1

Work

In January 1814, John Kennard of Talbot County placed an advertisement in the Eastern Shore General Advertiser that read: “‘Wanted to Hire’: A Negro man who understands the farming business.”1 Kennard may have intended to hire a slave-for-life or a term slave from a neighboring slaveholder. He may have also considered hiring a manumitted African American. Any Talbot County freedman who saw or heard of the advertisement knew what Kennard wanted from his new hire. The new hire would perform a variety of tasks related to grain production, including harrowing and plowing the soil, cutting the wheat with a cradle scythe, mowing the hay that Kennard grew for his draft animals, sharpening the plows, and maintaining the farm equipment. Kennard may have expected his new hire to recruit seasonal laborers, oversee their work, and distribute their pay. Compensation would have included wages, but Kennard may have also offered housing and provisions, and if his new hire was married, employment for his wife. It is strange that Kennard stated his preference for a man since everyone who read the advertisement understood that “the farming business” was men’s work. Although women worked alongside men during the harvest season, the hired work of a “Negro woman” was more typically domestic and might include housekeeping, laundering, cooking, and child care.

Fifty years earlier Kennard would have filled this position by hiring a landless white man, a convict laborer, a tradesman who wanted seasonal work, or possibly an apprentice. Historically, Maryland “Negroes” were bought, not hired, but the manumission of hundreds of slaves after the 1780s gave Kennard the option of hiring a free African American for what was once a white man’s job. Beginning in the 1790s free African Americans worked for daily, weekly, or seasonal wages on the grain plantations that defined the economy and society of the Upper Eastern Shore. Some carved out economic niches for themselves as sawyers, barbers, ditchers, butchers, and peddlers; and a few others achieved the coveted status of landholder. Whatever their position in the hierarchy of rural labor, these former slaves maximized the potential of their status as a rural, laboring people to earn some money and to establish beneficial relationships with white employers. In the process, they transformed the century-old slave system of the Eastern Shore into a mixed labor system that balanced slave and wage labor.

Maryland plantation owner John Beale Bordley was an early advocate of replacing slave labor with the hired labor of freedmen.2 In a manual for farmers titled Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs (1799), Bordley proposed a number of innovative agricultural techniques and weighed in on the subject of manumission and the transition to wage labor. He encouraged farmers and planters to consider how the transition to a wage labor system could potentially increase their profit margins as the region intensified agricultural production to meet the rising demand for food in the Atlantic world. Bordley, who owned more than one thousand acres of land and dozens of slaves in both Pennsylvania and the Eastern Shore, was uniquely qualified to lead such a discussion.3 With one foot in Pennsylvania, where manumission was compulsory after 1780, and one foot in Maryland, where the free African American population grew steadily after 1780, Bordley confidently declared that slavery was “done with in America.” It was time for Maryland farmers to “begin the inquiry” into alternate labor systems so “that they may be prepared for the change.”4

Concerned that Maryland planters had insufficient experience with conducting “rural business with hired laborers,” Bordley urged them to carefully study the example set by Great Britain, with its long tradition of using “hirelings” in agriculture.5 Like other early republic landowners, Bordley believed that only the “considerable ignorant” made their lives as hirelings, while hardworking individuals joined the ranks of tenant farmers or smallholders. Essays and Notes suggests that without direction from their social betters, former slaves would act no differently than former indentured servants. The smart and skilled would ascend to tenancies or smallholdings, and the “ignorant” would remain marginally employed. Equally important, Bordley understood that the Maryland legislature would not follow the lead of Pennsylvania and convert slaves into apprentices, and so the burden of converting former slaves into wage laborers would fall to individual planters.

The recent history of Eastern Shore planters with hired laborers was more complicated than Bordley suggested in Essays and Notes. Some rural wage laborers were members of a degraded, landless class with limited opportunity for socioeconomic advancement, but during most of the eighteenth century, they were skilled artisans and craftsmen who chose seasonal agricultural work to earn supplemental income. Six months out of the year, saddlers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and tailors practiced their respective trades. In the remaining months, they contracted with local wheat planters to do agricultural work, such as reaping, mowing, or threshing grains, for cash wages.6 These rural workers were neither ignorant nor desperate, as Bordley suggested, but bi-occupational. Nonetheless, Bordley rightly recognized that the existing pool of wage laborers was insufficient to fill the labor gap that he anticipated would follow whenever slavery ended in Maryland. Maryland did not need more bi-occupational laborers but rather a class of agricultural workers who accepted their hireling status as a legitimate and worthy “station in life.”7

In Essays and Notes Bordley championed the British cottager system as the ideal alternative to slavery. Cottagers (cottars or cottiers) were not yeomen. Nor were they independent tradesmen or craftsmen who hired themselves to local planters during the harvest season. Cottagers were landless men and their families who agreed to work in exchange for housing, a garden plot, access to pasturage, firewood, a line of credit, and, occasionally, cash. They resided on common lands or on the landowner’s premises in housing sometimes provided by their employers, and they worked for provisions mutually agreed on in an annual contract. Security was the chief benefit of the system for both employers and employees. It guaranteed employers a continuous flexible labor supply and employees job security and the necessities of life (housing, food, and fuel). Cottagers could neither tend their own land nor hire themselves to another employer while under contract. Bordley recommended that Maryland planters provide their cottagers with only a quarter-acre garden plot, “which gives employment and comfort to the wife and children: but not an inch of ground is otherwise allowed for cultivation of any sort, which might tend to draw the cottager from the [employer’s] business.” He insisted that for most poor people, who otherwise could not afford their own farm, the life of a cottager was a desirable substitute, allowing men to enjoy a family as well as the “useful and settled station of a decent, independent and contented labourer.”8

