Conclusion

Just prior to the Civil War, the Methodist minister John Dixon Long offered his opinion on the status of free African Americans in Maryland:

They have to take the raking fires from three batteries. The slave envies them. The poor white man is jealous of them lest they encroach upon his assumed rights and privileges; and the large slaveholder hates them, as their very presence puts notions of freedom in the minds of his slaves. They are expected to please every body, which is a very difficult matter. They are the scapegoats of southern society. If any crime is committed, and the perpetrator is not discovered, it is laid to the free negro. If he commits a crime, and it is proved on him, he is sure to get the full penalty of the law. If he steals from the white man, he goes to the penitentiary; which is right. If the white man steals from him, he goes clear; which is wrong. If he is lazy, he is a nuisance; if industrious, and lays up money, he is accused of dealing with slaves; if he conducts himself properly, he is proud and wants taking down a little. His wife and daughter may be insulted by rowdies, and he must hold his tongue. Yet for intelligence, industry, economy, and morality, he is far superior to the third class of slaves. His wife and children are his; his body is his own. He can remove to a free State or go to Africa. Partial liberty is better than pampered slavery. Considering his antecedents and circumstances, he has met the expectations of all reasonable men. Many of them are lazy, but it must be remembered that laziness is a contagious disease in the South. My advice to all young enterprising free colored people of the Southern States is, to leave for the free States, Canada, or Liberia.1

Long was an abolitionist and a native of the Lower Eastern Shore. In his narrative he claimed to have traveled throughout the state in the 1840s “in private to bear my testimony to masters against slavery, and in public to labor for the salvation of slaves.” He was satisfied with this mission until the 1850s, when anti-abolition sentiment grew to a fever pitch. He worried about the impact on his sons, who were beginning “to imbibe the common prejudices of slave society—hatred of work and of slaves.”2 And so he relocated to Philadelphia, “the city of brotherly love,” expecting to raise his children in a culture that shared his liberal and abolitionist values. What he wrote about the state of African Americans in 1857 could have easily applied to free African Americans in 1837.

Had John Beale Bordley lived to see the Maryland that John Dixon Long described, he would have been bewildered. It was not what he had predicted. If Conway and Flora, Joseph Chain, or Washington Dorrell, or any of the other members of the manumitted generation had known what was to come, they might have made different choices for the sake of their children and grandchildren. But they could not have known, and everything about their respective situations gave them reason to hope that the lives of their children and grandchildren would be as rewarding as their own. In the Age of Revolution, the impulse to emancipate resonated throughout the Atlantic world. In the United States it was strongest in Pennsylvania, but slaveholders in other parts of the country also felt it. In the absence of a national mandate for or against emancipation, states and individuals made situational choices. Looking across the patchwork of emancipation schemes implemented in the early republic it is evident that a consensus emerged among American emancipators: a peacetime emancipation must balance human rights with property rights. It is a consensus clearly articulated by William Tilghman, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in his now well-known decision to deny an expedited emancipation to a term slave named Peggy. In 1815 Tilghman explained, “I know that freedom is to be favoured, but we have no right to favour it at the expense of property.”3 Gradual, compensated emancipation struck that balance between human rights and property rights, and for that reason it was the method widely adopted in the Atlantic world, not only in Pennsylvania (1780), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804), but also in the British Caribbean (1833) and Spanish Cuba (1880).

Any emancipation tells us something about the values, ambitions, and expectations of the emancipators and the emancipated. Political ideology, global economics, and religion are all routinely cited in emancipation studies as variables that inspired emancipation and shaped the social lives of former slaves. Studies of emancipation in the early republic address one or all of these themes to some degree. What has been missing from studies of emancipation in the early republic is an understanding of these emancipations in the context of America’s transition to a free labor system. In general, the history of emancipation in the early republic does not address the impact of African American freedom on the economy, the formation of a laboring class, employers’ attitudes toward working people, or the emerging free labor ideology that was so central to American identity by the middle of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, discussions about the merits of free labor versus slave labor in the 1780s and 1790s did not generate the same visceral reaction that they did later in the 1850s, but the discussions happened, and they were influential in some circles. On the eve of the first emancipation “free labor” was just an idea without expression in the United States. The early republic emancipations gave life to the idea and tested its merits.

