman, Scraping By, 207. 33. See T. Stephen Whitman, “Orphans in City and Countryside in Nineteenth-Century Maryland,” in Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America, ed. Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 52–70, for a comprehensive treatment of apprenticeship in nineteenth-century Maryland. My conclusions are based on analysis of a sample of 306 apprenticeship contracts filed in Talbot County Court over fourteen years between 1808 and 1861. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), MSA C1870–2, 1804– 1812; MSA C1870–6, 1822–1840; MSA C1870–7, 1840–1853; and MSA C1870–8, 1853–1864. 34. See note 33 for the basis for my conclusions. 35. My conclusions are based on analysis of free African American property owners listed in Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List), MSA C1825–6, 1822–1824, and MSA C1825–7, 1825 and 1830; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–7 and 8, 1813; MSA C1831–9, 10, 11, and 12, 1817; and MSA C1831–13, 14, and 15, 1826. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), 1807–1815 and 1815–1828, MSA C1843 1–2; and Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom) 1806–1819 and 1819–1832, MSA C1842 1–2. 36. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), 1807–1815, MSA C1843–1, Boston, 1812, p. 96. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), 1815–1828, MSA C1843–2, William Boston, 1816, p. 39. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, William Boston, p. 2. 37. “James Bantom, Sr.” appears in the Talbot County Assessment Record (1813 and 1817), and Joseph Bantom appears in the 1804, 1813, 1817, 1824, and 1825 assessment records. 38. The Chaplains appear in the Talbot County Assessment Record (1804, 1813, 1817, 1822, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1832). 39. See note 35 for the basis of my conclusions. 40. Cited in Christopher T. George, “Mirage of Freedom: African Americans in the War of 1812,” Maryland Historical Magazine 91 (Winter 1996): 431. 41. Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (New York, 1837), 469. 42. Maryland State Papers (Series A) 1715–1847, S1004–128 (MdHr 6636–95-277), Council Chamber to Lieutenant Colonel Frisby Tilghman and Alexander Magruder, April 18, 1812. 43. The Maryland legislature adopted resolutions in 1817, 1819, 1831, and 1832 in support of efforts of the U.S. Congress to transport free African Americans to West Africa and Haiti. 44. Robert Henry Goldsborough, “Draft of Talbot County freemen’s memorial to Assembly in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” MSA SC 2085-b35-f13. 45. Draft of Talbot County freemen’s memorial, MSA SC 2085-b35-f13. 46. “An Act Relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” 1832 Session Laws, chapter 323. 47. Brenda J. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 264 and 270–73. 48. T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007), 171–72. 49. Ibid., 210. 50. Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 71. 51. For a thorough treatment of Richard Allen’s views on colonization, see Richard Neuman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 183–208.

182

Notes to Pages 139–146

52. William S. Watkins’s editorial appeared in Genius of Universal Emancipation under the pen name “A Colored Baltimorean” on November 27, 1829, and was reprinted in William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: or An Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. II. (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832): 54. 53. Cited in Whitman, Challenging Slavery, 142. 54. Watkins, “Appeal to Colored Citizens,” 52. 55. Maryland Colonization Journal (1835–1840), MSA M11070, “Schooner Columbia sailed from Baltimore for Cape Palmas, 17th May 1838,” April 1840. 56. The Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society to the Members and the Public (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1836), “Literal copy of a letter from Jacob Gibson, a coloured man, to Messrs. Latrobe and McKenney,” August 31, 1835, pp. 57–58. 57. The Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society to the Members and the Public (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1837), “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” pp. 29–31. 58. Fourth Annual Report, “Extract of Letter to Moses Shepperd, Esq. from Stepny Harper, a Coloured Man,” December 24 1835, pp. 57–58. Maryland Colonization Journal, MSA M11070, December 1, 1836, “Extract of a Letter from Thomas Jackson to Mr. Moses Sheppard”; “Extract of a letter from Wm. Polk to Mr. Moses Sheppard”; and “Copy of a letter from Eliza Jane Wilson.” Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Levi Norris to the Rev. Richard B. F. Gould,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60; “Letter from Jacob Gibson,” August 31, 1835, pp. 57–58; and Fifth Annual Report, “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” pp. 29–31. 59. Passenger lists appear in the Maryland Colonization Journal, April 1840. Note that the passenger list for the brig Ann excluded the ages of thirteen passengers, and so the total number of children on board may have been greater. 60. Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Levi Norris to the Rev. Richard B. F. Gould,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60. 61. Richard L. Hall offers a history of the Cape Palmas settlement in On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2008). Hall does not argue for a single motivation for emigration, but in his profiles of individual migrants he suggests that livelihood issues were likely the single most important factor for many colonists. He argues that the composition of the migrants changed between the 1820s, when most settlers were freeborn individuals with skills and education, and the 1830s, when most settlers were newly manumitted slaves, lacking education, skills, or capital, and thus unlikely to succeed as smallholders in Maryland. See Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 23. 62. The Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society to the Members and the Public (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1839), 10. 63. Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Stepny Harper,” December 24, 1835, pp. 57–58; “Letter from Jacob Gibson,” August 31, 1835, pp. 57–58; “Letter from Levi Norris,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60. Maryland Colonization Journal, MSA M11070, “Letter from Eliza Jane Wilson,” December 1, 1836. Fifth Annual Report, “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” pp. 29–31. 64. Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Levi Norris to the Rev. Richard B. F. Gould,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60. Conclusion 1. John Dixon Long, Pictures of Slavery in Church and State; Including Personal Reminiscences, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, etc., etc., with an Appendix, Containing the Views of John Wesley and Richard Watson on Slavery (Philadelphia: Author, 1857), 8. Electronic Edition. Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.