Bordley described the system as mutually beneficial to employer and employees, but his chief concern was the advantage to employers. In a brief discussion about the cost of employing cottagers, Bordley proposed that a farmer could save almost $590 a year by replacing thirty-five enslaved men, women, and children with a free labor force of four cottagers and their families.9 He bemoaned the fact that the farmer who owned slaves was often “a slave to his slave in cultivating his ground.” Often, slaveholders had more slaves than they needed and were burdened by the “supernumerary hands, eating, wasting, making confusion, &c. the year through without abatement.”10 By contrast, the employer of cottagers increased his profit margin by hiring only those hands he needed while relieving himself of the surplus. Bordley further suggested that for most Maryland planters, the transition from slaveholding to employing cottagers would be seamless because of the nature of the employer-cottager relationship. He encouraged planters to hire cottagers in the early winter, allowing both families to “have all the winter to become familiarly acquainted” and to be continuously “in attentions to [the cottagers].” Cottagers did not live within the planter’s household like servants, but they were still “regarded as part of his own.” In return, the planter could expect the happy cottagers to “look up to [their employer] as their friend.” Cottagers who proved to be “ungrateful and little disposed to prefer their landlord” could be compelled to “pay so much more” in their rent.11

Skeptics who doubted the economic advantage of substituting wage laborers for slaves would find reassurance in the examples set by England and Pennsylvania, where the trend toward hired labor in commercial agriculture was strong. At different times in the eighteenth century, landowners on both sides of the Atlantic had expanded production in response to rising food prices, and in both instances agricultural intensification led to a growth in the population of agricultural wage laborers. In the case of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the reliance of landlords on hired labor started in earnest in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, when land was cheap and labor dear, the first priority of Chester County landowners was to secure a stable workforce. To that end, landowners offered land leases with generous terms to tenant farmers and their families, expecting that these tenants would clear, improve, and maintain new farms over several years. In the early eighteenth century, these developed lands were now valuable, but labor was easier to obtain than ever before. Landowners who concentrated on grain production needed fewer workers for shorter durations as well as a more diverse workforce that included both skilled and unskilled laborers. Concurrent population growth meant that landowners with improved lands could better tailor their workforces to the specific needs of grain cultivation. Newly arrived Irish and German immigrants who settled in Chester County needed immediate employment and housing. Cottager arrangements satisfied both these new immigrants and landowners, and beginning in the 1760s, the cottager was a fixture in this rural area. In 1769 Chester County assessors identified 12 percent of the county residents as cottagers. Ten years later 22 percent of residents were identified as cottagers. The trend continued and by 1800 county tax assessors identified one in four families as landless cottagers.12

In England the number of people identified as cottagers or agricultural workers grew as a result of a food crisis amid the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Wartime food demands had already created a food shortage, but two harvest failures (1794–95 and 1799–1800) had created near famine conditions in parts of the country. England needed food, and Parliament proposed to meet the demand by passing the Enclosure Acts that would sanction cultivation of the common lands. Peasants and smallholders had used these undeveloped grounds to pasture livestock, forage for herbs, trap small animals, and collect firewood. Common lands were well used, even if they were uncultivated, but, to a nation in crisis, the common lands appeared an untapped resource, and so Parliament cleared the way for their development. Nearly three million acres were privatized between 1790 and 1819, and England’s agricultural output nearly doubled between 1750 and 1850.13 But enclosure also forever changed the agricultural workforce of the nation. Enclosure gave smallholders and peasants title to specifically allotted lands, but while privatization enriched some, it impoverished many others.14 Smallholders who already had some capital profited from privatization. They bought or rented their neighbors’ allotments, improved the lands by building drainage systems, and then stepped up agricultural production. The increase in agricultural production in turn stimulated the regional economy. New roads were built to facilitate trade between farms and towns where investors built new flour and corn mills and grain warehouses. Merchants who recognized the earning potential of these new landowners opened small shops in the bustling towns where they sold manufactured merchandise.

Those smallholders who could not afford to rent or buy additional allotments watched their standard of living decline. Smallholders and peasants who had depended on the common lands for pasturage experienced the most precipitous decline. Families who before allotment kept garden plots, but relied principally on the income they earned from the sale of dairy products, eggs, and excess livestock and poultry, simply could not support themselves without rights in common land. The standard ten-acre allotment was just large enough for a cow, a pig, and a garden plot. Inevitably, the families sold their flocks, their herds, and then their allotments. In desperation they looked for employment as day laborers on the expanding farms of their more fortunate neighbors or in the emerging towns. Men looked for work on grain farms or in the new grist mills. Women went to work as domestics or took in piecework. Whole communities seemed to be in flux, as men and women moved from their rural homes to find temporary or permanent employment. By the 1810s, the allotment process had made countless numbers of hirelings of formerly free men, and cottagers of once self-sufficient householders. In England the rise of rural poverty in the 1780s and 1790s was so alarming that English philanthropists urged a standardization of cottage construction to provide the most desperately poor with warmth, privacy, and a healthier living environment.15

In 1800 Maryland looked to be the next place where the cottager system would take root. Intensified production had precipitated the manumission of hundreds of slaves from the Middle Atlantic states, who now looked to farmers for employment and housing. John Beale Bordley imagined that Maryland planters would hire their former slaves as wage laborers and that former slaves would accept their status as hirelings. Admittedly, cottagers and hirelings were not yeomen. They would be a degraded class, dependents in an age that celebrated independence, but what other choice would former slaves have? Some might rise to the rank of smallholder since Maryland law did not explicitly prohibit them from owning real estate in 1801. But John Beale Bordley accepted the inevitability of wage dependence for free African Americans, just as Chester County landowners had accepted it for newly arrived European immigrants and English landowners had accepted it for former peasants.

