Notes

Preface

1. Wilson J. Moses, “Black Communities in Antebellum America: Buttressing Held Views” Reviews in American History 25 (1997): 557–63.

2. W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) is a noteworthy exception, a very creative approach to transatlantic community formation among black seamen. More typical are discrete histories of free African American communities in the tradition of Gary Nash’s pioneering work, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). See, for example: Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk Virginia, 1790–1860 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1664–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

3. On the subject of the British emancipation, see: William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1975); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1997); Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); and Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

4. Scholarship that treats American emancipation as a labor problem includes: Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); James D. Schmidt, Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815–1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); and Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5. The economic impetus for emancipation has been well explored by Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderland in Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); T. Stephen Whitman in The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); and John Joseph Condon, Jr., in “Manumission, Slavery, and Family in the Post Revolutionary Rural Chesapeake: Anne Arundel County, Maryland, 1781–1831” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2001).

6. This book is partly a reaction to a historiography that has been narrowly focused on ideological and political questions about the early republic emancipations. See, for example, Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); David Nathaniel Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderland, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and numerous articles and dissertations on the manumission process.

7. Paul Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grains (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain: Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2001); Lorena S. Walsh, “Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620–1820” Journal of Economic History 49 (June 1989): 393–406; Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Live in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993): 170–99; Jean B. Russo, “A Model Planter: Edward Lloyd IV of Maryland, 1770–1796” William and Mary Quarterly 49 (January 1992): 62–88; and Christine Daniels, “Alternative Workers in a Slave Economy: Kent County, Maryland, 1675–1810” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1990).

8. Studies of agricultural wage work in early Pennsylvania have provided me with important models, in particular the work of Lucy Simler, especially “The Landless Worker: An Index of Economic and Social Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 114 (1990): 163–99; and Carl Douglas Oblinger, “New Freedoms, Old Miseries: The Emergence and Disruption of Black Communities in Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1780–1860” (PhD diss., Lehigh University, 1988).

9. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 63–89. Historian Seth Rockman also takes issue with the “dual labor system” model and applies the term “hybrid-labor system” to describe what I have called a “mixed labor system.” Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Introduction

1. On the origins of the plantation economy, see Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grains (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); on the Lower Eastern Shore see, Jean Elliott Russo, “‘Fifty-Four Days Work of Two Negroes’: Enslaved Labor in Colonial Somerset County, Maryland,” Agricultural History 78 (Autumn 2004): 466–92.

2. Patrick W. Carey, Catholics in America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 10–13.

3. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 86.

4. Ross M. Kimmel, “Free Blacks in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (Spring 1976): 19–25.

5. Clemens, Atlantic Economy, 147.

6. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 60.

7. On emerging wheat markets, see Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain: Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2001); Clemens, Atlantic Economy; David Klingaman, “The Significance of Grain in the Development of the Tobacco Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 268–78. Bayly Ellen Marks, “Economics and Society in a Staple Plantation System: St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1790–1840” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1979) offers another case study of the economic and social impact of diversified agriculture.

8. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 62–64.

9. Clemens, Atlantic Economy, 198–204.

10. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 29–30.

11. Keith Mason, “Region in Revolt: The Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1740–1790” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 120–22.

12. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 128–29.

13. Russo, “Fifty-Four Days,” 476–77.

14. Walsh, “The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications, William Mary and Quarterly, 58 (January 2001): 158.

15. John Kelly Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 186–90.

16. Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa; Who was a Slave about Two Years in Maryland; and Afterwards Being Brought to England, was Set Free, and Sent to his Native Land in the Year 1734 (London: Richard Ford, 1799), 20.

17. Clemens, Atlantic Economy, 61.

18. Alan Kulikoff, “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 226–59; Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

19. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove, 61–64.

20. Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1933), 161–70.

21. On slave-work regimes, see Lorena Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the America, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 170–99.

22. On the differences between rice, tobacco, and wheat production, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 146–59 and 164–75; and Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society,” 177.

23. Ernest McNeill Eller offers a full history of naval operations in the Chesapeake in The Chesapeake Bay in the American Revolution (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1981).

24. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 72–93.

25. Harold T. Pinkett, “Maryland as a Source of Food Supplies during the American Revolution,” Maryland Historical Magazine 46 (September 1951): 159, 163–64.

26. Elizabeth Cometti, “Inflation in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 7 (1951): 234.

27. Letter of Blake Corsica to Governor Lee, July 27, 1780. Journal and Correspondence of the Council of Maryland, Archives of Maryland, 1780–1781, vol. 45, p. 32.

28. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 238.

29. Ibid., 331.

30. Ibid., 245. Revolt in the Lower Eastern Shore is the subject of Ronald Hoffman’s A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

31. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 123.

32. Carey, Catholics in America, 13–15.

33. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 334.

34. William H. Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1796–1820 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1984), 41.

35. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 120–22. Mason, “Region in Revolt,” 168–69.

36. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society,” 187–88.

37. Governor and Council (Sale Book) 1786–1788, MSA S964–2.

38. William L. Calderhead, “Slavery in Maryland in the Age of the Revolution, 1775–1790” Maryland Historical Magazine, 98 (Fall 2003): 311.

39. Quote in T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007), 32. See also 24–25 and 31.

40. Council to Nathan Nicholson, February 16, 1778. Journal and Correspondence of the State Council, 1 January 1777 to 20 March 1778, Archives of Maryland, vol. 16, p. 501.

41. Frederick Emory, Queen Anne’s County, Maryland: Its Early History and Development (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1950), 255–60. The first reference to the Talbot poorhouse appears in Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–3, 1786, p. 3.

42. Hollyday Papers 1677–1905, MHS MS1317, Richard J. Earle to Henry Hollyday, April 18, 1787, reel 3, p. 708.

43. Louis Maganzin, “Economic Depression in Maryland and Virginia, 1783–1787” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1967), 71.

44. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 120–40; Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society,” 189–91.

45. For more on Baltimore’s transformation, see T. Stephen Whitman, “Slavery in Early National Baltimore and Rural Maryland,” in The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Early National Baltimore, chapter 1 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 8–32; Christopher Phillips, “Slavery and the Growth of Baltimore,” in Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860, chapter 1, Blacks in the New World series (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 7–29; and Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

46. Cited in Mason, “A Region in Revolt,” 381.

47. Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 49–82; Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 430.

48. Jean B. Russo, “A Model Planter: Edward Lloyd IV of Maryland, 1770–1796,” William and Mary Quarterly 49 (January 1992): 62–88, 85–86.

49. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 10–11; and Rockman, Scraping By, 27.

50. Kenneth Carroll, “Religious Influences on the Manumission of Slaves in Caroline, Dorchester, and Kent Counties,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (Fall 1961): 176–97.

51. Calderhead, “Slavery in Maryland in the Age of the Revolution,” 305–6.

52. Lathan A. Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790, vol. 2 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 328–29.

53. Delaware also experienced a surge in manumissions after the American Revolution, but Delaware planters did not blend slave labor with free labor. Instead, planters employed free black workers in grain cultivation and slaves in other industries. See Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865, Carter G. Woodson Series in Black Studies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 69–74.

1. Work

1. Eastern Shore General Advertiser, January 18, 1814.

2. John Beale Bordley, Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1801).

3. General Assembly House of Delegates (Assessment Record) 1783, MSA S1161–80, Queen Anne’s County, Corsica District, John Beale Bordley, p. 45.

4. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 388, 389, and 390.