Equally important, it was in the process of converting slaves into free laborers that white Marylanders developed expectations for free labor (and slavery) that would last to and through the Civil War. Emancipation tested people’s assumptions about laboring people and a free labor system. How manumitted slaves responded to these tests mattered, but in most of the emancipation states (Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey) the test was fixed from the start. The twenty-plus years of term slavery required of African Americans in these states was a clearly articulated method for creating a dependent, racialized labor force. It was a system for making a working class, or perhaps more accurately, a caste, that was routinely enforced in courts of law (hence Chief Justice Tilghman’s dilemma). In all of the emancipation states the transition was linear and absolute. Slaveholders could stall, but they could not reverse emancipation. In Maryland no one manumitted a slave under the threat of emancipation. There, manumission was gradual, compensated, and voluntary. Initially, Maryland slaveholders made the transition from slaveholders to employers in the 1780s and 1790s without any meaningful guidance or support from the state. The Maryland legislature did not explain or dictate to slaveholders how to make slaves into contented, self-motivated hirelings. Moreover, the fact that slavery remained viable, even as the labor system absorbed more free workers, meant that it was slaveholders who set the early rules and expectations for a free labor system. In that context it is not surprising that slaveholders had a vested interest in establishing a free labor system that was friendly to slavery.

In Maryland the free labor system unfolded with fewer restraints than it did in other parts of the United States or the larger Atlantic world. To be sure, Maryland slaveholders would have agreed with emancipators in Pennsylvania or New York or the British Caribbean that they had a critical role to play in the transition from slavery to free labor. John Beale Bordley, William Tilghman, and others presumed that those who already commanded labor had the responsibility and the power to bring a working class into being. At the same time, a diversity of notions about work and freedom informed each individual’s notion of what a free laborer should be. Economic theory mattered, but so did republican ideology and individual religious convictions. Above all else, the switch from slave labor to free labor involved a leap of faith on the part of emancipators. Everyone had expectations, but there were no guarantees. Perhaps what is most remarkable about the transition from a slave labor system to a mixed labor system on the Eastern Shore is that it happened because a generation of emancipators believed that work could be incentivized. What the exact incentives were had yet to be determined, but in the 1780s and 1790s, those who manumitted their slaves were willing to explore options beyond the whip or the threat of sale.

This libertarian impulse in the 1780s and 1790s offered a narrow window of opportunity for the newly manumitted to inform the meaning of free labor in early republic Maryland. The newly manumitted responded rationally to the work choices put before them. In the 1790s, when work was plentiful, they exercised their freedom to accept, negotiate, or walk away from a prospective employer. On the Eastern Shore free African American laborers filled the geographic and employment voids created by an exodus of landless whites, craftsmen, and artisans, who left the countryside for Baltimore or the Deep South. Most free African Americans worked for wages in agriculture, but some worked in an emerging rural service sector as butchers, barbers, or wagoners. Those who could not find steady employment in the countryside (especially young women) went to the city to work. Others pieced together a livelihood migrating between employment sectors in the countryside and the city. Migration was planned, and when young African Americans left the country for the city the decision to leave was probably not personal but instead directed by family interests. Often African American families made the choice to send one or two family members to work in the city, while the remainder stayed behind on the Eastern Shore.

Those who could find steady employment on the Eastern Shore used their wages to buy land or lease housing with the intent of putting some physical distance between themselves and their employers. They took up residence in emerging African American enclaves like Ivytown and Hole-in-the-Wall, or they rented housing from other free African Americans. Wage work also had consequences for family life. Few individuals were economically self-sufficient, and most relied on family labor to maintain much-prized autonomous households. Individual family members sacrificed their personal ambitions for the good of the family. Initially, the white majority did not impede these developments, and local governments facilitated the transformation of the newly manumitted into free workers. Free African Americans went to the court to record lease agreements and deeds of manumission, to obtain poor relief, and to apply for the Certificates of Freedom that facilitated migration in a free labor market. Some free African Americans also used the courts to settle disputes with their white or black neighbors as well as with family members.