On the Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland a contemporary of John Beale Bordley initiated changes in his agricultural workforce that could have provided a model for the planter-cottager relationship described in Essays and Notes.16 Before 1790, slaveholder Thomas Chamberlain manumitted all but one of his slaves and, thereafter, relied exclusively on the labor of free African Americans.17 In 1790 twenty-eight former slaves lived at Chamberlain’s plantation, and at least six negotiated work and living arrangements that reflected Bordley’s cottager ideal. Among the manumitted were Conway and Flora, a husband and wife who lived in cottager-type arrangements at the Chamberlain plantation between 1789 and 1792. Conway’s arrangement with his employer illustrates one way in which some former slaves experienced the challenges and rewards of these new worker-employer relations. Conway was one of six freedmen who contracted to serve Chamberlain for one year in return for an annual wage and necessities. In 1789 and 1790, he accepted contracts for “acting as an overseer altogether with common binding services,” for which he earned approximately £15 Maryland money annually as well as “clothing, food, 200lbs meat, [and] three barrels of corn.”18 Manumitted from slavery and then hired back by his former master, Conway was a supervisor and served as a liaison between the freedmen who worked for wages and their employer. He managed the labor of the hired agricultural workers, and between November 1789 and July 1790, his workforce included at least six freed men and seven freed women. Men and women who had been freed worked side by side in the harvesting of grains under Conway’s direction. Traditionally, men cut the wheat and women and children bound and stowed it. But at the Chamberlain plantation, four women were among seven laborers who reaped wheat between 1789 and 1790.19

On at least one occasion, Conway distributed payments to Chamberlain’s employees. When Chamberlain discovered in August 1790 that he had underpaid Pompey for reaping services, he instructed Conway “to make up to [Pompey] six shillings a day for reaping at harvest.”20 Chamberlain’s decision to confer this position of trust on Conway suggests not only that his former slave was familiar with the plantation, the work, and the workforce, but also that he had held a similar leadership position as a slave.

Chamberlain hired men and women to reap, bind, and stow wheat in July and then again in December; Conway oversaw the harvests of both spring wheat and winter wheat. He would have started plowing and planting in April and continued through November. Plowing was a specialized skill, so it is not surprising that Chamberlain relied on Conway and the other cottagers to plow rather than hiring seasonal laborers for the task. But because plowing required draft animals, additional freedmen were hired to mow hay, and Conway may have overseen their labor in the spring of 1790. When Conway was not plowing, planting, or harvesting, he was probably engaged in other kinds of maintenance around the plantation. Between March and May 1790, additional freedmen dug ditches for irrigation and sawed wood at the plantation, and Conway would have assisted in that work. At times Conway worked alongside his seasonal laborers and earned extra wages for “common binding services.”

Conway’s work routine changed little after his manumission, but his domestic life probably underwent a radical transformation. As a cottager, Conway and his wife, Flora, maintained a household on their rather meager earnings, and like other rural poor people, they improved the quality of their lives by purchasing necessities on credit from their employer. Between 1791 and 1792 Conway purchased three pairs of shoes, two milk cows, a plow horse, six old chairs, and a bedstead from his employer.21 A steady line of credit gave Conway and Flora access to necessities and other material comforts that they otherwise could not have afforded, and perhaps it also sheltered them from the potential dangers faced by those who bought and bartered for goods in the so-called slave economy of stolen goods.

Although he had some supervisory responsibilities, Conway earned significantly less than an overseer. In 1799 Richard Tilghman IV suggested to William Tilghman that overseers should earn £45 Maryland money annually, nearly three times Conway’s salary, and be given “prerequisites” that included four hundred pounds of pork, three barrels of corn, two lambs, “milk of one cow,” one horse, the right to raise fowl and ducks, and land to grow flax (for yarn).22 In 1811 Robert Lloyd Nicols agreed to pay £60 annually to an overseer and to provide him with five hundred pounds of pork, five bushels of wheat, and the milk of one cow. He also permitted his overseer the right to raise poultry and keep two sows.23 Overseeing, moreover, was a stepping-stone toward tenancy or farm ownership. At The Hermitage, a plantation in neighboring Queen Anne’s County, overseers received an annual corn and pork allowance, as well as annual wages, through the 1780s but with few exceptions most moved on within three years, and one, Robert Butler, moved from overseer to tenant-planter in 1788.24

In his lifetime, Conway undoubtedly watched more than one white man ascended from overseer to tenant or smallholder, and perhaps Conway had visions of moving beyond the rank of hired worker to tenancy. In 1791 and again in 1792 he purchased fourteen bushels of wheat and a plow horse, suggesting an attempt to broaden his economic opportunities by cultivating grains for market. For most freedmen, the dream of landownership would never materialize because they lacked the capital to acquire land, but Thomas Chamberlain bequeathed legacies to each of his nineteen former slaves, and so Conway inherited £50 Maryland money in freedom dues making smallholding a dream within his reach. According to the account books kept by Chamberlain’s executors, several manumitted slaves received their legacies between 1792 and 1799. Some of the mature adults received their entire legacy in one payment, but the children received their legacies on reaching their majority. Sampson, for example, accepted his promised legacy of £50 in 1792, but Young Daph, to whom Chamberlain had bequeathed more than £13, could not collect her inheritance until she reached her majority in 1799.25 Conway surely knew of his inheritance soon after Thomas Chamberlain died in 1790 and perhaps spent the next year preparing for his imagined future as a tenant farmer or even a small landowner. In 1793 Conway and Flora received the much-anticipated legacy with interest, £73 Maryland money in total, from Chamberlain’s executors.26