Notes to Pages 146–158

183

2. Long, Pictures of Slavery, 24–25. 3. Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 66–67. 4. Long, Pictures of Slavery, 24. 5. As a border state, Maryland was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). The state emancipated its slaves with the revision of the state constitution. The Maryland general emancipation went into effect on November 1, 1864. 6. Cited in Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 126–27. 7. Richard Paul Fuke, “The Work of Children,” in Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999). 8. Fuke, “Work of Children,” 70. 9. On November 9, 1864, The United States Army put emancipated children in Maryland under “special military protection,” ordered the end of “refettering,” and authorized U.S. Army provost marshals to hear the complaints of African American families. In 1867 the Supreme Court determined that the 1860 Apprenticeship Law was in violation of the Civil Rights Act (1866). See Fuke, “Work of Children,” 78–82. 10. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 318–28. 11. Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 200–202. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 318–28. 12. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 366–70. 13. David W. Guth, “The Bay Bridge Metonymy: How Maryland Newspapers Interpreted the Opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge,” American Journalism 25 (Spring 2008): 62. 14. As an example of an effort by one municipality to balance the economic interests of commercial agriculture, the tourism industry, environmentalists, historic preservationists, and residents, see Talbot County, Maryland, “Comprehensive Plan,” Talbot County Courthouse, http:// www.talbotcountymd.gov/index.php?page=Comprehensive_Plan. 15. Ian Urbina, “In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution,” New York Times, November 29, 2008. 16. Robert Bussel, “Taking on ‘Big Chicken’: The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance,” Labor Studies Journal 28 (2009): 1–24. The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance has since merged with likeminded activists across the nation to form the National Poultry Justice Alliance. 17. United Food and Commercial Workers, “UFCW Principles on Immigration Reform,” http://www.ufcw.org/issues/immigration/principles_reform.cfm. 18. Steven Greenhouse, “Priest vs. ‘Big Chicken’ in Fight for Labor Rights,” New York Times, October 6, 1999. 19. The Office of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforces federal immigration law. Since 2004 the DHS has extended immigration enforcement power to select local police departments according to terms established between the ICE and the municipality. Police departments working in partnership with ICE are authorized to identify undocumented immigrants in order to facilitate deportation. Some communities welcome the partnership whereas others have opted out of the program, charging that local police are already overburdened. Citizens in so-called sanctuary cities do not allow local law enforcement to share information about an immigrant’s status (legal or illegal) with federal agents or to otherwise enforce federal immigrations laws. The practice is better understood in the American West than in the East. Armando Navarro, a community organizer and activist, surveys sanctuary-inspired ordinances that were adopted by various communities in The Immigration Crisis: Nativism, Armed Vigilantism, and the Rise of a Countervailing Movement (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2009), 287–97. On Maryland and sanctuary laws, see Steve Hendrix, “Takoma Park Stays Immigrant ‘Sanctuary’,” Washington Post, October 30, 2007.

