Maryland

By: Frank Towers

Source:

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

Maryland

The experience of African Americans in Maryland changed over time. In the 1600s most African Americans were slaves but enjoyed some legal and economic privileges. The advent of plantation slavery in the eighteenth century ended those privileges. Between 1790 and 1860, slavery went into decline and free blacks grew in number; slavery ended during the Civil War but full equality remained elusive.

Seventeenth-Century Privileges

Founded as a British colony in 1634, Maryland's early English settlers grew tobacco. Within the first decade of settlement white planters, motivated by greed and prejudice, imported African slaves to help in the growing of that labor-intensive crop, though European indentured servants greatly outnumbered slaves in seventeenth-century Maryland's workforce.

In the frontier society of the 1600s Maryland slaves enjoyed social privileges that ameliorated some of the more disagreeable aspects of bondage. Interracial alliances were possible where African slaves lived in proximity to white masters or worked alongside white servants who shared similar burdens. Most slaves had enough spare time to travel locally and to produce and sell goods such as shoes, tobacco, and chickens.

Early Maryland law allowed slaves to arrange for self-purchase, petition for manumission after Christian baptism, and otherwise use the courts to challenge their legal condition. Race alone did not amount to legal status, because the English also enslaved Indians and some Africans were free. Free people accounted for as much as one-third of the black population in some counties. The center of free black life was Maryland's Eastern Shore—a sparsely populated region opposite the first colonial settlements on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. A few free blacks obtained enough wealth to purchase slaves; some intermarried with whites; and all had the means to acquire property and bequeath it to their children.

Despite these opportunities life was difficult in seventeenth-century Maryland. New diseases, arduous work routines, poor diets, and a higher ratio of men to women prevented the slave population from adequately reproducing itself.

Eighteenth-Century Plantations

African American life in Maryland changed in the late 1600s as planters began purchasing African slaves in large numbers. Planters replaced indentured servants with slaves when the prices for servants rose and the life expectancy of slaves increased, making slaves more profitable. In the 1650s slaves accounted for less than 5 percent of the colony's total population; in 1700 the proportion had risen to one-fourth, and one out of every three adult workers was a slave.

Before the 1690s most slaves came to Maryland from other New World settlements. By the eighteenth century African-born slaves were in the majority, as the demand for slaves had risen sufficiently to bring traffickers in human cargo directly from West Africa. Because slave buyers preferred male field hands, the ratio of African American men to women was skewed to three to two. This gender imbalance, combined with the diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds of African slaves, hindered slaves' abilities to establish families. Slavery's expansion changed the racial composition of the workplace. Before 1680 fewer than two of every ten slaves worked in an all-black labor force; after 1700 more than half did so.

To maintain control over the colony's increasingly valuable slaves, Maryland's white legislators passed laws that restricted slave autonomy and equated race with servitude by closing off routes to emancipation and occasionally pushing free blacks back into slavery. In 1664 the legislature fired its first volley in this assault by declaring that “all Negroes and other slaves” would serve life terms. That and subsequent statutes also punished whites who allied with blacks. Colonial legislators made manumission more difficult by enslaving children born to white mothers and enslaved black fathers and by denying Christianized African slaves the right to petition for their freedom.

In the mid-1700s economic changes helped African Americans expand their work roles, establish stable families, and regain access to the marketplace. The economy diversified as tobacco prices fell and soil lost its fertility. Farmers on poorer lands in Maryland's east and north stopped planting tobacco and turned instead to wheat, which did less damage to the soil and required less labor to cultivate. By the 1790s tobacco accounted for less than half the value of Maryland's exports. Slaveholders who abandoned tobacco found new tasks for their slaves and sometimes hired slaves out to neighboring farmers and artisans. A minority of Maryland slaves acquired more prestige by practicing skilled trades such as blacksmithing and carpentry or by becoming house servants. Economic diversification also gave slaves more time to cultivate their own crops and livestock on small provisioning grounds allotted to them by their masters.

Additionally, these shifts enabled African Americans to establish families. By the 1750s the ratio of men to women had evened out, and American-born slaves outnumbered those born in Africa. Natural increases in the rate of reproduction, rather than ending slave imports, accounted for the change, as slaves defied the hardships of their circumstances to create stable families. Family lineage played a central role in social identity in West African cultures, but most enslaved Africans came to Maryland without kin. The creation of new families in Maryland and other colonies marked a successful effort by African Americans to rebuild African traditions in a New World context.