As a freed woman and a cottager’s wife, Flora had responsibilities within her own home as well as on the Chamberlain plantation. Like other wives, Flora managed and maintained her modest household. She probably kept a garden and cared for whatever livestock the couple owned, including the milk cows that her husband purchased in 1791. She also attended to the chores of her household: cooking, cleaning, mending, and laundering clothes. Some of those chores, especially laundry, would have allowed her to socialize with the other freed women who lived and worked on the plantation. When she was not attending to her family, Flora had also worked for Thomas Chamberlain. In 1790 Chamberlain hired Flora at the rate of £6 Maryland money a year for unspecified work, although she seems to have earned her wages primarily by spinning thread.27 Between February and July 1790, Flora delivered a total of 61.25 pounds of spun flax and “course thread” to Chamberlain. In July Flora left her spinning to work alongside the other freed men and freed women who were hired to harvest the summer wheat. Chamberlain paid her the standard wage of three shillings a day for the seven days that she stowed wheat in July 1790. There was plenty of agricultural work to be done by annual employees like Flora. While her husband may have devoted his time to plowing, Flora could have earned some of her salary by hoeing corn, harvesting vegetables, or breaking flax.28

Although working for wages posed real challenges for Conway and Flora, they enjoyed enviable living and working arrangements in 1790. Unlike the majority of freedmen, who worked at the Chamberlain plantation for seasonal wages, Conway and Flora had secured annual employment and housing. Even if their housing, salary, and provisions were meager, they enjoyed some economic security. As former slaves who had survived the lean years of the American Revolution, they knew how to stretch those supplies and supplement them as needed. Moreover, they had access to a line of credit that few seasonal migrant workers could claim. Most important, Conway and Flora, who received their freedom together and unconditionally, had each other. In the early republic, when slaveholders deliberately released only one family member from bondage with the expectation that a free spouse or parent would work toward purchasing those family members who remained enslaved, Conway and Flora’s partnership was an unusual asset.

Nevertheless, while they were spared separation from each other, it is possible that Thomas Chamberlain’s manumission scheme separated Conway and Flora from either their children or their elderly parents. Although Chamberlain manumitted all his slaves, he put conditions on the freedom of his juvenile and elderly slaves. He apprenticed all of the enslaved children until they were twenty-one. Male slaves under fourteen were apprenticed “to profitable traders” on the condition that their new masters would teach them to read and write and would provide them with freedom dues. Girls under fourteen were apprenticed to families to learn to sew, spin, knit, “and to do those kind of work which women usually do.” Similarly, Chamberlain arranged for his executors to provide his four superannuated slaves with clothing, care, and housing at the expense of his plantation for the duration of their lives. While the provision seems generous, it effectively bound these elders to the plantation.29

Under the terms of these apprenticeships, manumitted parents could wait a minimum of seven years to see their apprenticed children enjoy their freedom. If Conway was the father of apprenticed children, then he had a powerful incentive to remain where he could see them, even if employment prospects seemed better elsewhere. The possible forced apprenticeship of his children might have influenced Conway’s choices when he purchased the wheat and the plow horse, contemplated where to take up a tenancy, or imagined where to buy land with his freedom dues. Until then, he and his wife made do with the wages that allowed them to support themselves in a community that likely included free and enslaved loved ones.

Some manumitted slaves may have envied the security that Conway and Flora enjoyed as cottagers, but others likely rejected it as too restrictive. Some former slaves yearned for a radical break from the plantation work routine, and, as Conway’s arrangement with Chamberlain reveals, the cottager arrangement did not offer that break. Conway certainly knew many manumitted slaves who routinely moved in search of work, wages, and a better life. He oversaw the labor of at least seven freed men and freed women who were hired as seasonal laborers but were not Chamberlain’s own former slaves.30 Conway also met unfamiliar freedmen who peddled crafts at the plantation, including two freedmen who sold “a bread tray and butter bowl” and brooms to Chamberlain. Others came to sell “bushels of oysters.”31 If Conway had few chances to travel beyond the boundaries of his employer’s plantation, he may have welcomed the news and tales that those peddlers brought along with their crafts to his own workplace.

Conway and Flora’s example demonstrated to Eastern Shore plantation owners that, with the proper incentives, former slaves would continue to work on their plantations as hired laborers. Thus, the plantation experienced an uncomplicated transition from a slave system to a wage labor system. But the lesson of how to transform slaves into cottagers was largely lost on Maryland slaveholders, who never manumitted slaves at the rate that Bordley anticipated in Essays and Notes. Even as some slaveholders manumitted record numbers of slaves, other small and middling farmers with rising economic expectations purchased their first slaves.32 The central lesson of the 1790s was that slave labor and wage labor complemented each other. Maryland slaveholders did not discard one labor form for the other but experimented with both. Plantation records illustrate how planters created blended labor forces that included slaves-for-life, term slaves, free African American workers, and, eventually, child laborers.33 Even more important, the records reveal that rising grain prices forced rural employers to compete with one another for hired laborers and that free African Americans benefited from this competition with more consistent employment, a greater diversity of work assignments, better wages, and an opportunity to experiment with different methods of making a living.