184

Notes to Pages 158–159

20. Pamela Constable and Lisa Rein, “To Illegal Immigrants, Maryland Feeling Less Friendly,” Washington Post, March 25, 2008. Lisa Rein and Nick Miroff, “Maryland License Confusion for Illegal Residents: Interpretations of Driving Law Vary,” Washington Post, May 29, 2009. 21. Constable and Rein, “Illegal Immigrants,” Washington Post, March 25, 2008.

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Index

abolition, 47, 61–62, 82–83, 94, 104–5, 111, 125–26, 138–40, 146 Abolition Society (Maryland), 94 Abolition Society (Pennsylvania), 125, 138 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 18–19 Adams, Abraham, 93 Adams, Edward, 112 African Friendly Society, 80 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church Baltimore Bethel AME, 111–13, 116 community branches, 102–3, 109–11 discord, 114–16 Easton Bethel AME, 98, 102, 109–17, 160 female membership, 112–14 formation, 107–10, 117 free African Americans, role for, 109–10, 113, 116 –17, 150 leadership positions, 44, 111–14, 116 –17 Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), relationship with, 103, 105, 107–10, 113, 115

Philadelphia Bethel AME, 111, 113, 116 –17 prayer groups, 109, 113, 115 psychological role, 102 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, 81, 115 agriculture crop diversification, 5–7, 16 –17, 121 enclosure, 25–26 experimentation, 121 implements, 9, 33, 84 labor, role of, 4, 6 –9, 17–18, 22–27 land ownership, 4, 14, 25, 84 seasonal work, 20–23, 28, 30–33, 38, 57, 150, 155–56 soil quality, 1–2 truck farming, 17, 38, 123, 151 See also individual crops Allegany County, 18 Allen, Richard, 100–103, 106 –7, 110–11, 113–16, 138–39 Allen, William, 5

204

Index

almshouses, 15, 125, 129–30 American Colonization Society, 133, 138, 140, 152 American Revolution, 5, 10, 12–17, 20, 30, 47, 71 Amherst County, 52 Anglicans, 3, 4, 13 Annapolis, 3, 4, 38, 135 Anne Arundel County, 18 apples, 38 apprenticeships, 23, 31, 36, 82–85, 130–31, 152, 154 Asbury, Francis, 105–8 assimilation, 100, 138 Atlantic trade, 1, 7, 17, 59, 119–20 Austin, Alice, 107–9 Austin, William, 93, 108 bacon, 38, 84, 88 Ball, Charles, 133 Baltimore, 38 Bethel AME, 111–13, 116, 126 Certificates of Freedom, 51–52, 57–58 convict labor, 3 economic growth, 17 free black population, 58, 75 grain trade, 17, 38, 121–23 labor, demand for, 46, 126 merchants, 2, 5, 17, 48, 58, 66 migration to, 54–58, 126, 149, 152 mutual aid societies, 81, 113, 129 racial violence, 126, 152 recession, impact of, 124–26 shipping industry, 58–59, 120 slavery, use of, 18, 37, 58, 124 Banning, Jere, 37 Bantom, James, 42, 132 barbers, 22, 37, 39–40, 44, 84, 109, 134, 149 barges, 2, 36 Barnes, Jacob, 65 Barnett, David, 67 Barnett, Henny, 57 Battle of Trafalgar, 119 Bennet, Thomas, 79 Benson, William, 110 Berry, James, 106 –7 Bight of Benin, 8 Black Codes, 83, 87–88, 97, 134, 151 blacksmiths, 9, 23, 36, 37