One unanticipated outcome of the transition from slave labor to free labor on the Eastern Shore was a free African American community with more social layers than one might expect in a rural society. Some African Americans were manumitted and others were freeborn. Some owned property and were rooted in Eastern Shore communities, while others were propertyless and rootless. African Americans who enjoyed a steady income, taxable assets, an autonomous household, and a family united in freedom rooted themselves in the Eastern Shore and contributed to community development. They developed a consciousness about themselves and their place in Eastern Shore society, and they joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church because that particular religious group gave expression to their ambitions. Another group of African Americans remained economically insecure, and, as a result, they never established permanent roots in Easton, Ivytown, or any of the other free African American neighborhoods. Or maybe it was because they could not establish permanent roots that they did not have a secure economic base. Either way, some Eastern Shore free African Americans did not find steady employment, and so they were constantly in motion, working when they could find work, living at the job site, separated from family members, who no doubt remained divided between slavery and freedom, and worshiping in the Methodist Episcopal Church. It was this group that left for Baltimore, Philadelphia, or even Cape Palmas.

On the Eastern Shore of Maryland the seasonal rhythms of commercial agriculture shaped the lives and attitudes of free African American workers. Wages provided free African Americans with the food, shelter, fuel, and clothing that they needed to sustain themselves in freedom. The type and availability of work determined where people lived, how they related to their spouses or parented their children, and how they managed their leisure time. Importantly, the experience of working for wages also informed free African Americans’ attitudes. The possibility of wage work set or tempered their ambitions and shaped their family values, their work ethic, their sense of justice, and their sense of self. Working for wages gave rise to distinctive attitudes toward work, family, time, and even status. These values were manifest and reinforced in the family (the concept of reciprocity), in the free black neighborhoods (Easton, Trappe, or elsewhere), and, most especially, in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Certainly, by the 1820s, these free African Americans had developed a consciousness about themselves as a free, laboring people in a slave society.

In the 1790s, when the Eastern Shore enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity, planters and slaveholders were content to let the high tide lift many different boats. The mixed labor system they had willfully created benefited them. Free labor was common on the Eastern Shore, and, even as Maryland received thousands of wage-working immigrants from Ireland and indentured workers from Germany, wage-working African Americans dominated the free labor workforce of the Eastern Shore for generations. As early as the 1820s planters had decided that free African American laborers were irreplaceable, and it is for this reason that men like Robert Henry Goldsborough wavered between tightening the screws on their mobility and adding “salutary provisions” to the Black Codes. Goldsborough knew that he needed these workers, and he also knew that he needed to handle these workers differently. He needed to offer incentives to attract men to his plantations, including wages, housing, work opportunities for wives and children, or work that gave the free worker more autonomy or responsibility than a slave, such as truck farming. Goldsborough did not want more slaves, but if he had he could have readily purchased an able-bodied young person at the annual Easton slave auction, an auction that facilitated the transportation of hundreds of Maryland slaves to the Deep South each year. What he wanted was a compliant workforce, free men and women who worked contently, supported their families on meager wages, kept the peace with their white and black neighbors, and accepted their place in the social and racial hierarchy.

Goldsborough’s expectations were no different than those of employers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, or a New England mill town. Similarly, the first generation of free African American workers had much in common with their peers in other parts of the United States. The common fate of working people everywhere was one of poverty, insecurity, exploitation, and vulnerability to employers and market forces beyond their control.

When that same high tide of prosperity receded in the 1810s and 1820, so too did planters’ ambivalence about the free African Americans. The world that John Dixon Long described in 1857 had its origins in the 1810s and 1820s. With less wealth to share and more people to share it with (notably immigrant laborers and a fast-growing population of freeborn African Americans), employers claimed there was a greater need to define labor relations and the social order. Now race mattered, and whites used race-based arguments to rein in the freedom of free African American laborers. Maryland began instituting the system of labor control that in Pennsylvania and the British Caribbean was integral to emancipation. Maryland legislated dependence, denying free African Americans the right to rise above their hireling status to join the shrinking population of yeomen farmers. Hereafter, planters and the state reserved the right to coerce labor out of free African Americans by means of vagrancy laws, forced labor on public works projects, and a racialized apprenticeship system.