Slaveholder Richard Tilghman’s ledger, from the Talbot County plantation Grosses, showing arrangements with his hired workers provides an example of how free African Americans who performed agricultural wage work responded to the agricultural boom of the 1790s and 1800s. Tilghman owned fifty-eight slaves in 1810, but he also hired twenty additional African Americans laborers to harvest wheat at his Talbot County plantation between 1790 and 1806.34 Initially, Tilghman hired only one or two freedmen, and they rarely worked more than seven days a season. In July 1793, he paid twelve shillings Maryland money to a freedman named Anthony for two days of reaping wheat. When Anthony returned to Tilghman’s plantation the following summer, he labored for two and a half days, but he earned only twelve shillings and sixpence for his work. His economic prospects improved after 1796 as Tilghman intensified production. With more wheat to harvest, seasonal laborers like Anthony worked longer for better wages. In 1796 Tilghman paid Anthony six shillings a day to reap wheat for nine consecutive days.35 That same summer he employed at least two other freedmen to work alongside his many slaves, and still the harvest took eleven days to complete. By 1802, when freedman Adam Blake joined the workforce, the harvest lasted a minimum of eighteen days. Equally important, Tilghman upped his wages, presumably to attract reliable workers. In the three years that Adam Blake worked for Tilghman, his per diem wages rose from six shillings in 1802 to six shillings and sixpence in 1804, and then to seven shillings and sixpence in 1805.36

Women also worked at Tilghman’s Grosses plantation, but their work choices were few, and it seems the expansion of grain production actually reduced their employment opportunities. Responding to rising market demand, grain farmers from Virginia to Pennsylvania intensified production and sought out laborers who could handle the tools of modern grain production: plows, harrows, sickles, and cradle scythes. Physical strength gave male laborers an advantage on the largest and most modern grain plantations. African American men assumed the new skilled jobs of plowing and harrowing while African American women continued hoeing and weeding.37 Tilghman shared this preference for male laborers. He hired freed men each summer to assist in the harvest of his wheat but never paid a single freed woman to do the traditionally female work of binding or stowing wheat. Similarly, Talbot County slaveholder Robert Lloyd Nicols, who in 1815 owned nineteen male slaves and just six female slaves, consistently hired more men than women as wage workers, even though his enslaved labor force was already disproportionately male.38

The mechanization and masculinization of grain production drove many freed women out of agricultural work, leaving spinning as the only substantial employment option for women. Between 1790 and 1806, four freed women, Grace, Nan, Memory, and Eve, spun yarn for Richard Tilghman. Each woman spun for two or more consecutive years, and each received one shilling per pound of yarn.39 Equally important, Tilghman did not discriminate between his white and black spinners. In 1797 he paid his black spinners the same wages that he paid his white spinner, Betty Greenfield.40 In 1813, 1815, and 1816, African American women also spun “stocking yarn” for Robert Lloyd Nicols’s thirty-seven slaves.41 In contrast with other employers who paid their spinners by the pound, Nicols paid his spinning women monthly wages for their service. Between September and October 1815, he weighed and delivered 25.75 pounds of wool to Lettice, a freed woman contracted to spin wool for his “people’s clothing.” He agreed to pay her a monthly wage for spinning, and then in August 1816, he “agreed with Lettice to increase her monthly wages to $2.50 a month.”

While it is likely that these women spun yarn because they had few other options to earn wages, it is also possible that they preferred spinning to more arduous agricultural labor. After all, spinning allowed women to work at home throughout the year at a pace that complemented their other domestic responsibilities. In December and January, when plantation operations slowed, freed women continued to make money by selling their yarn. When husbands, fathers, and sons were underemployed in the off-season, wives and mothers became the principal wage earners. Eve, for example, earned fourteen shillings and eightpence for spinning 22 pounds of kersey yarn in November 1793 and fifteen shillings and tenpence for spinning 22.6 pounds the following November. She also supplemented her income by selling eggs and chickens to her employer. Other women opened lines of credit with their employers. Memory, for example, earned nearly £2 and five shillings for spinning 45 pounds of yarn in October 1798, but in the same month she also borrowed twenty-two shillings and sixpence from Tilghman.42 Eve’s and Memory’s enterprising efforts made a practical difference in cash-poor households and affirmed the important contribution freed women made to the domestic economy of African American households.

With limited opportunities to perform skilled agricultural work, freed women competed with one another and with slaves for the least desirable jobs on a grain plantation: weeding with hoes, grubbing swamps, breaking up ground too difficult to plow, cleaning stables, and spreading manure (tables 1.1 and 1.2).43 At Robert Lloyd Nicols’s plantation, for example, only three African American women worked the wheat harvest, and their work options were limited to binding and stowing. Men, on the other hand, earned wages for sawing, mowing grass, binding, plowing corn, cutting the meadow, and cutting oats. Typically, freed men earned three to four times what freed women earned. Freed woman Maria Foster, for example, earned only fifty cents per diem for binding wheat in 1818. By comparison, James Grace and Jacob Howard each earned a dollar fifty per diem for cutting with sickles, and Hector Downes earned two dollars a day for mowing. Men who cut and mowed consistently earned the highest wages.44

After 1810 Eastern Shore planters also began hiring freeborn African American children to do so-called women’s work, that is, weeding with hoes, grubbing swamps, breaking up ground too difficult to plow, cleaning stables, and spreading manure.45 In August 1816, Nicols paid $1.25 each to “Isaac and William, two small boys” for their work in the harvest. Robert Henry Goldsborough hired girls to turn hay and boys to mow a meadow in August 1822.46 Slaveholders had always assigned domestic and agricultural tasks to enslaved children, and so it is not surprising that planters would put freeborn children to work, but these children were not forcibly indentured to their employers. Instead, they came to work at the request of their parents. For example, the freedman Greenberry, a day laborer hired by Goldsborough, negotiated work arrangements for his wife, Mary, and three of their children, Risden, Ann, and Pere. Greenberry performed a variety of odd jobs between 1821 and 1825, including agricultural work, caring for a colt, and making “two white oak brooms for sweeping chimneys.” Mary also earned wages for binding wheat in 1824. Their son Risden began working at the plantation in 1824, turning hay and mowing the meadow. The following year Risden’s sister, Ann, worked “in the meadow,” and in 1825, their brother, Pere, earned $4.25 for a season of wheat cutting.47 The payment record indicates that their employer did not pay these wages to the individual laborers but to Greenberry, acknowledging him as the family patriarch.