Blake, Adam, 33 Bordley, John Beale, 22–24, 27, 32, 43, 124, 146, 148 Boston, William, 132 Bowdle, Henry, 70 Bowlin, Richard, 66 Boyer, Joe, 56 –58 Briley, Samuel, 93 Brown, John, 137 Bryan, Arthur, 19 Bullet, Anthony Thomas, 91 butchers, 22, 37, 84, 134, 149, 159 Butchery, Robert, 3 Butler, Robert, 29 Button, Eve, 65, 69 Calvert County, 142, 143 Campbell County, 52 Canada, 16, 138–40, 146 canoes, 2, 15, 36 Cape Palmas, 59–60, 135, 140–43 Caribbean, 6, 10, 16, 45, 58, 59, 74, 83, 120, 133, 147 Caroline County, 2, 4, 14, 59, 70–71, 104, 127, 141, 156 carpenters, 23, 37, 41, 125 Catholicism, 3, 13–14, 103–4 Caul, Daniel, 37 Cecil County, 3, 94 Census of Negroes, 74 Center of Excellence in Food, Science, and Technology, 156 Certificates of Freedom, 49–57, 70, 149, 158 Chain, Joseph, 39–41, 44, 109–10, 113–14, 116 –17, 134, 146, 159 Chamberlain, Thomas, 27–31 Chaplain, Phil, 42, 132 Charles County, 18 cherries, 38 Chesapeake Bay, 1, 3, 5, 10, 14, 16, 47, 66, 119–20, 133, 155, 157 Chesapeake Bay Bridge, 155 Chester County, 25, 27 Chester River, 1, 2, 12 Chestertown, 6, 17, 155 chickens, 34, 156 –57 China, 83 cholera, 125 Choptank River, 1, 2

Index Christianity, 3, 101–2, 106 –7, 112, 113, 138–39 Civil War, 61–62, 136, 145, 147 Clay, Edward, 152 coartación, 62 Coastal Ecology Teaching and Research Center, 156 Cockran, John, 93 Coker, Daniel, 102–3, 106 –7, 110, 113, 138–39 Cole, Thomas, 53 colonization, 59, 74, 100, 126, 133–44, 152 Columbia, 140 Committees of Correspondence, 12 Connecticut, 55, 63, 81 Continental Army, 10, 12 Continental Congress, 10 Cooker, Daniel, 92 Cooper, Joseph, 36 coopers, 36, 37 corn, 2, 6, 7, 10, 17, 26, 84, 120, 156 Corn Laws, 120 Corsica, Blake, 12–13 cottagers, 23–27, 31, 32, 43 cotton, 47, 66, 67, 123, 124 Council of Safety (Maryland), 10, 12–13, 15 Coursey, Rachel, 68 crabs, 2, 154, 157 Crouch, John, 91 Cuba, 16, 147 Cuffee, Paul, 138–39 Daughters for the County Angola Beneficial Association, 80 Davis, Kit, 89 Davis, Noah, 66 –68 Dawson, George, 69 Dawson, Impey, 65, 69 Delaware, 3, 4, 6, 13, 17, 46, 52, 57, 73, 86, 103, 115, 136 Delaware Bay, 2, 16 Delaware River, 7, 120 Delmarva Peninsula, 1, 2, 11, 103, 121, 154 Demby, Sam, 42 Diallo, Ayuba “Job” Suleiman, 8–9 District of Columbia, 47, 48, 136, 153, 155 ditchers, 22 Dixon, Joseph, 96 Dobson, Abraham, 36, 111, 112 Dobson, Artridge, 98 Dobson, James, 37

205

Dobson, John, 110, 112 Dobson, Josiah, 112 Dobson, Perry, 110, 112 Dobson, William, 110, 112 dockworkers, 124, 132 Dorchester County, 12, 156 Dorrell, John, 39, 41, 91, 109, 117, 134 Dorrell, Washington, 109–14, 116 –17, 146, 159 Dorsey, James, 78–79 Douglass, Frederick, 50, 72, 76, 124 Dover, 154 Downes, Hector, 34 Earle, James, 66 Earle, Richard J., 16 Eastern Shore General Advertiser, 21, 40, 49, 122 Easton, 38–41, 44, 54, 77, 89, 98, 102, 109–17, 124, 150, 155 Edmondson, Peter, 78–79 Elk River, 1, 10 emancipation, 13, 19, 46, 62–63, 81–83, 106, 133, 137–39, 146 –48, 152–54 Embargo Act, 120, 124 embargoes, 10, 14, 120, 124 Enclosure Acts, 25 England, 4 agricultural trade, 6, 16 –17, 26 convicts, 3 cottagers, 23–27, 31, 32, 43 emancipation, 82–83 grain trade, 6, 10, 16 –18 merchants, 2 Parliament, 25–26, 82, 119 Royal Marines, 133 Royal Navy, 119–20 slave liberators, 47, 133 Slavery Abolition Act, 82–83 wage laborers, 23–25 Episcopalians, 87–88, 106 –7, 157 Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs, 22–23, 27, 32 Everett, Joseph, 18, 105, 108 executive clemency, 89–92 Fairfax County, 52 families autonomous households, 71–76, 78, 80, 149–50, 153 children, role of, 78–81, 130–31

