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. 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 Anglo-Africans, 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 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 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. 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 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 “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 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 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 re-enslavement. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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-in-law 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 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 thirty-seven 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.

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.