Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery In

By: Delano Greenidge-Copprue

Source:

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

Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery In

Although it was by and large a slave city, Baltimore boasted a large free black population, which included Frederick Douglass's wife, Anna Murray, who worked for a postman on the same street where Douglass lived with the Auld family. In the first half of the nineteenth century the free black population of Baltimore increased 3,000 percent, as African Americans were moving to many urban locations for better opportunities and more freedom.

Indeed, while Baltimore served as a bastion of freedom for many African Americans in the antebellum period, it was a city surrounded by slavery. To the south of Baltimore, in Prince George's County, where tobacco was a chief crop, the population in 1790 consisted of 11,176 slaves, or 52 percent of the county's population; the proportion changed little before 1850. Meanwhile, north and west of Baltimore the numbers of both free and enslaved African Americans steadily increased over the same period, as slavery gradually declined. To the east of Baltimore, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the number of slaves in Caroline County between 1790 and 1850 decreased from 2,057 to 808. Along with the decrease in numbers of slaves came an increase in free blacks—from 421 to 2,788 in the same period of time.

In Baltimore between 1790 and 1810 the number of slaves grew to outstrip the number of whites in the city. This demographic shift occurred largely because planters moved to the city and brought their slaves with them. Between 1810 and 1830 the number of slaves in Baltimore declined from 4,700 to around 4,100, while the overall population in the city rose from 46,000 to 80,000. Of this 80,000, some 15,000 were free blacks, up from 5,600 in 1810. The free black population swelled during this time largely because of manumission or “term slavery,” the process by which an enslaved person could work for a stipulated period of time to gain his or her freedom. On the whole, Baltimore was a city of complex labor relations, where free and enslaved African Americans worked in close proximity.

Above all, Baltimore was a city of opportunity for black Americans. Black men and women could work for wages or even establish their own businesses. In 1836 Anna Murray and her mother, Mary, ran a restaurant on Buxton Street. Frederick Douglass, new to the city from plantation life, was struck by the degree of opportunity to be found there. Baltimore was home to a class of slaves called “city slaves,” whose work was not as brutal as concentrated plantation labor, and for whom extreme physical punishment did not occur as often. In his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life, Douglass comments:

"A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation. He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation."

(p. 38)

Douglass's notions of economic self-reliance most likely began in Baltimore, where he experienced glimmers of economic dignity; he lauded this sense of freedom in the Narrative:

"There I was immediately set to calking, and very soon learned the art of using my mallet and irons. In the course of one year from the time I left Mr. Gardner's, I was able to command the highest wages given to the most experienced calkers. I was now of some importance to my master. I was bringing him from six to seven dollars per week. I sometimes brought him nine dollars per week: my wages were a dollar and a half a day. After learning how to calk, I sought my own employment, made my own contracts, and collected the money which I earned."

(p. 83)

An industrial port city, Baltimore offered free and manumitted African Americans work in shipyards not only as caulkers but also as brick makers, rope makers, shipbuilders, ironworkers, carpenters, and shoemakers—all trades that gave them and their families decent footing in the antebellum South. While life in Baltimore presented African Americans with economic opportunity, it remained a city of struggle, as racial tensions with regard to employment were heightened. Douglass recalled:

"Many of the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown out of employment."

(p. 81)

In the riot that ensued in this instance, Douglass's “left eye was nearly knocked out.”

Douglass lived with Sophia and Hugh Auld in Baltimore on three occasions, and with each stay he acquired more of the skills he needed to live the life of a free man. Douglass first came to Baltimore in 1826 from the Eastern Shore. He found the Auld household comforting; there he was treated not as a pig but as a child, being fed not out of a trough but on a plate, at a table. For a while he received instruction in reading and writing from Sophia Auld, but the lessons ceased once Hugh learned about them. In October 1827 Douglass returned to Aaron Anthony's plantation because Anthony had died and all his property, including Douglass, had to be collected and redistributed. This valuation was heartbreaking to Douglass: “Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination.” After valuation, in November 1827, Douglass returned to Baltimore again to live with the Aulds. They moved to Philpot Street the following year, after Hugh Auld opened his own shipyard, where Douglass apprenticed as a ship's caulker. Douglass would remain with the Aulds until March 1833.

During this second stay in Baltimore, Sophia Auld's reading of the Bible, along with Hugh Auld's apprenticing of Douglass in Baltimore's shipyards, provided him with the stirrings of literacy that he would need to become one of the greatest orators and writers of his day. At the age of twelve Douglass entered Knight's Bookstore and bought The Columbian Orator for fifty cents. Reading and memorizing passages from the Orator, Douglass began to learn the cadences of some of the greatest rhetoricians in Western letters. In 1831, after converting to Christianity, Douglass joined the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church; he became familiar with William Lloyd Garrison and associated abolitionists through reading the local papers. Upon his return to the Eastern Shore in March 1833, Douglass could not settle down to plantation life. He opened a Sunday school and taught his fellow slaves how to read the Bible—while also forging passes to help him and four of his friends escape from slavery. When the plan was discovered, Douglass was jailed in Easton, Maryland; after enduring the threat of being sold south into more severe slavery, Douglass was returned to Baltimore in April 1836 with the promise, made by Hugh Auld, that if Douglass mastered the caulking trade, he would be granted his freedom on his twenty-fifth birthday.

During this, his third visit to Baltimore, Douglass lived on Fells Street with the Aulds; he attempted to obtain room and board outside the Auld household, a common practice in the city, but was denied on two occasions. Douglass had developed a sense of himself as a free man, and living with the Aulds clouded that vision. However, his living under the open sky of Baltimore, with its free black population, and even carrying money in his pocket, was not exclusively positive; twice, while working in the shipyards, Douglass was openly attacked. In 1837 he joined the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, a debating club for free black men, and met Anna Murray, to whom he eventually became engaged. When they met, Anna encouraged Douglass, a fledgling violinist, to continue his musical pursuits. She sold two featherbeds to help Douglass secure safe passage to New York City, where they were married on 15 September 1838, twelve days after Douglass's escape from slavery. They would remain married for forty-four years.

By 1850, twelve years after Douglass and Anna Murray left Baltimore, slavery in that city was in steady decline, with fewer than 7,000 slaves living alongside 30,000 free blacks and 175,000 whites. The city remained at odds concerning slavery and race. In April 1861 pro-Confederate civilians in Baltimore stoned Union troops. After the Civil War free blacks were forced out of Baltimore's caulking trade, which they had helped establish, and an attempt to open a black-run caulking shop in 1865 resulted in severe beatings. Nevertheless, Douglass, visiting Baltimore in 1866, had faith that the city would mature into a peaceable home for all races. Baltimore served as both a liberating and a confining place for African Americans; as such it was a microcosm of the South between 1820 and 1865—a place of political unrest, transformation, and contradiction.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; Auld Family; Bible; Caulker's Trade; Columbian Orator, The; Demographics; Discrimination; Douglass, Anna Murray; Douglass, Frederick; East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society; Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Garrison, William Lloyd; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Urbanization; Violence against African Americans; and Work.

processed xml | source xml