206

Index

families (continued) freedom alternative strategies, 68–69 inclusive structure, 71–73 labor contracts, role of, 78–79 marriage, 3–5, 73, 81, 97, 104 networks, 4–5, 80 nuclear structure, 71–75 recession, impact of, 131–32 reciprocity principle, 76 –78, 80, 153 slave life, 8–10, 28, 62, 71–73 slave separation, 30–31, 61–62, 65–71, 81, 158–59 surnames, use of, 69–71 famines, 6, 25 Farmers Bank of Maryland, 39 Federalists, 126 Female Benevolent Society, 80 Female Mutual Aid Society, 81 Fender, Demby, 87, 89 Fenwick, Edward, 64 Fields, Barbara Jeanne, 137 fishing, 2, 154, 156 flour, 6 –7, 10, 16, 26, 120 Forest, The, 5 Fort McHenry, 120 Foster, Maria, 34 France, 6, 10, 16, 119, 120 Frederick County, 86 –87 Free African Society, 80–81 freedom papers. See Certificates of Freedom French Revolutionary Wars, 17, 25 Fugitive Slave Act, 19, 158 Gabriel’s Rebellion, 47, 135 Gambia, 8 Gardner, Charles, 64 Garrettson, Freeborn, 18, 105, 108 General Assembly (Maryland), 49, 51, 84–86, 94, 126 General Assembly (Virginia), 52 Genius of Universal Emancipation, 139 Georgia, 123, 140 Germany, 25, 119, 124, 126, 151 Gibson, Jacob, 56, 59, 92, 141–43 Gibson, Nace, 111–12 Goldsborough, Charles, 89–90, 93, 103 Goldsborough, Mary, 65 Goldsborough, Robert Henry, 35, 37–39, 106, 121, 134, 136 –37, 151

Grace, James, 34 grains Baltimore market, 17, 38, 121–23 European trade, 6, 10, 16 –18, 20 masculine labor, 33, 55 railroads, impact of, 123 recession, impact on, 120–21 slavery, impact on, 10, 17–18, 20 tobacco crop, comparison with, 6 –9, 17 Graves, Horatio, 110 Great Britain. See England Green, Emily, 56 Green, William, 65, 68 Groome, Samuel, 41 Grosses plantation, 32–33, 37 Guiana, 59 Guinea-Bissau, 8 Haddaway, William, 56 –57 Haiti, 47, 59, 138–39 Hamilton, Lydia, 78 Harmony, 142 Harper, Robert Goodloe, 100 Harpers Ferry, 137 Harris, Peter, 91 Harris, Sam, 89 harrows, 9, 21, 33 Hartford, 55, 81 Harwood, Thomas, 107–8 Haskins, Caroline, 70 Haskins, Violet, 70–71 Havre de Grace, 120 hay, 17, 21, 28, 35, 36, 66 Henry, John, 94–95 Henry, Thomas W., 104, 110 Hercules, Adam, 111, 114–16 Hermitage, 4, 29 Hindman, William, 70 HMS Leopard, 119–20 Hole-in-the-Wall, 41–43, 77, 78, 102, 114, 117, 127–28, 149, 158 Hollyday, Henry, 16 Hollyday, James, 48, 121, 123 Hollyday, Sarah, 68–69 Holton, Solomon, 65 household chores, 10, 30, 34, 55, 76 Howard, Jacob, 34, 110 Howe, William, 10 Hutchings, James, 94