The arrival of thousands of European immigrants in Baltimore aggravated the condition of free African American laborers everywhere. White workingmen wanted (but did not get) segregated workforces, and so they found other ways to preserve and protect the “assumed rights and privileges” of whiteness.4 Initially, they used violence to enforce racial separation, but popular culture also helped to define the differences between wage-earning whites and blacks. Edward Clay’s printed parodies of free African American life, and the minstrel shows that were enormously popular with white working men, elevated whiteness. In other words, the collective evidence proved that African Americans had failed the test of manumission. Free African Americans did not fail to ascend to the ranks of the yeomanry because the regime barred the possibility, the argument went; they failed because they were instinctively lazy, untrustworthy, and predisposed to criminal activity. They were hopeless, and no amount of freedom would ever enable them to rise above their low status. The American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society seized on this idea. Both organizations appealed for funding on the grounds that wage-earning white people would only be able to get a toehold in the middle class when wage-earning African Americans were removed from the workforce. Colonization advocates never succeeded in convincing either the federal government or the Maryland legislature to exile free African Americans, but thereafter transportation remained a threat that hung over them for the duration of the antebellum period.

By 1820, African American freedom was under siege, and the gains of the 1780s and 1790s were steadily rolled back. Employers, slaveholders, and white workingmen all had a vested interest in curtailing free African Americans’ progress. But John Long Dixon proposed that slaves also envied their free African American neighbors and that perhaps slaves would undermine free African Americans’ progress. It is an idea worth considering.

The evidence from the Eastern Shore of Maryland suggests that slaves and free African Americans did not act as a single “community” and, more important, that their interests diverged with the transition from slavery to freedom. Certainly, emancipation was a shared interest of all African Americans, but it is also true that in freedom African Americans developed different priorities and new values. The importance they placed on maintaining autonomous households and the expectation of reciprocity in the maintenance of those households are two examples of distinctly free African American values commonly held by former slaves on the Eastern Shore and elsewhere. It is also irrefutable that the values often associated with the uplift theology of the nineteenth-century African Methodist Episcopal Church (piety, thrift, and industriousness) were distinctively free African American values, born of free African Americans’ experience with racial prejudice. The free African Americans on the Eastern Shore evidently shared these values. Then again, it does not seem that living by the code of moral uplift put free African American laborers in conflict with slaves. What is more likely is that free African American laborers adopted these values in part to distinguish themselves from slaves in the eyes of the white majority. Wage-earning African Americans, like wage-earning whites, quite rightly wanted to be treated differently than slaves, and so it should not be surprising that they looked to set themselves apart from slaves. It is equally logical that a wage-earning African American who presented himself to a prospective employer as a pious, thrifty, and industrious worker gained some advantage in doing so. After all, this is what employers’ wanted. It is no coincidence that those most involved in the Easton African Methodist Episcopal Church were also among the most affluent and socially mobile free African Americans on the Eastern Shore. Adopting a new cultural framework for freedom probably did not determine success, but it could, and did, help, even in a slave society.

The triangulation scenario described by John Long Dixon in 1857 ended on November 1, 1864, when the Maryland legislature unconditionally emancipated the 87,000 slaves remaining in Maryland.5 Slaveholders and employers knew the end was near as early as 1862. That year the federal government extended a compensated emancipation to District of Columbia slaveholders that forced Maryland slaveholders to imagine their future without slaves. African Americans too had forced the issue. Maryland slaves escaped to the “free territory” of the District of Columbia and to the Union Army, and thousands of free African American men ran away from their jobsites to enlist in the Union Army’s black regiments. In the spring of 1864, the superintendent of black recruitment in Maryland reported to his superiors about the consequences of such recruitment for the agricultural economy. He noted that “whenever the U.S. gets a soldier, somebody’s plow stands still.”6