5. Ibid., 388.

6. Christine Daniels, “‘Wanted: A Blacksmith who understands Plantation Work’: Artisans in Maryland, 1700–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (October 1993): 766.

7. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 389.

8. Ibid., 389 and 390–91. For more on the cottage system, see Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1988), 106–43.

9. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 392.

10. Ibid., 391 and 393.

11. Ibid., 391, 393, 394, and 395.

12. Lucy Simler, “The Landless Worker: An Index of Economic and Social Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104 (April 1990): 172–74, and 165.

13. G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence and Impact, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1997), 22.

14. See Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure, 117–23, for a description of enclosure procedure.

15. John E. Crowley, “‘In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry’: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House,” Winterthur Portfolio 32 (Summer–Autumn, 1997): 169–88, 182–85; Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure, 130–32.

16. Thomas Chamberlain’s accounts with his hired laborers were documented in a memorandum book (1789–1790) that was maintained by Chamberlain and a separate account book that was maintained by Robert Lloyd Nicols, an executor of Chamberlain’s estate. Both books are part of the Sarah D. Griffen, Clyde Griffen, and Margaret Thibault Collection of Goldsborough Family Papers located at the Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, Maryland.

Chamberlain’s memorandum book is inventoried as “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (MSA SC 2085-B4-F1). The executor’s record is located in a folder that contains three account books and is inventoried as “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (MSA SC 2085-B4-F12). The collection descriptions do not detail the contents of the folders or otherwise indicate that these record sets contain documents that pertain to the estate of Thomas Chamberlain. Therefore, I have decided to cite these two account books as “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), and “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate) to clarify for the reader that this record set actually holds documents pertinent to hiring practices on the estate of Thomas Chamberlain.

17. Talbot County Register of Wills (Wills, Original), 1785–1794, MSA C1925–4, Thomas Chamberlain, 1790, p. 175–82. Also, Heads of Families of the First Census Taken in the Year 1790, Maryland (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1907), 114.

18. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, February 12, 1790. Payments in this account book are in Maryland currency and expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence.

19. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, July 27, 1790.

20. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, August 26, 1790. A note in the account book indicates that planters generally paid five or six shillings per diem for reaping “in this part of the country.”

21. “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate), MSA SC 2085-B4-F12, p. 5.

22. Richard Tilghman IV to William Tilghman, August 9, 1799, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659 (box 14, folder 10).

23. “Agreement between Robert Lloyd Nicols and Bennett Shields,” MSA SC 2085-B35-F11, January 7, 1811.

24. Papers of the Tilghman Family, Georgetown University Libraries, Special Collections, Colonel Richard Tilghman, account C, folio 73 (Family Expenses), folio 140, 152, 156 (Overseer James Wilkins), folio 97, 106 (Overseer David Lesage), and folio 125 (Overseer William Ring).

25. Payments to former slaves, including Daph, are listed in “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate), MSA SC 2085-B4-F12, p. 15.

26. “RLN Account Books, 1786–1810” (Chamberlain Estate), MSA SC 2085-B4-F12, p. 5.

27. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, January 15, 1790.

28. Payments to Flora are recorded in “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1. Walsh, “Slave Life,” 187.

29. Chamberlain instructed his executors to apprentice all the enslaved children under fourteen, but he did not name the children. Talbot County Register of Wills (Wills, Original), 1785–1794, MSA C1925–4, Thomas Chamberlain, 1790, p. 175–82.

30. Daniel, Isaac, Peter, Kitt, Bett, Hannah, and Poll were all free African Americans hired by Chamberlain and his executors, but none of them were mentioned in his will, and none received legacies.

31. “RHG Account Books, 1789–1804” (Chamberlain Memorandum), MSA SC 2085-B4-F1, May 30, 1789; April 25, 1790; and April 27, 1790.

32. Richard Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Slavery and Freedom, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 49–82. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 430. Jean Butenhoff Lee, Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 253. Russo, “Edward Lloyd, Model Planter,” 85.

33. My description of hiring practices on Upper Eastern Shore plantations is based on analysis of five account books. The Richard Tilghman ledger is part of the Tilghman Family Papers, 1793–1940 (MS 2600) housed at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. The other account books are part of the Sarah D. Griffen, Clyde Griffen, and Margaret Thibault Collection of Goldsborough Family Papers (MSA SC 2085) housed at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis.

34. In 1800 Richard Tilghman appeared as the head of a household that included two white women and fifty-eight slaves. Population Schedule, Second U.S. Census, Talbot, Maryland, 75.

35. Richard Tilghman, ledger (1790–1806), MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 59. Payments in the Tilghman accounts are in Maryland currency and expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence.

36. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 124.

37. Lois Green Carr and Lorena Walsh, “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 175–88.

38. The slaves belonging to Robert Lloyd Nicols are listed in an 1815 inventory that appears in “RLN Account Books, Inventory, 1808–1809, 1815–1818,” (MSA SC 2085-B4-F3). Hereafter, I will cite this book as “RLN Account Books, Inventory.” To compare the sex ratios of Eastern Shore plantations with plantations in Virginia, see Richard Dunn, “After Tobacco: The Slave Labour Pattern on a Large Chesapeake Grain-and-Livestock Plantation in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, Early Modern Atlantic Economy, chapter 12 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 361.

39. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 68 (Old Grace), p. 25; (Negroes Memory and Nan), p. 10 (Negro Eve). See the accounts of Betty Greenfield, a white spinner, and Nan, a black spinner. Richard Tilghman, ledger, p. 98 (Betty Greenfield) and p. 25 (Nan).

40. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, pp. 68, 25, and 10.

41. “RLN Account Books, Inventory,” MSA SC 2085-B4-F3, September 1815 and August 1816.

42. Richard Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 25.

43. Walsh, “Slave Life,” 187.

44. “RLN Account Books, Inventory,” MSA SC 2085-B4-F3, April 1818 (Foster); June 1815 (Grace); August 1818 (Howard); and June 1815 (Downes).

45. Walsh, “Slave Life,” 187.

46. “RLN Account Books, Inventory,” MSA SC 2085-B4-F3, August 1816; “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Account), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, p. 10.

Robert Henry Goldsborough’s accounts were documented in an account book that is divided into two parts. The front of the book includes a record of accounts with tenants, merchants, and hired laborers, and I will cite references to this part of the book as “Goldsborough Accounts.” The back of the book includes a record of cash payments arranged by date. I will cite this half of the book as “Goldsborough Cash Accounts.”

This account book has been inventoried as “Thomas Chamberlaine Account Book, 1818–1821” in the Sarah D. Griffen, Clyde Griffen, and Margaret Thibault Collection of Goldsborough Family Papers located at the Maryland State Archives (MSA SC 2085-B3-F3). It is unclear why an account book with entries from the 1820s was linked to Thomas Chamberlain, who died in 1790. The book details grain production at Plain Dealing, a Talbot County farm owned by Robert Lloyd Nicols but evidently managed and maintained by Robert Henry Goldsborough after Nicols died in 1815. The account book is one of several records in the collection that document Goldsborough’s management of the farm and its tenant (Jeremiah Valiant).

I have decided to cite “Thomas Chamberlaine Account Book, 1818–1821” as “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts) and “TC Account, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts) to clarify for the reader that this account book is the source for all information about Robert Henry Goldsborough’s hiring practices.