Table 1.1 Average per diem wages earned by freed men, 1789–1823 (in dollars)

Table 1.2 Average per diem wages earned by freed women, 1789–1823 (in dollars)

By the 1800s the Maryland legislature had sanctioned child labor and expressly empowered county courts to apprentice the freeborn children of indigent African American parents to white households. Nevertheless, few planters took advantage of this opportunity. Talbot County Court apprenticed sixty-eight children between 1808 and 1810, but only nine of these apprentices were free African Americans. In 1809 the typical court-indentured apprentice was a white teenage male, sixteen years old, and bound with the consent of at least one parent to a master craftsmen. Even as late as 1828, apprenticeship remained a path to a skilled profession for white boys. Planters had no great demand for child laborers, but persuasive parents like Greenberry successfully convinced planters to hire their children on terms that were acceptable to African American parents.

Agricultural work remained the most important and common means for former slaves to earn a living, but some African Americans explored other options and created new opportunities for themselves. According to Talbot County tax assessments, a number of freed men and freed women owned barges and canoes, while others owned “yoke oxen” and “work steers.”48 Oxen owners may have carted produce and grains, and barge owners may have transported goods through the waterways of the Delmarva Peninsula. Those who owned canoes may have fished or oystered. A noteworthy number of African Americans raised sheep, presumably for food or wool, which suggests that sheep herding provided a number of African American households with income. In an 1817 tax assessment, thirteen Talbot County freedmen owned three or more sheep. Joseph Cooper and Andrew Moore, who resided in St. Michaels, owned thirteen and seven sheep, respectively. Nine years later they owned the same number of sheep, which suggests that they deliberately maintained the size of their flocks. Sheep herding was evidently very profitable for some African Americans. Abraham Dobson, who owned a flock of twenty-six sheep in 1817, was also one of the wealthiest freedmen in Talbot County.49

Freedmen who were trained as blacksmiths, masons, and coopers also successfully marketed their talents to the same planters who hired them to cut grains. Planter Robert Henry Goldsborough of Talbot County routinely hired free African American butchers, shoemakers, coopers, and a barber. In three years, he hired at least six African American sawyers and paid them fifty cents for each cord of cut wood they produced.50 Traditionally, sawing was seasonal work performed by slaves during the winter months before tobacco planting, but by the 1820s, freedmen dominated this work. Four sawyers, including Jere Banning, Toby Martin, James Dobson, and Chester Sewell, earned the bulk of their wages by sawing. James Dobson, for example, earned $19.38 in November 1823 for cutting thirty-nine cords of “oakwood.” Chester Sewell earned the majority of his wages between November 1823 and February 1824 by cutting wood, and agreed to “husk out corn” once, in January 1824.51

In the 1790s and 1800s Richard Tilghman of Grosses also hired numerous African American coopers for “trimming pork barrels,” “mending wheels,” and other unspecified “cooper’s work.” Freedman Daniel Caul worked for Tilghman for six years making cider casks and setting up tobacco hogsheads.52 As the manufacturing and shipping industries in Baltimore siphoned skilled slaves and white artisans away from the countryside, free African American tradesmen filled the void. But few African Americans achieved economic self-sufficiency as craftsmen, partly because white planters still preferred to hire white craftsmen.53 Tilghman, for example, hired several freedmen as coopers, but he hired only white blacksmiths and carpenters. Even the basket weaver, freedman Joseph Kelly, who wove more than twenty-seven baskets for Tilghman, varying in price from two shillings for small baskets to six shillings for larger “clothes baskets,” could not make his living by basket weaving alone. Inevitably, Kelly, like white craftsmen a generation before, was a semiagricultural craftsmen, or bi-occupational, in this plantation economy. He hired himself out for “service” for nine months in 1793 for £11 and five shillings and then again for ten months in 1794 for £12. Kelly also reaped wheat in 1795, 1802, 1804, and 1806.54 In the summer of 1804 he earned six shillings and sixpence a day for reaping wheat (nearly £6 Maryland money for sixteen days of work) and nearly £1 for weaving seven baskets.