Index Iberian Peninsula, 6, 120 immigration, 2–4, 25, 27, 119, 124, 126, 157–59 indentured servants, 2, 4, 23, 35, 79, 130, 151 Indiana, 59 Intolerable Acts, 12 Ireland, 3, 25, 119, 124, 126, 150 Italy, 6 Ivytown, 102, 111, 114–17, 149, 158 Jackson, Thomas, 141–42 Jamaica, 16 Jefferson, Thomas, 120, 135 Jesuits, 3, 94–95, 103–4, 106 –7 Johns, Margaret, 97 Jones, Richard, 129 Jump, Isaac, 96 Kelley, Edmund, 66 –68 Kelly, Joseph, 37 Kemp, Frederick, 129 Kennard, John, 21–22, 121 Kent, Joseph, 90 Kent County, 2, 6 –7, 48, 92, 127 Kersey, George, 66 kidnapping, 15, 50, 54, 93–95 labor agriculture, role in, 4, 6 –9, 17–18, 22–27 apprenticeships, 23, 31, 36, 82–85, 130–31, 152, 154 child labor, 31–32, 35–36, 78–81, 85, 124, 130–31 compensation, 21–22, 29–30, 32–38, 78–79, 119, 124, 153 contracts, 48–49, 78–79, 83 convicts, 3, 22, 85–86 gender roles, 9, 14, 21–22, 31, 33–35, 55 household chores, 10, 30, 34, 55, 76 migration, effect of, 45–46, 58–60 non-agricultural work, 36 –44 recession, impact of, 124–26 seasonal work, 20–23, 28, 30–33, 38, 57, 150, 155–56 shortages, 45–48, 124–26 See also slavery Lafayette, 142 Lambdin, Robert, 66 Latrobe, John H.B., 141 laundresses, 17, 55

207

Leaverton, John, 93 Lee, Thomas Sim, 12 legislature (Maryland) apprenticeships, 36, 84–85 Black Codes, 83, 87–88, 97, 134, 151 child labor, 36, 85 criminal codes, 85–89, 99 emancipation, 137–38, 152–54 escapee legislation, 47–50, 91 expulsion, 135–37 General Assembly, 49, 51, 84–86, 94, 126 license requirements, 84 manumission regulation, 63–65 migration laws, 57, 135 Nat Turner Rebellion, response to, 135 poor-relief act, 15 slave dependency, 83–87, 90–92, 99, 151–52 vagrancy laws, 15, 45, 84, 152 legislature (Virginia), 135–36 Liberia, 59, 135, 138, 140, 146 livestock, 2, 12, 17, 25, 29, 91, 111, 118 Lloyd, Edward, 121, 123 Lloyd, Philemon, 5 Long, John Dixon, 145–46, 151–53 Lord Baltimore, 3–4 Loudon County, 73, 136 Louisiana Purchase, 135 Lowe, William, 96 Loyalists, 12–15 loyalty oaths, 13 lumber, 1, 2 Lynchburg, 52 Maccary, Isaac, 41–42, 53–54, 118–19 Maccary, James, 54, 119 Maccary, Samuel, 118–19 Magahey, John, 95 manumission, 18–19, 22–23, 27, 31–32, 45, 49, 62–65, 87, 99, 106 –7, 136, 148 marriage, 3–5, 73, 81, 97, 104 Martin, Joseph, 56 –58 Martin, Lettice, 42 Martin, Toby, 37 Maryland Agricultural Society, 121 Maryland Fish and Wild Life Cooperative Research Unit, 156 Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS), 59, 74, 135–36, 140–43, 152 masons, 36

208

Index

Massachusetts, 63, 67, 81 Matthews, Hugh, 94 McKenney, William, 141 Mental and Moral Improvement Society, 113 Methodism, 13–15, 18, 44, 94–95, 103–9, 157 Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), 103, 105, 107–10, 113, 115 migration Certificates of Freedom, effects of, 53–54 circular, 56 labor, effect on, 45–46, 58–60 mobility, value of, 45–46, 49–50, 54–56, 135, 138 recession, caused by, 126 –28 white frustration, 45, 49 Miles River, 1, 2 militias, 3, 12, 13, 15, 133 Miller, Jeremiah, 116 Mississippi, 123 Mississippi River, 59, 124 Mobberly, Joseph, 94–95, 106 Moore, Andrew, 36 Mudd, Father Aloysius, 104 mutual aid societies, 80–81, 111, 113, 129 Nanticoke River, 1 Napoleon Bonaparte, 119 Napoleonic Wars, 17, 25, 123 Natchez, 121, 123 Native Americans, 81 negrophobia, 134 New Bedford, 67, 81 New Hampshire, 63 New Jersey, 5, 10, 13, 63, 97, 103, 147 New Orleans, 47, 95, 124 New York, 46, 63, 115, 147–48 newspapers, 39, 44, 94, 126 Nicholites, 104 Nicols, Greenbury, 75 Nicols, Henry, 77 Nicols, Robert Lloyd, 29, 33–35, 39 Niger, 9 Niles Weekly Standard, 94 Norfolk, 58–59, 155 Norris, Levi, 142–43 North Carolina, 94 Oath of Fidelity, 13 oats, 34, 84