47. These payments to Greenberry appear in “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 10, 16, 17, 18, 30, and 31.

48. For example, Joseph Caldwell paid taxes on “work steer” and Edward Delehay on “yoke oxen.” Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–10, 1817, Election District 2, Caldwell, p. 6; MSA C1831–11, 1817, Election District 3, Delehey, p. 10.

49. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–11, 1817, Election District 3, Abraham Dobson, p. 7.

50. The seven sawyers were James Dobson (1823), Chester Sewell (1823–24), Pompey Gibson (1823), Isaac Gray (1823–24), Abraham Denny (1823), and the team of Jere Banning and Toby Martin (1821–22). “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 14, 21, 24, and 23.

51. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, John Dobson and Chester Sewell, p. 21.

52. Daniel Caul worked for Tilghman between 1793 and 1799. Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, p. 8.

53. See Daniels, “Wanted,” 750–53. Richard Tilghman hired six white carpenters, eight white blacksmiths, and six white brick makers between 1790 and 1806.

54. Kelly’s account appears in Tilghman, ledger, MHS MS 2600-B3-F10, pp. 26, 37, and 51.

55. Jacob Ross did not have an account with Goldsborough, but he appeared repeatedly in the cash accounts. For his collection of money from tenant Jeremiah Valliant and Captain Vickars, see “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 1 and 5.

56. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 1, 2, and 9.

57. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, p. 4.

58. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, pp. 1, 5, and 8.

59. Dickson J. Preston, Talbot County: A History (Centreville: Tidewater Publishers, 1983), 144–53.

60. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Accounts), MSA SC 2085-B3-F3, p. 10.

61. Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser, January 21, 1817, p. 4.

62. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–1, 1804, Election District 1, John Dorrell, 40.

63. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA SC1880–43, 1809, p. 105 (John and Maria Webster to John Dorrell). Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–4, 1804, Election District 1, John Webster, 33.

64. Values taken from the Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–9, 10, 11, and 12, 1817, Election Districts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

65. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–7, 1813, Election Districts 1, John Dorrell, p. 3.

66. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C-6, 1804, Election District 3, Isaac Maccary, p. 21; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, James Pritchart, p. 26.

67. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, Sam Demby, p. 9; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, Joseph Bantom, p. 2.

68. In Baltimore, African American property owners also constructed tenant homes or took in boarders. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 102.

69. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–13, 1826, Election District 1, Henry Toomey, p. 42.

70. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1832–3, 1832, Election District 3, Isaac Mackary (Maccary), p. 24. White property owners also built “tenant” or “tenement” houses that they leased to free African Americans. Richard Ray, for example, built three tenement houses at his lot on Aurora Street in Easton. See Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–13, 1826, Election District 1, p. 36.

71. Totals compiled from analysis of free African American property owners listed in Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA SC1831–9, 10, 11, and 12, 1817, Election Districts 1–4. By comparison, Emma Jones Lapsansky found that in 1838 Philadelphia 10% of the black population in Philadelphia owned 70% of the African American community’s wealth. See Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 96.

2. Migration

1. Kenneth L. Carroll, “An Eighteenth-Century Episcopalian Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission of Slaves,” Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 145.

2. T. Stephen Whitman and Barbara Jeanne Fields have both argued that Maryland slaveholders felt more threatened by African American mobility than by slave revolt. T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007), 127; Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 71. The Black Codes are analyzed more fully in chapter 4 of this book.

3. Whitman, Challenging Slavery, 32.

4. Ibid., 98–99.

5. “An Act to prohibit the transportation of absconding slaves to Hayti, or elsewhere,” Archives of Maryland, 1824 Session Laws, chapter 85. On Virginia law, see Whitman, Challenging Slavery, 189.

6. James Hollyday to William Tilghman, August 15, 1797, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659.

7. “An Act to prevent the inconveniencies arising from slaves being permitted to act as free,” Archives of Maryland, 1787 Session Laws, chapter 33; “An Act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” Archives of Maryland, 1796 Session Laws, chapter 67, section 17; “A further supplement to an act, entitled, An act to prevent the inconveniences arising from slaves being permitted to act as free,” Archives of Maryland, 1822 Session Laws, chapter 115, section 6, “Exception.”

8. “A Further additional supplement to an act, entitled, An act relating to negroes,” Archives of Maryland, 1807 Session Laws, chapter 164.

9. “An Act to prevent the unlawful exportation of Negroes, and Mulattoes, and to alter and amend the Laws concerning Runaways,” Archives of Maryland, 1817 Session Laws, chapter 112, section 6. Also, “A supplement to an act entitled, An Act to prevent the unlawful exportation of negroes and mulattoes, and to alter and amend the laws concerning runaways,” Archives of Maryland, 1824 Session Laws, chapter 171, section 1.

10. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855 (New York: Dover, 1969), 286.

11. Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 14–15. The government of Delaware adopted antikidnapping laws in 1787, 1789, and 1793, and the Virginia legislature passed antikidnapping laws in 1788. See Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 85–86; and Tommy S. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790–1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 99.

12. The Baltimore County Court issued 350 certificates between 1810 and 1816. The 350 certificate bearers represented only 4% of the free black population of Baltimore in 1820. Leroy Graham, “Manumitted Free Blacks in Baltimore, 1806–1816,” Maryland Magazine of Genealogy 5 (Spring 1982): 8–22.

13. In Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties both the county court and the office of Register of Wills recorded Certificates of Freedom. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), Jacob, 1805, MSA C1843–1, p. 169. In 1807 the Queen Anne’s County Clerk issued the first “official” freedom certificate to Harry in 1807. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1366–1, 1807, p. 1.

14. On average 39 free African Americans applied for certificates each year between 1800 and 1829 in Talbot County, but in 1807, 120 applied for certificates, and in 1819, 119 applied for certificates.

15. See Donald Sweig, introduction to Registrations of Free Negroes (Fairfax, Virginia, 1977), 3; and Howard Bodenhorn, “A Troublesome Caste: Height and Nutrition of Antebellum Virginia’s Rural Free Blacks” Journal of Economic History 59 (December 1999): 980.

16. Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 252.

17. Essah, House Divided, 113 and 110–11.

18. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–35, William Frazier to Thomas Cole, 1794, p. 259. Cole’s freedom certificate was the first I found recorded in Talbot County records.

19. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–1, John Maccary and Levin Maccary, 1814, pp. 75 and 74; Grace Maccary and James Maccary, MSA C1843–2, 1818, pp. 77 and 90; Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Maccary Family, p. 30.

20. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Maria Pipes and Peter Pipes, 1827, p. 55; Eliza Pipes, 1828, p. 59; and Henny Pipes, 1829, p. 65.

21. G. W. Offley, A Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley, a Colored Man, Local Preacher and Missionary (Hartford, Conn., 1859), 11.

22. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 110.

23. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joseph Martin, 1831, p. 97. Talbot County Court Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Jacob Gibson, 1822, p. 19 and 49. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joe Boyer, 1832, p. 130. Jacob Gibson, Joe Boyer, and Joseph Martin were all quite young when they applied for their first certificates; they were twenty-two, twenty-three, and thirty years old, respectively. Their youth affirms the argument that young people were more likely to seek certificates to facilitate migration.