By 1820 free African American workers were a common sight across the Upper Eastern Shore, and planters did not think twice when hiring free African Americans for seasonal, semiskilled, or skilled work. Robert Henry Goldsborough even employed freedmen in managerial-type positions between 1818 and 1825. Although freedman Jacob Ross was not identified by a particular job title in the account books, he was arguably Goldsborough’s most valued employee. Ross interacted with Goldsborough daily and served as his agent in a variety of local commercial transactions. He collected various sums of money from white clients, including tenants and Captain Vickars, the ship captain charged with transporting the harvested grains to the Baltimore market.55 Ross also shopped for his employer. He purchased necessary household items like bacon and sugar, as well as luxury items like “a pint of brandy,” “a quire of paper,” and “segars” at the local stores.56 Ross also labored in fields in 1821, but he performed skilled and high-paying labor such as plowing cornfields.57

Robert Henry Goldsborough trusted Jacob Ross, and he rewarded his diligence with a respectable income and considerable autonomy. Ross’s most important work was marketing his employer’s produce. Goldsborough experimented with truck agriculture, selling fruits, vegetables, and dairy products to town residents. Although the little town of Easton hardly compared with Baltimore or Annapolis, it claimed more than 150 residents and dozens of businesses in 1798. Truck agriculture had economic potential, and in 1821 Goldsborough entrusted Ross with overseeing the operation. This business occupied Ross from March through October, just as the majority of the free African Americans in Talbot County went to work in the grain fields. In the spring and summer Ross brought cherries, raspberries, peaches, and pears to the town, and in the early fall, he sold apples and apple cider. In November 1821 he sold 2.5 bushels of apples and earned $1.25, but more expensive fruits like cherries, which Ross brought to Easton in July 1823, earned him nearly a dollar for each half-bushel he sold.58 Since he sold all of his produce for cash, Ross regularly carried money with him, an experience that distinguished him from most other rural laborers. He also probably had responsibility for a cart or wagon and one or two draft animals, all valuable plantation equipment. Finally, since Goldsborough never acknowledged any assistants in his accounts, Ross must have worked alone, carting produce to market and carting the leftovers and money back to the plantation. If he had assistance, it was informal. Perhaps his wife or his children joined him in what must have been very long workdays.

Jacob Ross may have considered Easton quite a metropolitan place. In 1821 the town was still small and young, but it was home to the General Court of the Eastern Shore as well as the Talbot County Courthouse, a local newspaper, numerous churches, and the first bank of the Eastern Shore, the Farmers Bank of Maryland.59 It was also a hub in the interstate slave trade, and as such the town regularly hosted slave buyers from the Deep South. Easton also claimed a substantial number of free African American residents who made their own unique contributions to the town. African American tradesmen like John Dorrell and Joseph Chain lived and worked in Easton, but they also served the plantations. Dorrell, a butcher, sold meat to both Robert Lloyd Nicols and Robert Henry Goldsborough. Chain, a barber, counted Goldsborough among his numerous clients. Jacob Ross would have seen Chain when he came to Goldsborough’s plantation, or he may have visited Chain’s barbershop to pick up razors for his employer. Even if Ross could not recognize Chain as the black barber of Easton, he may have recognized him as a leader in the recently formed African Methodist Episcopal Church. As an independent businessman and a leader of that church, Chain was one of the most recognizable African American men in Talbot County in 1820.

If Robert Goldsborough’s dealings with Joseph Chain and the other tradesmen listed in his account books are representative, then white planters regularly patronized these free African American establishments in the 1820s. Chain probably spent most of his time in his shop, providing haircuts and shaves to established clients as well as to the men who visited the town on business. If Chain preferred that his customers visit him in his store, his newspaper advertisement indicated that he was nevertheless willing to visit his clients “elsewhere, with prompt attention.” Being away from his shop did not necessarily undermine his business, because traveling to other plantations allowed Chain to peddle shaving supplies, including razors, to country gentlemen. Chain, who charged as little as twenty-five cents for haircuts or shaves, depended as much on the income he earned from the sale of a pair of razors ($.75) and other toiletries as from barbering. Goldsborough routinely ordered razors from Chain, who undoubtedly traveled regularly to Baltimore or Philadelphia to stock up on supplies preferred by his white clients.60

African American tradesmen like Joseph Chain and John Dorrell experienced freedom differently than agricultural workers like Greenberry or even Jacob Ross. Chain and Dorrell were exceptional in that they avoided agricultural work, supporting themselves with earnings from practicing their respective trades. Both men courted the business of the white planter elite, and they maintained professional relationships with those men throughout the year. Their professional success depended equally on their skill at their trade and on the successful marketing of their skills to this plantation elite. Establishing their businesses, building a slaughterhouse, or renting a storefront required a capital investment that few freedmen could make without financial assistance from members of the white community. At a time when few free African Americans owned any real property, both Dorrell and Chain owned the tools of their respective trades as well as homes and shops in Easton. By 1817 Joseph Chain’s barbering business had outgrown its original location, an “old stand opposite the Fountain Inn tavern,” and he leased a storefront in the heart of town. That year he placed an advertisement in an Eastern Shore newspaper to notify his customers that he had relocated to a store “two doors south of the Bank” and just across the street from Mr. Samuel Groome’s new hotel. He hoped “to continue to merit the patronage of his old yearly customers” and welcomed the business of “traveling gentlemen.”61

Figure 1. Joseph Chain advertisement, 1817. Joseph Chain was a manumitted slave, a barber, and a leader in the free African American community of Easton, Maryland. He was one of a distinct class of free African American worker who provided Eastern Shore planters with goods and services. January 14, 1817, Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser. Courtesy of University of Vermont.