Slaves made families by taking advantage of the high concentration of their population in the tobacco counties of southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore. Although most eighteenth-century slaveholders owned fewer than five slaves, some wealthy planters owned more than twenty. Slaves on large plantations had less trouble maintaining contact with spouses and children, but even on small farms marriage and family were possible because of the rising population density and relaxed restrictions on slave travel.

Families helped slaves withstand the power of their masters. For example, slave families served as the organizational unit for work at Charles Carroll's Doohoregan estate, one of Maryland largest plantations. In 1773 Carroll's 385 slaves lived in thirteen separate quarters. A family leader headed each quarter, and several quarters were named for their resident slave families. Those families buffered Carroll's demands for productivity by organizing a schedule detailing how long and how hard each person would labor on a given day. When pressed to the limit, slaves could use families to carry resistance beyond the boundaries of the plantation; kinfolk frequently harbored runaway slaves.

While slaves expanded their everyday liberties, only a small percentage of Maryland's African Americans were legally free before the Revolution. In 1755 Maryland's eighteen hundred free blacks made up only 4 percent of the black population.

Union Opportunities

The American Revolution, with its proclamation of universal liberty and equality, weakened the institution of slavery in Maryland. Some slaves supported the British, who in Virginia had offered freedom to any slave who escaped from a Patriot master and joined the King's forces. In the Eastern Shore's Dorchester County, white Patriots disarmed a group of slaves found with eighty guns and a supply of swords and bayonets; such slaves believed that poor white Marylanders and the British army would help them win freedom. Indeed, in 1783 British forces transported more than one thousand escaped Chesapeake slaves to freedom in Canada and the Caribbean. During the War of 1812 approximately fifteen hundred Maryland slaves accepted a similar offer of freedom in exchange for assisting British forces.

Behind the battle lines the Revolution constrained the ability of masters to suppress slave demands for better treatment. In an extreme example from 1779, slaves on one Maryland plantation killed an overseer who had demanded too much work. Despite fears of insurrection Maryland Patriots needed African American manpower; by the war's end they had authorized slave enlistments and drafted free blacks into the military. Maryland planters understood that to win the Revolution they would have to yield some of their vast authority to poor whites and even to slaves.

The end of the American Revolution reopened international markets, and for a time slavery expanded. In 1810 Maryland's slave population peaked at 111,502. Thereafter slavery went into decline. In 1790 slaves made up one-third of all Marylanders; a half century later they accounted for less than one-fifth of the population, and their overall number had fallen to 89,495. In the early Republic, Maryland slaves expanded the informal economy of the 1700s and established the customary right to travel to see family on weekends.

Economics, politics, and religion all contributed to the decline in Maryland's slave population. Slave sales to western states increased as falling tobacco profits coincided with a rising demand for slaves in southwestern cotton fields. Prices for Maryland slaves were further boosted following the 1808 ban on international slave imports. Between 1790 and 1860 roughly 185,000 slaves left Maryland, mostly through sale. The domestic slave trade broke up families because cotton and sugar planters in the Deep South only wanted young adults.

Thousands of Maryland slaveholders opted for manumission rather than sale as the solution to unneeded slave labor. These masters acted out of economic necessity, religious piety, and a conviction that slavery violated the ideals of the Revolution. Masters often freed their chattels, however, under an exploitive arrangement known as term slavery. Term slaves were required to purchase their freedom in small, incremental payments that stretched out for years. Often accompanied by slave hiring, gradual emancipation prevented slaves who bought their liberty from accumulating wealth during their most productive years.

In the 1780s the growth of Baptist and Methodist evangelical churches bolstered support for emancipation. Evangelicals emphasized the equality of all Christians before God, and for a brief time the Methodist clergy declared slavery contrary to God's law. Some evangelicals joined Quakers in petitioning the legislature to end slavery. Although these efforts failed, individual acts of manumission freed thousands. In 1790 Maryland's 8,043 nonenslaved African Americans represented 3 percent of the population. By 1850 free blacks numbered 74,723, and they made up 13 percent of all Marylanders. Between 1820 and 1860 Maryland had America's largest free black population.