24. Emily Green’s letter to the Talbot County Register of Wills is a miscellaneous document that was tucked into the Account of Sales. Talbot County, Register of Wills, Accounts of Sale, 1818–1821, MSA C 1818–20. Melvin Patrick Ely cites additional examples of free African Americans or their employers requesting copies of freedom papers by mail in Virginia. Ely, Israel on the Appomattox, 253.

25. “An Act, entitled, An additional supplement to an act, entitled, An act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” Archives of Maryland, 1805 Session Laws, chapter 66. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 61–62.

26. “An act relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” Archives of Maryland, 1831 Session Laws, chapter 323, section 2.

27. Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joseph Martin, 1831, p. 97, and Queen Anne’s County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1448–1, Joe Boyer, 1832, p. 130.

28. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 18.

29. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 12.

30. Percentage compiled from Graham, “Manumitted Free Blacks in Baltimore,” 8–22.

31. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 94, esp. footnote 4; Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, 21.

32. Nash, Forging Freedom, 136.

33. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, 55–56. See Stephen Vincent, “Southern Origins, ca. 1760–1830,” Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900, chapter 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–25.

34. See Christopher Phillips, “The Dear Name of Home: Resistance to Colonization in Antebellum Baltimore” Maryland Historical Magazine 91 (Summer 1996): 194. “Report of the Committee on Colored Population,” House of Delegates, Public Documents, February 26, 1840, MSA SC M3171, pp. 1125–26.

35. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 283.

3. Family

1. See, for example, Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Wilma Dunaway, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

2. For a brief history of coartación, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (2007): 659–92.

3. Notwithstanding the terms of the Pennsylvania Act of Abolition, approximately 67% of the male term slaves and 75% of the female term slaves in Philadelphia were released from slavery after they reached twenty-six years of age. Gary Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 164–65.

4. Petition of Charles L. Gardiner [Gardner] to the County Court, St. Mary’s County, Maryland, May 20, 1833, Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, Series 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1777–1867, part B (Maryland), reel 5, frame 0778.

5. T. Stephan Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 96. Historian Jessica Millward found that 83% of the manumission deeds filed in Anne Arundel County between 1785 and 1808 similarly required a term of service before freedom. See Millward, “‘A Choice Parcel of Country Born’: African Americans and the Transition to Freedom in Maryland, 1770–1840” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), 202.

6. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 101 and 134–35.

7. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Elisha, 1827, p. 116.

8. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Anne Reese, 1837, pp. 188–89.

9. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1800–1802, MSA C1880–39, George Dawson to Peter and Rose Chesnor, 1801, p. 80.

10. “An Act to ascertain and declare the condition of such Issue as may hereafter be born of Negro or Mulatto Female Slaves, during their servitude for Years, and for other purposes therein mentioned,” Archives of Maryland, 1809 Session Laws, chapter 171. Talbot County Court Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, 1827, Mary Ann Jones, 114.

11. William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave) (Springfield, Mass.: L. M. Guernsey, 1853), 5.

12. On the development of the business of slave trading, see Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

13. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1794–96, MSA C1880–35, Robert Lambdin to negro George Kersey, 1795, p. 221.

14. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1800–1802, MSA C1880–39, James Earle, Jr. to negro Richard Bowlin, 1802, p. 435; George Dawson to Peter and Rose Chesnor, 1801, p. 80; and Robin Chamberlain to negro Richard Bowlin, 1802, p. 434.

15. Rev. Noah Davis, A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, a Colored Man. Written by Himself at the Age of Fifty-Four (Baltimore: J. F. Weishampel, Jr., 1859), 29.

16. Ibid., 31.

17. Ibid., 37–40.

18. T. Stephen Whitman explains the relationship between the price of children and the timing for purchase and manumission in Price of Freedom, 134–36.

19. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1823–25, MSA C1880–55, John Tilghman to negro David Barnett, 1824, p. 66; Talbot County Court (Land Records), 1828–30, MSA C1880–58, Samuel Roberts to negro Hestor Benson, 1828, p. 111.

20. Offley, Narrative, 4.

21. Whitman, Price of Freedom, 133.

22. Davis, Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, 31, 57, and 58.

23. Edmond Kelley, A Family Redeemed from Bondage; Being Rev. Edmond Kelley, (the Author,) His Wife, and Four Children (New Bedford, Mass.: The Author, 1851), 11.

24. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1806–8, MSA C1880–42, Sarah Hollyday to Nanny Occomy, 1808, p. 467, and Sarah Hollyday to Jack, 1808, p. 468.

25. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1800–1802, MSA C1880–39, George Dawson to Peter and Rose Chesnor, 1801, p. 80.

26. See Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 557–58.

27. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 84–87.

28. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–1, Caroline Haskins, 1814, p. 123, Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–2, Anna Haskins, 1827, p. 54, and Joe Haskins, 1822, p. 23.

Other Haskins family members who filed for Certificates of Freedom include, Perry Haskins, MSA C 1843–1, 1810, p. 84, and Esther Haskins, 1812, p. 78. Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1842–1, Benjamin Haskins, 1811, pp. 44–45; Joseph Haskins, 1817, pp. 61–62; Rachel Haskins, 1811, pp. 42–43; Rachel Haskins, 1826, p. 52; Daphne Haskins, 1817, p. 80; and Violet Haskins, 1833, p. 82.

29. Alan Kulikoff, “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 243–44, and 255.

30. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), 38.

31. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 303. Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 132.

32. “An Act Relating to the People of color in this State,” 1831 Session Laws, chapter 281, section 9.

33. Greenbury Nicols and the ten members of his household were included in the 1832 Census of Negroes. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Greenbury Nicols Family, p. 14.

34. Fourth U.S. Census 1820, Talbot County, Maryland; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore City, Maryland. Fifth U.S. Census, 1830, Talbot County, Maryland; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore City, Maryland.

35. Offley, Narrative, 5–6.

36. Shepard Krech III, Praise The Bridge That Carries You Over: The Life of Joseph L. Sutton (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 448–52.

37. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–2 (1798); C1831–4, 5, and 6 (1804); C1831–6 and 7 (1813); C1831–9, 10, 11, and 12 (1817); and C 1831–13, 14, and 15 (1826). Talbot County Board of County Commissioners (Assessment Record) 1832–96, MSA C1832–1, 2, 3, and 4 (1832). Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List) 1812–30, MSA C1825–1 (1813), C-1825–6 (1822–24), C-1825–7 (1825, 1830).

38. Talbot County Court (Land Records) 1813–14, MSA C1880–46, Henry Nicols to Robert Moore, administrator for Grace Brooks, 1814, p. 504 (details terms of ninety-nine-year lease). Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1804, Election District 3, MSA C1831–6, Grace Brooks, pp. 5 and 6, and Ned Brooks, p. 5. Ned Brooks, Population Schedule, Second U.S. Census, Talbot County, Maryland, 1800, 76.

39. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1813, Election District 3, MSA C1831–8, Hannah Brooks, p. 3.

40. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1817, Election District 3, MSA C1831–11, Hannah Brooks, p. 3, and Amy Brooks, p. 3.

41. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1832, Election District 3, MSA C1832–3, Amy Brooks, pp. 1 and 3. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Amy Brooks Family, p. 32. Amy Brooks’s family included herself (50 years old), Lucretia Brooks (23), David Brooks (20), and ten-year-old George Brooks.

42. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes) 1832, MSA C1841–1, Lydia Hamilton/Hambleton, p. 39; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1826, Election District 3, MSA CM 985–14, Lydia Hamilton, p. 13.