On the Eastern Shore, slaveholders clung tenaciously to the mixed labor system that had served their economic and social interests so well for more than fifty years. In the same week that Maryland emancipated its slaves, former slaveholders appeared before county courts to apprentice more than 2,500 newly emancipated African American youths.7 Eyewitnesses reported that planters brought children to the local courts by the wagonload. Some of the children were legitimate orphans in need of guardians. Others, including infants and toddlers, were so young that the claims of apprenticeship were meaningless, but most were adolescents or teenagers, old enough to earn decent wages. Across the state the county courts ignored the protests of African American parents and abolitionists who questioned the legitimacy of enforcing apprenticeship laws that predated emancipation in Maryland. County courts actually expedited the process by extending their time in session: the Talbot County Court apprenticed 300 children in just nine days.8 The federal government acted quickly to put an end to the whole sordid business, but it was a chilling moment for the thousands of slaves making the transition to freedom.9 It was also the last gasp of planter power.

The plantation elite of the Eastern Shore never again exercised exclusive control over African American laborers. Emancipation, combined with the opening of the American West, broke plantation agriculture in the 1860s and 1870s. Eastern Shore grain growers could not match the large-scale, capital intense grain production underway on the Great Plains, and so they focused on perishables and converted some of their grain acreage to orchards. Fishing, long an individual or family pursuit, was also commercialized in the 1870s and 1880s. Men now harvested millions of bushels of crabs and oysters for urban markets. Commercial fishing expanded with critical investments in the infrastructure of the Delmarva Peninsula. In the 1870s a long-anticipated railroad line was completed, connecting communities on the bayside of the peninsula to Elkton, Maryland, on the Pennsylvania border, as well as Dover and Wilmington, Delaware. Also in the 1870s, the Army Corps of Engineers undertook a massive public works project, dredging and broadening the harbors on the Lower Eastern Shore, stimulating more steamboat travel between Baltimore and multiple Eastern Shore ports. Improved trade networks made it possible for an Eastern Shore orchard man to ship tomatoes, blackberries, and peaches to urban kitchens in a single day. Much later, in the 1920s, gristmills converted grains to chicken feed, and a new poultry industry developed on the Eastern Shore.10

The new trade networks of the 1870s and 1880s married Baltimore capital and industry with Eastern Shore agriculture and, by extension, its underemployed, unskilled, low-wage workforce. Gilded Age railroad barons invested heavily in oystering and built canning facilities on the Eastern Shore. Men, women, and children worked for meager wages, shucking and canning oysters that were then packed into barrels and transported either to the train station or the recently dredged harbors. Railroad cars carried the packed produce northward, while steamboats headed to Baltimore, the District of Columbia, and Norfolk. Working people also used the railroads and steamboats to access work across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and, especially, in industrial Baltimore and Philadelphia.

On the Eastern Shore some African Americans routinely migrated between jobs in agriculture, the seafood industry, and manufacturing, working seasonally in the orchards, on the water, at the emerging shipyards, and in factories.11 Meanwhile, the same capitalists who poured money into canning and commercial seafood discovered the natural beauty of the Eastern Shore. Railroad, oil, steel, manufacturing, and merchandizing moguls came from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the Eastern Shore to fish, boat, swim, and otherwise relax, spurring the construction of luxurious beachfront resorts in the 1880s and 1890s.12 Tourism effectively commercialized the work of domestics, bringing men and women out of planters’ estates and into hotels and hunting lodges as waiters, cooks, and housekeepers.