Occomy, Nancy, 68 Ocean City, 155 Offley, G. W., 54–55, 67–68, 73–74, 78–81, 100–102 Ohio, 59 Orien, Harry, 108 oxen, 9, 36 Oxford, 6, 14, 17, 155 oysters, 2, 31, 36, 154, 155, 157 Panic of 1819, 123 Panic of 1837, 125 pardons, 89–92 Parliament, 25–26, 82, 119 Patriots, 12–15 Payne, Daniel, 100, 117 Peacock, Captain, 14–15 peasants, 25–27 peddlers, 22, 32 penitentiaries, 85–91, 93, 96, 145 Pennsylvania, 3, 4, 13, 15, 17, 22, 25, 33, 46, 63, 138, 146 –47 Philadelphia Bethel AME, 111, 113, 116 –17 British occupation, 10, 15 Eastern Shore connection, 5–6, 20 elite families, 3–4, 20, 111, 113 free black population, 75–76, 111 labor, demand for, 46, 126 merchants, 2, 6 –7, 17, 48 migration to, 57–58, 126 mutual aid societies, 80–81, 111, 113, 129 recession, impact of, 124–26 shipping industry, 58–59 surnames, use of, 69 Pipes, Eliza, 53, 55 Pipes, Peter, 53 plantations, 14, 31–32, 44, 49, 72, 84, 104, 154 plows, 9, 21, 28, 33, 154 Polk, William, 142 poorhouses, 15, 92–93, 129–31 pork, 29, 37, 84 Portugal, 6, 16, 120 poultry, 26, 29, 155–58 poverty, 15, 26, 102, 122, 151, 157 prayer groups, 109, 113, 115 Presbyterians, 3, 13 Price, Jerry, 89–90 Prince George’s County, 104

Index Pritchart, James, 42 Protection Society of Maryland, 94 Protestants, 3 Quakers, 2–3, 13–14, 18, 48, 103–6 Queen Anne’s County, 2, 3, 5, 12, 15, 50–52, 55–56, 74–75, 94, 96, 98, 127–29 Queen Anne’s War, 5 Queen Esther AME Church, 116, 160 Raboteau, Albert, 115 railroads, 123, 154–55 Rakes, Mary, 118–19 Reburk, Andrew, 96 Reconstruction, 61 Redbourne, 4 Reese, Ann, 65 Rhode Island, 63 rice, 6, 9 Rice, James D., 86 Ridout, Henrietta, 68 Rigby, Philip, 70 Rodda, Martin, 14 Roden, Thomas, 93 rootless people, 15, 16, 149, 159 Ross, Jacob, 37–38 Royal Marines, 133 Royal Navy, 119–20 rye, 10, 84 saddlers, 23 sailors, 119–20, 124, 135 Saint-Domingue. See Haiti Sassafras River, 1, 2 sawyers, 22, 37 scythes, 9, 21, 33 Senegambia, 8–9 Seven Years’ War, 6 Sewell, Chester, 37 Sharp Street Church, 113, 126 Shaw, Joshua, 96 sheep, 16, 36, 88 shoemakers, 37, 92, 125 sickles, 9, 33, 34 Sierra Leone, 8 skiffs, 2, 15 slavery abolition, 47, 61–62, 82–83, 94, 104–5, 111, 125–26, 138–40, 146