43. Offley, Narrative, 7.

44. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1804–12, MSA C1870–2, Charles Dorsey to Peter Edmondson, 1810, pp. 205–6.

45. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1840–53, MSA C1870–7, James, Charles, and Thomas Hemsley to Levi Duke, 1855, pp. 39–44.

46. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1804–12, MSA C1870–2, Henry to Matthew and Elizabeth Greentree, 1810, pp. 180–81.

47. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), 1822–40, MSA C1870–6, Charles Peck to Thomas Bennet, 1823), p. 50.

48. Offley, Narrative, 8.

49. Ibid., 7 and 8.

50. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 60.

51. Erica R. Armstrong, “Negro Wenches, Washer Women, and Literate Ladies: The Transforming Identities of African American Women in Philadelphia 1780–1854” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000), 43.

52. Eugene B. McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton, eds., From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 162.

4. Dependency

1. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 135.

2. Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1983), 14–38; Michael Craton, “Reshuffling the Pack: The Transition from Slavery to Other Forms of Labour in the British Caribbean, 1780–1890,” chapter 18, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1997), 356–413.

3. Anne Marie Lee-Loy, “The Chinese Are Preferred to All Others: Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Chinese in Trinidad and British Guiana,” Asian Studies Review [Great Britain] 27 (2003): 219.

4. This chapter focuses on the legal code as a tool for creating a class of dependent laborers. It is not an analysis of criminal activity on the Eastern Shore and does not include a discussion of the crime rate or white criminal activity.

5. “An Act to prevent free negroes from selling any corn, wheat or tobacco, without having a license for that purpose from a justice of the peace,” 1805 Session Laws, chapter 80. “An Act relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” 1831 Session Laws, chapter 323, section 9. The 1805 proposal that would have required freedmen to acquire a license to own farm implements was part of a larger bill that required freedmen to apply for a license to own guns and dogs. See David S. Bogen, “The Maryland Context of Dred Scott: The Decline in the Legal Status of Maryland Free Blacks, 1776–1810,” American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990): 404–7, esp. footnotes 97 and 101.

6. “An Act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” 1796 Session Laws, chapter 67. “An additional supplement to the act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein mentioned,” 1825 Session Laws, chapter 161. “An act relating to Public Roads in Talbot County,” 1825 Session Laws, chapter 196.

7. “A further supplement to an act, entitled, an Act for the better regulation of apprentices,” 1808 Session Laws, chapter 54, section 2. “An act authorizing the Judges of the Orphans Court to bind out the Children of Free Negroes and Mulattoes,” 1818 Session Laws, chapter 189. In 1811 Delaware passed a similar law that empowered the county courts to indenture free black children if their parents could not prove their ability to maintain them. See Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 116–17.

8. On prison reform in early America, see Adam J. Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

9. “An Act for the more effectual punishment of criminals, Laws of Maryland,” 1789 Session Laws, chapter 44. According to James D. Rice, “The Wheelbarrow Act empowered justices to sentence those convicted of assault, manslaughter, petty larceny, sodomy, breaking and entering (excluding burglary), receiving, forgery, or perjury to work on the roads, although they could also choose to impose the old punishments.” James D. Rice, “Crime and Punishment in Frederick County and Maryland, 1748–1837: A Study in Culture, Society, and Law” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1994), 369.

10. Sentencing guidelines for the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore are included in “An Act concerning Crimes and Punishments,” 1809 Session Laws, chapter 138, especially section 9. The 1809 legislation permitted courts to sentence slaves to the penitentiary, but the legislature banned this practice in 1818.

11. “A Supplement to the act, entitled, An act concerning Crimes and Punishment,” 1817 Session Laws, chapter 72.

12. “A further act and additional supplement to an act, entitled, “an act concerning crimes and punishments,” 1825 Session Laws, chapter 93. “An Additional Supplement to the Act concerning Crimes and Punishments,” 1826 Session Laws, chapter 229. “An Act concerning crime and punishment,” 1835 Session Laws, chapter 200, section 3.

13. See Essah, House Divided, 111.

14. “An Act to restrain the evil practices arising from negroes keeping dogs, and to prohibit them from carrying guns or offensive weapons,” 1806 Session Laws, chapter 81.

15. “An Act respecting free negroes,” 1801 Session Laws, chapter 91. “A further supplement to the act, entitled, An act relating to servants and slaves,” 1808 Session Laws, chapter 81.

16. Rice, “Crime and Punishment,” 288.

17. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–49, William Melay to Henry Toomey, 1816, pp. 220–24.

18. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record) 1826, Election District 1, MSA C1831–15, Henry Toomey, p. 99; Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, Toomey (box 17, folder 2).

19. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–9, 1814, p. 124.

20. Whites in Pennsylvania also associated African Americans with property crimes. Between 1780 and 1800, 75% of the African Americans prosecuted in Philadelphia courts were accused of property crimes. See Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 249–55.

21. Kenneth L. Carroll, “An Eighteenth-Century Episcopalian Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission of Slaves,” Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 143.

22. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–9, 1792, p. 3; Talbot County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1857–14, 1811, p. 97. Marvin E. Gettleman, “The Maryland Penitentiary in the Age of Tocqueville, 1828–1842,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (September 1961): 277. Robert M. Saunders, “Crime and Punishment in Early National Virginia: Richmond, Virginia, 1784–1820,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (January 1978): 33–44, 43fn25.

23. James D. Rice, “The Criminal Trial before and after the Lawyers: Authority, Law, and Culture in Maryland Jury Trials, 1681–1837,” American Journal of Legal History 40 (1996): 457.

24. Rice, “Criminal Trial,” 464 and 470.

25. I am grateful to Dr. T. Stephen Whitman for providing me with his database of Maryland Pardon Papers, 1787 to 1827. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, 1815, Toomey (box 17, folder 2).

26. 1825 Session Laws, chapter 93.

27. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–26, 1826, Toomey (box 26, folder 73).

28. 1826 Session Laws, chapter 229.

29. Talbot County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1857–14, 1810, p. 44. Although the court clerk did not identify John Crouch by race, Crouch may have been a freedman, because many free black men were identified as “laborers.”

30. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–46, John Dorrell to Josiah Stangasser, 1813, p. 521; and, John Dorrell to Peter Harris, 1814, p. 518. That property was later returned to black ownership when Samuel Gibbs, a freedman, acquired it in 1833.

31. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–44, Tristram Thomas to Henry Toomey, 1811, pp. 520 and 521.

32. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–55, Henry Toomey to James Thomas, 1824, p. 416.

33. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–35, Isaac Wynn schedule, 1795, p. 403. Wynn’s property consisted of household goods and farm tools, including scythe blades, an axe, and a hoe. Wynn’s tools suggest that he was a smallholder or tenant.

34. Population Schedule. Second U.S. Census, Talbot County, Maryland, 1800, 80. Two of the three black residents were slaves and may have worked at the poorhouse.

35. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings) 1792–1847, MSA C1899–1, p. 83. In 1813 the trustees limited Fanny Adams’s pension to ten dollars a year. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings) 1792–1847, MSA C1899–1, p. 91.

36. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings) 1792–1847, MSA C1899–1, pp. 95, 101, and 114.

37. General Court of the Eastern Shore (Criminal Docket) 1786–1795, MSA S476–2, John Cockran, September 1789 and April 1791.