In the early Republic, Maryland produced several examples of free African American achievement. Benjamin Banneker, a freeborn farmer who taught himself mathematics and science, authored a series of popular almanacs and participated in the geographical survey of Washington, D.C. Joshua Johnson, the Baltimore artist, painted portraits for high- and lowborn Marylanders alike and won the patronage of Samuel Smith, an influential politician. In 1792 Thomas Brown, an African American Federalist, ran for the state legislature, as the law did not explicitly bar blacks from voting or holding public office.

As the free black population grew, white Marylanders began to curtail their liberties. Laws passed between 1800 and 1860 restricted African American access to the courts, took away their vote, punished vagrancy with forced labor, barred them from occupations coveted by whites, and restricted their travel. In 1833 Maryland established a branch of the American Colonization Society, created in 1817 to export free blacks to Liberia.

Free African Americans fought back by creating their own independent institutions. In 1797 African Americans in Baltimore, upset at racism inside the increasingly conservative Methodist Episcopal Church, formed the independent Bethel Church, which in 1816 joined the Philadelphia-based African Methodist Episcopal Church. Free blacks used independent churches to organize schools, mutual aid societies, and trade unions. The city's private black schools succeeded remarkably well. In the 1860 census, 70 percent of black Baltimoreans were literate. Existing as early as the 1830s, the Caulkers Association protected the jobs and good wages of black shipyard workers, most of whom were descendants of skilled slaves owned by early-nineteenth-century shipbuilders.

Maryland's independent black churches, schools, and trade associations trained the Civil War–era generation of antislavery leaders, including Frederick Douglass, America's most influential black abolitionist. Born in 1818 to an Eastern Shore planter, Douglass later worked in Baltimore as a slave hired out to a shipbuilder. Douglass joined a reading group affiliated with the Caulkers Association and mingled with free African Americans in black churches. These contacts helped Douglass meet his fiancée, Anna Murray, a free black domestic servant. In 1838 Murray provided the money and emotional support that enabled Douglass to escape slavery.

As the example of Douglass and Murray suggests, manumission in Maryland created tangled family relationships between those still enslaved, usually working-age men, and those set free, more often women and the elderly. Masters used their control over slaves to extract work from free relatives. Some former slaves rented land or signed year-long contracts, while others sought opportunity in towns. In 1850 Baltimore's 28,388 African Americans, 90 percent of whom were free, constituted America's largest urban black community.

In the 1850s European immigration constricted job opportunities for free blacks. In Baltimore, newcomers and native whites pushed blacks out of trades that they once dominated. In 1858 and 1859 a gang of native-born whites connected to the police department used violence to take the jobs of black caulkers. Meanwhile rural slaveholders voiced fears that free blacks undermined slavery. In 1860 a few months after John Brown's attempted slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Curtis Jacobs, an Eastern Shore planter, proposed a law to re-enslave or banish free blacks. African Americans drew on community institutions to combat the threat. During the shipyard riots the Caulkers' Association called on friendly white shipbuilders to prevent their exclusion. Free blacks helped defeat Jacobs's plan for re-enslavement by petitioning the legislature, holding public rallies, and privately lobbying friendly whites. Free blacks also worked on the Underground Railroad to shepherd fugitives like Douglass to freedom.

Civil War and Emancipation

During the secession crisis, Maryland stayed in the Union with President Abraham Lincoln's assurance that slavery would be protected. Slaves took matters into their own hands by escaping. In March 1862 slaves grew bolder when Congress authorized the army to shield fugitives from their rebel masters. The scarcity of federal military camps in Maryland and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia the next month made Washington, D.C., the preferred destination for Maryland runaways. Although the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 did not apply to Maryland, slaves in the state understood that the measure committed the Union to full freedom. The pace of escapes increased while masters' authority declined even further.

When Confederate forces advanced into Maryland and Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863, General Robert C. Schenk hired 4,000 free blacks from Baltimore to build fortifications. He then organized the 4th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment from this group. In October the War Department issued General Order 329, which provided for the enlistment of free blacks, slaves of disloyal masters, and slaves of masters who gave their consent to serve. Approximately 10,000 African American Marylanders, one third of the state's fighting-aged black men, served in the Union military. By comparison less than one fourth of Maryland's eligible white men fought for the Union.