Migration, agriculture, and exploitive labor practices remain significant determinants that shape life and work on the contemporary Eastern Shore. Seasonal migration remains an important factor in the economy of the Eastern Shore, but in new and unexpected ways. In 1952 the four-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge became the latest transportation innovation to connect the peninsula to the mainland. Since then cars have replaced steamboats and railroads, and each year more than twenty million tourists cross the Bay Bridge to visit the picturesque colonial-era towns of St. Michaels, Oxford, Chestertown, and Easton and well-developed Atlantic beaches along the Lower Eastern Shore (most famously, Ocean City).13 Along the way, they stop to shop at one of the many outlet malls, eat lunch at their choice of chain restaurant, and spend money on seasonal activities and attractions as well as accommodations. Curiously, Eastern Shore employers annually import numbers of students from Europe on temporary work/travel visas to work in the hotels, restaurants, shops, and amusement parks. Tourism now employs thousands of unskilled, low-wage seasonal workers, and tourist industry workers cope with many of the same challenges posed to agricultural workers of an earlier time. Tourism, like agriculture, is a seasonal industry. The work is often part time, unskilled, and low paying, with little opportunity for professional development or advancement. Also, like agriculture, tourism is subject to fluctuations in the global or national economy, and a downturn in the economy that prevents travel inevitably leads to unemployment or underemployment in the tourist sector.

Commercial agriculture also continues to have a place on the Eastern Shore. Corn, wheat, and soybeans are grown in large quantities by commercial farmers in Talbot, Dorchester, and Caroline counties. Those who farm smaller family acreage continue to truck produce to the Maryland mainland, and many of these farmers have adopted eco-friendly agricultural practices, such as raising organic fruits, vegetables, and beef. Municipalities are deeply aware of the inextricable link between agriculture and the environment, and a number of Eastern Shore counties that derive tax revenue from farming and tourism have adopted land-use plans that stress a balance of agricultural and environmental interests.14 The University of Maryland at the Eastern Shore (a historically black college) has also developed degree programs and research institutes that leverage the region’s agricultural and environmental uniqueness. The student population is majority African American in ethnicity but geographically diverse, with students coming from communities on both sides of Chesapeake Bay. Many of them study the theory and practice of agricultural and environmental sciences with scholars and professionals affiliated with the Maryland Fish and Wild Life Cooperative Research Unit, the Coastal Ecology Teaching and Research Center, and the Center of Excellence in Food, Science, and Technology.

Since the early 1970s, the poultry industry has eclipsed all other agricultural pursuits on the Eastern Shore. Chicken is the modern cash crop of Maryland, and like other cash crops it has come under attack for destructive environmental policies and exploitive labor relations. In the 1990s the poultry industry raised the ire of farmers, environmentalists, and, most especially, Eastern Shore watermen, who watched their earnings plummet as chicken manure poisoned the waterways of the Eastern Shore and destroyed the crab and oyster populations of Chesapeake Bay.15 The poultry industry in Maryland has also attracted the attention of labor-rights organizations, given that the industry thrives on the labor of unskilled, unorganized workers, including African Americans and many more unskilled, uneducated, and undocumented Latin American immigrants, who do not complain too loudly about their poverty-level wages or hazardous work conditions for fear of dismissal or deportation.

National labor organizations, including the United Food and Commercial Workers, have allied with religious organizations to raise public awareness about the exploitive labor practices in the Delmarva poultry industry.16 The union’s protest is simple and direct: the exploitation of contemporary undocumented workers “drags down wages, benefits, and working conditions for all workers.”17 It is a message that would have resonated with the early republic’s white workingmen, who made similar arguments about African American hirelings. Similarly, contemporary religious leaders of diverse faiths have challenged the exploitive labor practices of chicken “factories” with the zeal of nineteenth-century Methodist itinerants. Contemporary ministers evangelize among the chicken workers, and also challenge their largely white and affluent congregants to consider the human cost of food harvested by an exploited workforce. Like a nineteenth-century abolitionist who urged his consumers to buy produce made with free labor, an Episcopalian priest working to improve the lives of chicken workers carried raw chickens into church one Sunday and challenged his congregation to “see the fingerprints that are on this chicken.”18

Regrettably, it is easy to draw comparisons between the plight of undocumented workers in 2010 and the free African Americans who labored on the Eastern Shore two hundred years earlier. Historians have long considered Maryland a place that adapted to the social and labor problems posed by African American freedom with “a middle temperament.” Maryland was a “middle ground” between slavery and freedom for most of the nineteenth century, decidedly neutral on labor issues, but periodically pushed to extremes. Similarly, contemporary Maryland has a reputation among the angriest advocates of restrictive immigration policies as being a place that is too friendly to “illegals.” For now, the state has not adopted especially repressive policies toward undocumented immigrants, and Baltimore and a few other Maryland communities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities.”19 The “sanctuary city” is the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth-century “personal liberty law.” Just as antebellum abolitionists and friends of African American freedom refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, sanctuary cities refuse to enforce controversial federal immigration policies. Police departments in self-chosen sanctuary cities enforce local and state laws, but they do not question suspects about their immigration status or otherwise do the work of federal immigration and customs officers.