38. Queen Anne’s County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1387–3, 1817, p. 45. Leaverton was charged along with Philip Coursey and Peregrine Peters. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–19, Samuel Briley (box 19, folder 44), and William Austin (box 19, folder 23).

39. Hugh Matthews to William Tilghman, November 30, 1793, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659 (box 16, folder 21).

40. James Hutchings to William Tilghman, May 20, 1794, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP MS659 (box 10, folder 8).

41. Niles Weekly Standard, May 9, 1818.

42. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 230–31.

43. Brother Joseph P. Mobberly, Society of Jesus Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., “Diary Part 1,” (box 1, folder 1) pp. 111–13.

44. Talbot County Court (Court Minutes), MSA C1891–6, 1797, pp. 34, 35–36, and 39.

45. John Valliant to William Tilghman, January 13, 1801, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP MS659 (box 14, folder 10).

46. Queen Anne’s County Court (Minutes), MSA C1451–13, 1791, p. 13.

47. Queen Anne’s County Court (Minutes), MSA C1451–14, 1799, p. 66.

48. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–11, 1828, p. 41.

49. Queen Anne’s County Court (Criminal Record), MSA C1387–3, 1826, p. 377, and Queen Anne’s County Court (Minutes), MSA C1451–20, 1826, p. 151.

50. Maryland State Papers (Series A) 1795, MSA S1004–106, “Petition to the Governor from Sundry Inhabitants of Queen Anne’s County,” August 15, 1795.

51. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–22, Margaret Johns, 1822, p. 131.

52. Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–8, 1804, p. 292.

5. Community

1. “A Letter from General Harper, of Maryland, to Elias B. Caldwell, Esquire, Secretary of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color, in the United States with Their Own Consent” (Baltimore, 1817), reprinted in Eric Robert Papenfuse, The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), 100.

2. Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen. To Which is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793: With an Address to the People of Colour in the United States Written by Himself. Electronic Edition. Documenting the American South. University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.

3. Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, 55 and 59.

4. G. W. Offley, A Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley (Hartford: S.n., 1859), 20.

5. On Black Theology, see Timothy L. Smith, “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” Church History 41 (December 1972): 497–512. On the origins of the AME Church and identity, see William H. Becker, “The Black Church: Manhood and Mission,” in African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (New York: Routledge, 1997), 177–200.

6. On Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, and their history with the MEC, see Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000), 140–51 and 232. On Daniel Coker and the founding of the AME Church, see Daniel Alexander Payne, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1891; repr., New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1969), 88–89.

7. Charles Goldsborough to William Tilghman, June 9, 1797, William Tilghman Correspondence, HSP 659 (box 11, folder 24).

8. On the Jesuits in Maryland, see Thomas Richard Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1634–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Peter C. Finn, “The Slaves of the Jesuits in Maryland,” (MA thesis, Georgetown University, 1974). Records for the St. Inigoes plantation in St. Mary’s County are extensive and well used, but there is no comparable set of records for the Jesuit plantations on the Eastern Shore.

9. Jean Libby, From Slavery to Salvation: The Autobiography of Reverend Thomas W. Henry of the AME Church (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 6.

10. Libby, From Slavery to Salvation, 67–68. Talbot County baptismal and marriage records include the names of slaves baptized and married by Jesuits.

11. “Fr. Aloysius Mudd detailed description and evaluation of White Marsh as a site for Novitiate,” July 29, 1830, Archives, Maryland Province, Society of Jesus, Special Collections, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (box 62, folder 18).

12. Quote appears in Kenneth L. Carroll, “Religious Influences on the Manumission of Slaves in Caroline, Dorchester, and Talbot Counties,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (1961): 176–97, 178. On the Nicholites, see William H. Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769–1820. (Wilmington: Published for the Peninsula Conference of the United Methodist Church by Scholarly Resources, 1984), 8–9. On Talbot County Quakers and manumission, see Kenneth L. Carroll, “An Eighteenth-Century Episcopalian Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission of Slaves,” Maryland Historical Magazine 80 (Summer 1985): 139–50.

13. Cited in Kenneth L. Carroll, “Voices of Protest: Eastern Shore Abolition Societies, 1790–1820,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84 (Winter 1989): 350–59. On Bartlett’s school, see 355–56.

14. General Assembly House of Delegates (Assessment Record) 1783, MSA S1161–99, Talbot County, Third District, pp. 5 and 11.

15. The Methodist movement began as an evangelical movement within the Anglican Church but evolved into a distinct denomination in 1784, the Methodist Episcopal Church. As an evangelical movement and a formal denomination, Methodism relied on itinerant preachers who organized “societies” of Methodist disciples who would study scripture in classes organized by the itinerant. These societies grew into established churches within the MEC denomination. For more on the origins of the Methodist denomination in early America see Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton University Press, 2000).

16. Quote taken from Andrews, Methodists, 125–26.

17. Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America, from 1773 to 1813, Inclusive (New York: Daniel Hitt & Thomas Ware, 1813), 104.

18. Ibid., 147.

19. Francis Asbury, Journal and Letters, vol. 1, ed. Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Payton (London: Epworth Press, 1958), 581–82.

20. Asbury, Journal and Letters, 296. Dee Andrews argues that desegregated love feasts were uncommon. The MEC decided early to segregate such events when “black participation reached what whites perceived to be a critical mass.” Methodists, 133–34.

21. “TC Account Book, 1818–1821” (Goldsborough Cash Account), p. 11.

22. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–26, 1826 (box 26, folder 73).

23. Finn, “Slaves of the Jesuits,” 109 and 71.

24. Carroll, “Attack on Quaker and Methodist Manumission,” 144.

25. Ibid., 142. For more on James Berry and his antislavery activities, see Kenneth L. Carroll, “The Berry Brothers of Talbot County, Maryland: Early Antislavery Leaders,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84 (1989): 1–89.

26. Andrews, Methodists, 126–27.

27. Harry V. Richardson, Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as It Developed among Blacks in America (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976), 66.

28. Ibid., 67–75.

29. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–19, William Austin, 1819 (box 19, folder 23).

30. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–19, William Austin, 1819 (box 19, folder 23).

31. Asbury, Journal and Letters, 655–56.

32. This account of the origins of Easton Bethel AME Church comes from a broadside published by the congregation at the end of the nineteenth century, “Brief Church History of the Bethel AME Church, Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, 1818–1900,” MSA M1390. I have compared the details of this account with information found in other church histories and Talbot County government records, including the Land Records and Church Charter Record.

33. Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Years 1773 to 1813, vol. 1 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane), 1840.

34. Libby, From Slavery to Salvation, 51.

35. “Brief Church History,” MSA M1390.

36. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–57, Abraham Dobson (trustee) to Joseph Chain, 1827, p. 73. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–58, Henry Catrup to Joseph Chain, 1829, p. 427. This last document indicates that in 1820 Catrup had granted a ninety-nine-year lease to the Bethel Society trustees, but I could not find such an indenture.

37. Talbot County Court (Land Records), MSA C1880–59, James and Susan Parrott to Jacob Howard, William Benson, John, William and Pere Dobson (trustees), 1830, p. 400.

38. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 5–15; and Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 265–67.

39. Nash, Forging Freedom, 148n35.

40. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 139.