Although black Marylanders weakened slavery, masters refused Lincoln's 1861 proposal for gradual emancipation and clung to slavery. Anger toward secession-leaning slaveholders and a labor shortage stirred support for emancipation among white Marylanders. In 1864 the Unconditional Union party drafted a new state constitution that outlawed slavery but ignored civil rights. Despite its shortcomings, free blacks rallied for the document. A razor-thin 375-vote majority approved the new constitution, and on 1 November 1864, slavery ended in Maryland.

Loyal Maryland did not experience federal reconstruction. Nevertheless some Union commanders acted on behalf of former slaves. General Benjamin Butler turned three Patuxent River estates abandoned by Confederate slaveholders into government-owned farms worked by five hundred freedpeople. In 1864 and 1865 General Lew Wallace ran an unofficial freedmen's bureau to protect former slaves.

These measures responded to the white backlash against emancipation. White vigilantes terrorized free blacks and burned black churches on the Eastern Shore. In reaction to the removal of freedpeople's labor from white control, ex-slaveholders exploited antebellum apprenticeship statutes to bind African American youths to long terms of service, who were then used by whites as hostages to secure labor from their parents. Roughly 2,500 African Americans were forcefully apprenticed between 1864 and 1867, when a federal judge outlawed the system.

Whites also segregated public space and fought to keep blacks out of good-paying jobs. In 1865 white shipyard workers again tried to remove black caulkers. Isaac Myers, born free in Baltimore and educated in church schools, led the response of the Caulkers' Association. In 1868 caulkers bought their own dry dock. In 1869 Myers organized the Colored National Labor Union.

Black Marylanders looked to education as a means for advancement. Although the 1864 constitution mandated public schools, no funds were provided for black education. In 1864 white emancipationists founded the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People. It opened more than seventy schools across the state and claimed approximately 7,500 students. Northern philanthropists and the Baltimore City Council contributed to these efforts for African Americans, and were joined in 1866 by the Freedmen's Bureau. The next year the legislature authorized black schools but restricted funds for the schools to proceeds from African American taxpayers. In 1870 the Baltimore Association went bankrupt and the Freedmen's Bureau ended its schooling efforts. African American churches and black philanthropy supported the bulk of postwar black education.

In 1867 Democrats regained control of state government by campaigning against suffrage and legal equality for African Americans. Democrats fell in line with federal courts and allowed blacks to testify against whites, but otherwise the Democratic triumph of 1867 ended Maryland's brief experience with self-reconstruction.

Between 1864 and 1870 African Americans held conventions and rallies for the suffrage and civil rights, both of which came to Maryland through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Enfranchised in 1870, black men voted for the Republican Party. Democrats countered by campaigning for white supremacy and sympathy for the South. Only 23 percent of the Maryland electorate, African Americans could not on their own defeat the Democrats, who remained the dominant party for the rest of the century.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Maryland's African American population gradually shifted away from the southern and eastern counties, where slavery had been concentrated before the Civil War. Tobacco and grain farming went into decline, and farmers turned to orchards, truck gardens, and dairy herds, none of which required as much labor. Blacks remaining in Maryland's countryside stayed at the bottom of the economic ladder although a few managed to buy land. Others turned to oystering, a job free of direct employer supervision. Tens of thousands went to Baltimore where they took unskilled work at factories and the docks. In both town and country, African American Marylanders drew on traditional sources of collective action to combat the racism of the Jim Crow era.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; American Colonization Society; American Revolution; Antislavery Movement; Artisans; Banneker, Benjamin; Baptism; Baptists and African Americans; Black Family; Black Loyalists; Caribbean; Civil Rights; Civil War; Demographics; Economic Life; Education; Emancipation; Entrepreneurs; Food; Fraternal Organizations and Mutual Aid Societies; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Americans during the Antebellum (North); Free African Americans during the Antebellum (South); Fugitive Slaves; Gender; Gradual Emancipation; Health and Medicine; Indentured Servitude; Laws and Legislation; Marriage, Mixed; Methodist Church and African Americans; Occupations; Petitions; Philanthropy; Religion; Resistance; Slave Trade; Slavery: Upper South; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; Voting Rights; War of 1812; and Work.

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