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 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 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 family-operated tobacco farms. But the economy and society underwent a significant transformation in the 1660s when the proprietor of Maryland, Lord 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. 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 decade-long 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 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.

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 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 American-born slave population.

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 labor-intensive 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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’ half-century 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 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 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.

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.