41. Henry Newman, A. Harris, A. Harkless, and Levi Henry were all listed in the “Brief Church History” as “incorporators” of the church, but I could not find any of them in the public records. I have inferred that Joseph Stevens and William Benson were freedmen because they were listed as trustees of the Bethel Society in the 1827 deed. All of the other leaders appear in two or more public records.

42. Information about the assets of the trustees is compiled from Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List) 1813–1816 and 1822–1824; and, Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1813, 1817, 1826, and 1832.

43. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–1, Nace Gibson, 1812, p. 77, and Edward Adams, 1809, p. 72. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), MSA C1843–2, Washington Dorrell, 1819, p. 117.

44. Washington Dorrell, Population Schedule, Fourth U.S. Census, Talbot County, Maryland, 1820, 12. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), 1826, MSA C1831–14, Election District 2, Washington Dorrell, p. 9.

45. Becker, “Black Church,” 180.

46. John and Josiah Dobson appear in the Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes), 1832, MSA C1841–1, p. 12. “J. Dobson” is listed among the earlier preachers of the Easton Bethel AME Church in “Brief History,” and Josiah Dobson appears as a trustee in Talbot County Court (Church Charter Record), MSA C 1845–1, January 7, 1851.

47. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 139n65.

48. For examples of that process at work in the Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, see Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 65–69.

49. Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 107.

50. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 163–64.

51. Ibid., 172–75.

52. Payne, History, 24 and 42.

53. The Hole-in-the-Wall AME class was mentioned in the minutes of the 1824 AME Annual Convention. Payne, History, 42.

54. Ivytown is listed as both Ivytown and Ivory Town in nineteenth-century records. Ivytown is the contemporary spelling, and I have opted to use modern spellings of all the town names, including Ivytown.

55. Richard Allen’s letter to the Easton Bethel AME Church appears in Payne, History, 49.

56. Richard S. Neuman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 210–37.

57. Albert J. Raboteau, Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 92–94.

58. Payne, History, 19 and 34.

59. Ibid., 49.

60. Ibid., 52–53.

61. According to the brief history published by the Easton Bethel AME Church, the local trial preachers served the church from 1818 until 1849, when J. Edward Hawkins was appointed the first “regular pastor.”

6. Recession

1. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–8, 1813, District 3, pp. 13 and 14. The names of Isaac Maccary’s eight children are listed in the deed of land issued by Isaac Maccary (Mackery) to Sam Maccary (Mackery). Talbot County Court (Land Records), 1826, MSA C1880–56, p. 450. Talbot County Court (Census of Negroes), 1832, MSA C1841–1, Isaac Maccary, p. 30.

2. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 176.

3. Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain: Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2001), 276.

4. Hunter, “Rage for Grain,” 274.

5. The quote appears in Dickson J. Preston, Talbot County: A History (Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1983), 171.

6. Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620–1820.” In Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, 170–99. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 194–195, and 198.

7. Letter from Frisby Tilghman to James Hollyday, February 18, 1821, Hollyday Papers, 1677–1905, MHS MS 001317, reel 4, p. 196.

8. The Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser, January 21, 1817.

9. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 206.

10. Preston, Talbot County, 190–91.

11. Letter from James Hollyday to Mrs. James Hollyday, April 26, 1819, Hollyday Papers, 1677–1905, MHS MS 001317, reel 2, p. 120.

12. The Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser, April 28, 1818. William Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy: Austin Woolfolk, A Case Study,” Civil War History 3 (1977): 198.

13. Jack Lawrence (Calvin) Schermerhorn, “Against All Odds: Slavery and Enslaved Families in the Making of the Antebellum Chesapeake,” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2008), 69.

14. William Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy: Austin Woolfolk, a Case Study,” Civil War History 23 (September 1977): 200–201.

15. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 149.

16. Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 179. On the almshouse and its services, see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 198–213.

17. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 180–81.

18. Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn and Socio-economic Decline,” Journal of Social History 5 (Spring 1972): 185.

19. Cited in T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 156–57.

20. Paul A. Gilje, “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the Anglo-American Mob Tradition,” Journal of Social History 13 (Summer 1980): 551 and 556.

21. Quote appears in Rockman, Scraping By, 257. In Philadelphia a white mob attacked an African American neighborhood over a three-day period in August 1834, destroying a black church and fatally injuring at least one freedman.

22. James W. Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860 (New York: Columbia University, 1921), 184.

23. Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” 187 and 189–190.

24. On Philadelphia, see Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 93–120. On Baltimore, see Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 104–9.

25. First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth U.S. Census, 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, Talbot County, Maryland; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore City, Maryland. Phillips, Freedom’s Port, 15 and 60.

26. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 70.

27. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–25, 1825, Richard Jones (box 25, folder 99). Talbot County Court (Minutes), MSA C1891–9, 1816, p. 161 (conviction of Robin and Poll). Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, 1816, Robin and Poll (box 17, folder 94).

28. The burning of Judy Parrot’s hut is detailed in a pardon appeal for Frederick Kemp. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers), MSA S1061–17, 1815, Frederick Kemp (box 17, folder 32).

29. In 1813 a judge ordered the trustees to commit Thomas Roden, a freedman who suffered from an unstated affliction, but the trustees refused (apparently without consequences), offering instead to issue an annual pension of $16 to Roden. The pension was increased to $20 in 1814. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings), MSA C1899–1, 1792–1847, pp. 95, 101, and 114.

30. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–12, 1817, District 4, George Warner, pp. 7 and 15.

31. Talbot County Trustees of the Poor (Proceedings), MSA C1899–1, 1792–1847, pp. 94–95, 109, and 111.

32. Rockman, Scraping By, 207.

33. See T. Stephen Whitman, “Orphans in City and Countryside in Nineteenth-Century Maryland,” in Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America, ed. Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 52–70, for a comprehensive treatment of apprenticeship in nineteenth-century Maryland. My conclusions are based on analysis of a sample of 306 apprenticeship contracts filed in Talbot County Court over fourteen years between 1808 and 1861. Talbot County Register of Wills (Indentures), MSA C1870–2, 1804–1812; MSA C1870–6, 1822–1840; MSA C1870–7, 1840–1853; and MSA C1870–8, 1853–1864.

34. See note 33 for the basis for my conclusions.

35. My conclusions are based on analysis of free African American property owners listed in Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessed Persons List), MSA C1825–6, 1822–1824, and MSA C1825–7, 1825 and 1830; Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–7 and 8, 1813; MSA C1831–9, 10, 11, and 12, 1817; and MSA C1831–13, 14, and 15, 1826. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), 1807–1815 and 1815–1828, MSA C1843 1–2; and Talbot County Register of Wills (Certificates of Freedom) 1806–1819 and 1819–1832, MSA C1842 1–2.

36. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), 1807–1815, MSA C1843–1, Boston, 1812, p. 96. Talbot County Court (Certificates of Freedom), 1815–1828, MSA C1843–2, William Boston, 1816, p. 39. Talbot County Commissioners of the Tax (Assessment Record), MSA C1831–6, 1804, Election District 3, William Boston, p. 2.

37. “James Bantom, Sr.” appears in the Talbot County Assessment Record (1813 and 1817), and Joseph Bantom appears in the 1804, 1813, 1817, 1824, and 1825 assessment records.

38. The Chaplains appear in the Talbot County Assessment Record (1804, 1813, 1817, 1822, 1824, 1825, 1826, 1832).

39. See note 35 for the basis of my conclusions.

40. Cited in Christopher T. George, “Mirage of Freedom: African Americans in the War of 1812,” Maryland Historical Magazine 91 (Winter 1996): 431.

41. Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (New York, 1837), 469.

42. Maryland State Papers (Series A) 1715–1847, S1004–128 (MdHr 6636–95-277), Council Chamber to Lieutenant Colonel Frisby Tilghman and Alexander Magruder, April 18, 1812.

43. The Maryland legislature adopted resolutions in 1817, 1819, 1831, and 1832 in support of efforts of the U.S. Congress to transport free African Americans to West Africa and Haiti.

44. Robert Henry Goldsborough, “Draft of Talbot County freemen’s memorial to Assembly in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” MSA SC 2085-b35-f13.

45. Draft of Talbot County freemen’s memorial, MSA SC 2085-b35-f13.

46. “An Act Relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” 1832 Session Laws, chapter 323.

47. Brenda J. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 264 and 270–73.

48. T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007), 171–72.

49. Ibid., 210.

50. Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 71.

51. For a thorough treatment of Richard Allen’s views on colonization, see Richard Neuman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 183–208.

52. William S. Watkins’s editorial appeared in Genius of Universal Emancipation under the pen name “A Colored Baltimorean” on November 27, 1829, and was reprinted in William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: or An Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. II. (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832): 54.

53. Cited in Whitman, Challenging Slavery, 142.

54. Watkins, “Appeal to Colored Citizens,” 52.

55. Maryland Colonization Journal (1835–1840), MSA M11070, “Schooner Columbia sailed from Baltimore for Cape Palmas, 17th May 1838,” April 1840.

56. The Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society to the Members and the Public (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1836), “Literal copy of a letter from Jacob Gibson, a coloured man, to Messrs. Latrobe and McKenney,” August 31, 1835, pp. 57–58.

57. The Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society to the Members and the Public (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1837), “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” pp. 29–31.

58. Fourth Annual Report, “Extract of Letter to Moses Shepperd, Esq. from Stepny Harper, a Coloured Man,” December 24 1835, pp. 57–58. Maryland Colonization Journal, MSA M11070, December 1, 1836, “Extract of a Letter from Thomas Jackson to Mr. Moses Sheppard”; “Extract of a letter from Wm. Polk to Mr. Moses Sheppard”; and “Copy of a letter from Eliza Jane Wilson.” Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Levi Norris to the Rev. Richard B. F. Gould,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60; “Letter from Jacob Gibson,” August 31, 1835, pp. 57–58; and Fifth Annual Report, “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” pp. 29–31.

59. Passenger lists appear in the Maryland Colonization Journal, April 1840. Note that the passenger list for the brig Ann excluded the ages of thirteen passengers, and so the total number of children on board may have been greater.

60. Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Levi Norris to the Rev. Richard B. F. Gould,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60.

61. Richard L. Hall offers a history of the Cape Palmas settlement in On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834–1857 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2008). Hall does not argue for a single motivation for emigration, but in his profiles of individual migrants he suggests that livelihood issues were likely the single most important factor for many colonists. He argues that the composition of the migrants changed between the 1820s, when most settlers were freeborn individuals with skills and education, and the 1830s, when most settlers were newly manumitted slaves, lacking education, skills, or capital, and thus unlikely to succeed as smallholders in Maryland. See Hall, On Afric’s Shore, 23.

62. The Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society to the Members and the Public (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1839), 10.

63. Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Stepny Harper,” December 24, 1835, pp. 57–58; “Letter from Jacob Gibson,” August 31, 1835, pp. 57–58; “Letter from Levi Norris,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60. Maryland Colonization Journal, MSA M11070, “Letter from Eliza Jane Wilson,” December 1, 1836. Fifth Annual Report, “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” pp. 29–31.

64. Fourth Annual Report, “Letter from Levi Norris to the Rev. Richard B. F. Gould,” August 28, 1835, pp. 59–60.

Conclusion

1. John Dixon Long, Pictures of Slavery in Church and State; Including Personal Reminiscences, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, etc., etc., with an Appendix, Containing the Views of John Wesley and Richard Watson on Slavery (Philadelphia: Author, 1857), 8. Electronic Edition. Documenting the American South, University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.

2. Long, Pictures of Slavery, 24–25.

3. Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 66–67.

4. Long, Pictures of Slavery, 24.

5. As a border state, Maryland was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). The state emancipated its slaves with the revision of the state constitution. The Maryland general emancipation went into effect on November 1, 1864.

6. Cited in Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 126–27.

7. Richard Paul Fuke, “The Work of Children,” in Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).

8. Fuke, “Work of Children,” 70.

9. On November 9, 1864, The United States Army put emancipated children in Maryland under “special military protection,” ordered the end of “refettering,” and authorized U.S. Army provost marshals to hear the complaints of African American families. In 1867 the Supreme Court determined that the 1860 Apprenticeship Law was in violation of the Civil Rights Act (1866). See Fuke, “Work of Children,” 78–82.

10. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 318–28.

11. Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 200–202. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 318–28.

12. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 366–70.

13. David W. Guth, “The Bay Bridge Metonymy: How Maryland Newspapers Interpreted the Opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge,” American Journalism 25 (Spring 2008): 62.

14. As an example of an effort by one municipality to balance the economic interests of commercial agriculture, the tourism industry, environmentalists, historic preservationists, and residents, see Talbot County, Maryland, “Comprehensive Plan,” Talbot County Courthouse, http://www.talbotcountymd.gov/index.php?page=Comprehensive_Plan.

15. Ian Urbina, “In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution,” New York Times, November 29, 2008.

16. Robert Bussel, “Taking on ‘Big Chicken’: The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance,” Labor Studies Journal 28 (2009): 1–24. The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance has since merged with like-minded activists across the nation to form the National Poultry Justice Alliance.

17. United Food and Commercial Workers, “UFCW Principles on Immigration Reform,” http://www.ufcw.org/issues/immigration/principles_reform.cfm.

18. Steven Greenhouse, “Priest vs. ‘Big Chicken’ in Fight for Labor Rights,” New York Times, October 6, 1999.

19. The Office of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforces federal immigration law. Since 2004 the DHS has extended immigration enforcement power to select local police departments according to terms established between the ICE and the municipality. Police departments working in partnership with ICE are authorized to identify undocumented immigrants in order to facilitate deportation. Some communities welcome the partnership whereas others have opted out of the program, charging that local police are already overburdened. Citizens in so-called sanctuary cities do not allow local law enforcement to share information about an immigrant’s status (legal or illegal) with federal agents or to otherwise enforce federal immigrations laws. The practice is better understood in the American West than in the East. Armando Navarro, a community organizer and activist, surveys sanctuary-inspired ordinances that were adopted by various communities in The Immigration Crisis: Nativism, Armed Vigilantism, and the Rise of a Countervailing Movement (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2009), 287–97. On Maryland and sanctuary laws, see Steve Hendrix, “Takoma Park Stays Immigrant ‘Sanctuary’,” Washington Post, October 30, 2007.

20. Pamela Constable and Lisa Rein, “To Illegal Immigrants, Maryland Feeling Less Friendly,” Washington Post, March 25, 2008. Lisa Rein and Nick Miroff, “Maryland License Confusion for Illegal Residents: Interpretations of Driving Law Vary,” Washington Post, May 29, 2009.

21. Constable and Rein, “Illegal Immigrants,” Washington Post, March 25, 2008.