John Dorrell’s rise within the African American community in Easton illustrates how some freedmen maximized the economic and professional possibilities available to them. How Dorrell achieved his freedom is unknown, but he first appeared in the 1804 Talbot County tax assessment as the owner of personal property worth approximately £26, including horses, cattle, hogs, and furniture.62 In 1809 he bought two acres, part of “Abraham’s Lot,” from John Webster, a free black carpenter, and his wife, Maria. Slightly larger than two acres, the lot was small, but it included four “log dwelling houses” and could potentially house tenants.63 Over the next few years, Dorrell continued to prosper, working steadily for both Robert Lloyd Nicols and Robert Henry Goldsborough and investing in real estate. By 1813 he had acquired a quarter-acre lot in the heart of Easton, a significant achievement by any standard given that Easton lots were among the most desirable and most valuable properties in the county. In 1817 half-acre lots near Easton were generally assessed at $20 or more and were considerably more valuable than a half-acre lot in the bayside town of St. Michaels ($10 to $20), or the inland villages of Trappe ($6 to $10) and Hole-in-the-Wall ($4 to $8).64 Dorrell also owned two more acres outside of Easton, and on that property stood a “framed dwelling house,” as well as a slaughterhouse, kitchen, carriage, and furniture assessed at $447.65 By 1813 John Dorrell was among the five wealthiest free African Americans in Talbot County; his property was ten times more valuable than that of the average free African American property owner in the county.

Dorrell’s achievements were remarkable but not singular. Dozens of manumitted and freeborn African Americans purchased real estate, particularly in the villages of Trappe and Hole-in-the-Wall (table 1.3). As early as 1804, six free black families had purchased land in Trappe, just south of Easton. Among them were four men, Isaac Maccary, Phil Chaplain, James Pritchart, and Sampson Stevens, and two women, Lettice Martin and Hester Stevens. All shared portions of “Kingsale” and “Alexander’s Chance,” but Isaac Maccary, who owned twenty-two acres, stood out. The second-largest property holder, James Pritchart, owned only four acres. 66 In nearby Hole-in-the-Wall, four families owned equally modest estates. The largest landowner, Sam Demby, claimed only four acres, and the smallest landowner, James Bantom, claimed only half an acre.67 Several more African Americans acquired land in these communities before 1817; this included fourteen freed women, who purchased or leased property in Hole-in-the-Wall and Trappe. Five women acquired property in Trappe, and ten women acquired property in Hole-in-the-Wall, between 1805 and 1832. Although women rarely owned real property, these four women constituted half of the free African American property holders in Hole-in-the-Wall in 1832.

Given that they were shrewd enough to acquire real estate in the first place, it is not surprising that these entrepreneurial African Americans sought to profit from their landholdings by leasing housing and lots to other freedmen.68 Samuel Demby, owner of a lot in Hole-in-the-Wall, had two “tenant houses” on his property in 1826. Henry Toomey rented two lots on Dover Road outside of Easton to free African Americans. Toomey also rented out a room in his Easton house to Maria Price, a freed woman, and her enslaved husband, Jerry Price.69 Isaac Maccary owned more property than any other free African American living in Trappe in 1832, and he too maintained a “tenant house” on his property.70 Perhaps Demby, Toomey, and Maccary were motivated by philanthropy, but in light of their extraordinary wealth, it is undeniable that profits mattered to them. According to the 1817 tax assessment record, Demby, Toomey, and Maccary collectively owned 12 percent of the free black community’s wealth in 1817. Eighty-one free African Americans were listed in the 1817 tax record, and together, these property holders owned roughly $4,050 in taxable property. In 1817 the average value of a free African American’s property was only $50, and fifty-five people who appeared (68%) owned less than $32 in property. By comparison, Demby, Toomey, and Maccary, whose combined assets equaled $470 in 1817, were among the five wealthiest free black property owners in the county. Although considerably poorer than the wealthiest African American families in Baltimore or Philadelphia, they nevertheless constituted an elite group on the Eastern Shore.71

Table 1.3 Property owners in Trappe and Hole-in-the-Wall, Talbot County, 1804–32

On the whole John Beale Bordley accurately predicted that landless slaves would re-enter the agricultural workforce as wage laborers. What he failed to imagine was the spectrum of free African Americans’ experience with wage work and freedom. Conway, the cottager, and Joseph Chain, the Easton barber, represent two points on that spectrum. In the 1780s, Conway and his wife, Flora, exited slavery and immediately learned the limits of their freedom. As they weighed their options for work and housing, the harsh economic realities of the 1780s tempered their enthusiasm. Because employment opportunities did not grow in step with the emerging population of manumitted slaves who needed work, Conway and Flora’s personal ambitions gave way to the compelling need to find steady employment and accommodations. As a cottager he enjoyed some economic and personal security. He had a steady wage, housing, and other provisions.

In contrast, Joseph Chain shunned plantation life. He was not a native of the Eastern Shore, but he had lived as a freedman in Easton since at least 1813. His barber business was well established by the time he placed his advertisement in the local newspaper in 1817. What initially brought him to Easton is unknown, but Chain’s skill as a barber, coupled with his economic resources, made his break with plantation life possible. Not at the mercy of the cycles of grain production, Chain set his own schedule and traveled between Easton, the neighboring plantations, and Baltimore. However, this autonomy in his daily life did not mean that Joseph Chain was independent of the plantation elite. Chain’s lifestyle was possible only because planters invested in his business. Without their continued patronage, Chain inevitably would have had to join the agricultural workforce.

Joseph Chain could have lived and worked anywhere, but he chose to establish his barbershop in a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He also accepted a leadership position in the local AME church and thereby played a critical part in organizing the free African American community in Easton. Joseph Chain was at home on the Eastern Shore. He was invested in the economic and social development of this community. Surely, Chain knew other free African Americans who did not share his attachment to Easton: men and women who wanted to experience the world beyond the Eastern Shore of Maryland. These African Americans were fortunate to live at a time when employers across the Middle Atlantic states were willing to hire free African Americans in all kinds of occupations. The steady demand for wage labor in a variety of industries created opportunities for laborers. Many African Americans moved readily to seize the opportunities made available to them by an expanding labor market.