But times are changing, and the Maryland legislature feels pressure from its citizenry to address what is commonly known as the “immigrant problem.” The 2008 financial panic and subsequent rise in unemployment aggravated the already precarious condition of middle-class Americans, who for years had struggled with declining wages and rising costs for housing, food, and fuel. It is a familiar recipe for social discontent, and, unsurprisingly, some of the public’s anger has been directed at undocumented workers. Avoiding a direct challenge to employers, the Maryland legislature has not devised new labor laws that protect workers (citizen or immigrant) but has chosen to follow the familiar path of making it harder for low-wage workers to live and work in Maryland. In 2009 the Maryland legislature barred immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses if they could not show proof that they entered the United States legally.20 The driver’s license is to the modern worker what the Certificate of Freedom was to nineteenth-century African Americans. Without it an individual will have fewer employment and housing opportunities and may actually be wary of moving beyond a familiar neighborhood where he or she feels comparatively safe.

How the working poor cope with the indignities of wage work varies across place and time, but it is easy to imagine the exploited workers of the poultry industry adopting many of the same strategies used by early republic free African Americans. Most have clustered together in neighborhoods designated by whites as “immigrant neighborhoods” or “Hispanic neighborhoods,” just as early republic African Americans clustered in Ivytown, Trappe, and Hole-in-the-Wall. If they knew about the African American workers whose families were divided between slavery and freedom, contemporary undocumented workers would no doubt empathize, as many of them have also left spouses and children behind in their native countries. Some Latin American women have followed the tradition of nineteenth-century African American hucksters, selling packed lunches or homemade baked goods at the sites where day laborers gather to wait for work. Some of these women are also mothers of American-born children. Like the freeborn African Americans of the nineteenth century, these American-born children of undocumented migrants will experience work and freedom differently than did their rootless parents. In the present, as in the early republic, exploited laborers have looked to their church for material and spiritual support, for education, and to nourish their beleaguered souls; and, evidently, they have allies in the faith community. But perhaps the most extraordinary similarity between contemporary undocumented immigrant workers and the manumitted working men and women of the early nineteenth century is that both groups recognize themselves as stakeholders in their societies. Answering to the charge that illegal immigrants were ruining Maryland, a Mexican worker responded to a reporter, “Look around at this plaza. See how much life we Latinos have created here. That’s my bank. There’s my insurance agent. That’s where I buy my groceries…. I am helping this community grow. We all are. Just look around!”21

Had anyone asked, Joseph Chain and Washington Dorrell and countless other free African Americans laborers would have expressed similar thoughts. All around them was evidence of their contributions to the economic growth of the Eastern Shore. These men would have pointed to the harvested wheat, bundled and ready for transport to gristmills in Philadelphia and Baltimore, or the butchered meat prepared to suit the culinary tastes of clean-shaven Eastern Shore patriarchs and their dinner guests. They would have proudly pointed to their elderly parents, their spouses, and their children, all of whom they purchased from slavery after years of laboring to raise the ransom. Some would point to their freeborn children and grandchildren with gratitude that they had been spared their own childhood suffering. They would have expressed hope for their futures. Certainly, Joseph Chain and Washington Dorrell would have pointed to their own neighborhoods in Easton and Trappe and the single-framed houses, “Negro huts,” and tenements that they had built with their meager earnings. Finally, they could point to the Easton Bethel AME Church and the Ivytown Queen Esther AME Church, two churches that continue to serve the faithful. Of course, no one did ask, and so free African Americans lived, worked, and worshiped on the Eastern Shore in relative obscurity, never expecting anyone to notice why it all mattered.