209

apprenticeships, 23, 31, 36, 82–85 Certificates of Freedom, 49–57, 70, 149, 158 colonization, 59, 74, 133–44, 152 cultural disorientation, 8, 71 demographics, 7, 17–18, 46, 71–73, 97, 128 deprivation, 8, 14 emancipation, 13, 19, 46, 62–63, 81–83, 106, 133, 137–39, 152–54 escape, 15, 18, 47–48, 72, 91, 96 –97, 133 family life, 8–10, 28, 62, 71–73 family separation, 30–31, 61–62, 65–71 Fugitive Slave Act, 19, 158 grains, impact of, 10, 17–18, 20 illegal trade, 93–95 interstate trade, 123, 151 kidnapping, 15, 50, 54, 93–95 labor, role in, 7–10, 17–18, 22–23, 27, 48–49, 123–24, 147–48 manumission, 18–19, 22–23, 27, 31–32, 45, 49, 62–65, 87, 99, 106 –7, 136, 148 mortality rates, 8, 10, 71 purchasing freedom, 62–68, 136, 159 rebellions, 46 –47, 95, 133 religious practice, 101–6, 110–11 surnames, use of, 69–71 term slavery, 63–64, 68, 95, 124, 147 thievery, 86 –88, 91–92, 145 tobacco production, effect of, 4, 7, 9 transatlantic voyage, 7–8 whippings, 85–87 working conditions, 9–10, 14 Slavery Abolition Act, 82–83 Sleeper, John, 104 smallholders, 14, 18, 23, 25–29 Smith, Moses, 54, 92 Society of Friends, 106. See also Quakers Somerset County, 3, 12 South Carolina, 9, 46 soybeans, 156 Spain, 6, 10, 16, 62–63, 119, 120 Spencer, Isaac, 96 spinning, 14, 16, 30, 33–34 St. Inigoes Manor, 94 St. Mary’s County, 15, 18, 64, 94 St. Michaels, 2, 36, 41, 155 St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 87–88, 106 St. Thomas, 80 Stamp Act, 12 Stangasser, Josiah, 91

210

Index

Stanley, George, 82–83 Stevens, Hester, 42 Stevens, Sampson, 42 strawberries, 123 sugar, 6, 16, 38 surnames, 69–71 Susquehanna River, 17 tailors, 23, 125 Talbot County, 2–7, 12, 15, 18, 36, 50–60, 70, 74–77, 88, 95, 101, 126 –29, 156 Talbot County Trustees of the Poor, 129 tar, 2 tariffs, 120 taxation, 13–14, 54, 84, 156 Tea Act, 12 Tender, Ben, 88 Tennessee, 66, 68 Third Haven, 104–5 Thomas, Phaeton, 96 Thomas, Tristram, 89–90 Tilghman, Frisby, 121 Tilghman, James, 5 Tilghman, Richard, 5, 29, 32–33, 37 Tilghman, Tench, 5 Tilghman, William, 5, 48, 94, 96, 103, 146 –48 tobacco, 2–4, 6 –10, 16, 84 Tolson, James, 129 Toomey, Anthony, 89 Toomey, Henry, 42, 87, 89–92, 99 Toomey, James, 68 Tories, 14 tourism, 155–56 Trappe, 41–43, 77, 93, 117, 127–28, 150, 158 Treaty of Ghent, 120 Trinidad, 83 truck farming, 17, 38, 123, 151 Tubman, Harriet, 96 Tudas, Jonathan, 115 Turner, Nat, 52, 133–36 Underground Railroad, 96 Union Church of Africans, 115

United Food and Commercial Workers, 157 University of Maryland at the Eastern Shore, The, 156 USS Chesapeake, 120 vagrancy, 15, 45, 84, 152 Valliant, Nicholas, 87, 90–91 Vermont, 63 Virginia, 2, 4, 9, 13, 33, 47, 58, 88, 135–36 Wafers, John, 96 wagoners, 135, 149 Walker, David, 100 Walker, James, 68 War of 1812, 47, 57, 120, 126, 132–33, 144 War of Independence. See American Revolution Warner, George, 130 Washington, D.C., 67, 102, 120 Washington, George, 5 Washington County, 18 Watkins, William S., 139–40 Webster, John, 41 Wesley Church, 115–16 West Africa, 9, 59, 74, 135 West Indies, 6, 10, 140 Western Shore, 4, 95 wheat, 2, 6 –7, 9–10, 12, 16, 21, 32, 84, 156, 159 whippings, 85–87, 148 Whitman, T. Stephen, 64 Wilmington, 2, 6, 48, 102, 113, 115, 154 Wilson, Eliza Jane, 142–43 Wilson, Elizabeth Jacobs, 61–62 Winder, Levin, 89 Woolfolk, Austin, 124 Woolman, John, 104 Worcester, 81 Work. See labor Work, Alexander, 94 Wye House, 4 Wynn, Isaac, 92 yeomen, 23, 27, 151, 152