6

Recession

In 1826 Isaac Maccary was one of the most economically privileged free African Americans on the Eastern Shore. In 1808, when he was fifty-two years old, he acquired from Mary Rakes a small farm of 26.5 acres. Over the next twenty-four years, he and his wife, Memory, made several improvements to their property. They replaced a dilapidated “Negro hut” with a “tenant house,” and they built a dwelling house that tax assessors valued at fifty dollars in 1832. They also kept cattle and hogs, and steadily increased their livestock over time. In 1826 seventy-year-old Isaac decided to retire, and so he called on his eight children to support him in his old age. His son Samuel prepared a contractual agreement by which he would pay Isaac fifty dollars annually “for the better support and maintenance of his father.” In exchange for this promise of financial support, Isaac conveyed to his son the use of the “premises” occupied by the Maccarys since 1808. Isaac gave his daughter Grace “one acre of the said lot whereon the house she formerly lived in is erected,” and he instructed Samuel that his other children were all to receive “equal proportion of the residue of the said lot.” Samuel may have been the oldest Maccary son, but James ultimately assumed the duties of family patriarch. In 1832 Isaac and Memory lived with their son James, his wife, Mary, and their six children, William, Lureina, Milly, Samuel, Mary, and Elizabeth.1

Settled into a comparatively comfortable retirement surrounded by loved ones, Isaac Maccary had time to reflect on his life and his young grandchildren’s future. He was a savvy man who had accomplished much with his freedom, and he no doubt recognized that his grandchildren would not enjoy the same opportunities he had. Isaac and Memory, who had escaped slavery amid an economic boom, had opportunities to own land, livestock, and other forms of taxable property. They had many employment options and access to affordable housing on the Eastern Shore. They earned enough wages to acquire real estate and perhaps purchase (and thereby free) enslaved family members. Isaac’s white neighbors did not stand in his way, and at least one, Mary Rakes, sold him the land that was the foundation for his autonomy and prosperity.

But the high tide that had lifted the economic fortunes of the Maccary family in the 1790s had receded somewhat by 1807 and then had abated completely by 1820. An economic recession that began in the 1810s persisted into the 1820s, eliminating countless jobs. In the 1830s waves of Irish and German immigrants heightened competition for what work remained. Wages stagnated, and as a result, free African Americans had less money to buy real property or loved ones from slavery. Those who could afford to buy land or loved ones likely encountered more hostility from white neighbors than Isaac had years earlier. If they did not already know it, Maccary’s grandchildren would soon learn that white attitudes toward free African Americans wavered between ambivalence and outright hostility in the 1830s.

The economic troubles began with the decisive victory of the United Kingdom over the French and Spanish navies at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. The defeat of Napoleon empowered the English Parliament to reassert its control over Atlantic trade. After 1805 the Royal Navy actively patrolled Chesapeake Bay and the larger Atlantic seaboard, searching merchant vessels suspected of harboring British deserters or carrying supplies to Napoleon’s forces in Europe.2 The Royal Navy had already impressed hundreds of sailors from American vessels when in June 1807 the HMS Leopard seized four sailors from the USS Chesapeake. This particular violation of American neutrality prompted President Thomas Jefferson to pass the Embargo Act of 1807 that closed U.S. ports to exports and restricted imports from Great Britain. The act devastated commercial agriculture. Exports plummeted and the whole American economy faltered. American wheat exports declined by 90 percent between 1806 and 1808, and the total value of goods shipped from Baltimore ports dropped by an estimated 75 percent in two years.3

American merchants tried to temper their losses by increasing trade with the Caribbean and opening new markets in southern Europe. These measures worked in the short term. In 1808, 60 percent of the flour exported from the United States went to the Caribbean, and an additional 30 percent went to the Iberian Peninsula.4 But the decision on the part of the United States to declare war on Great Britain in the summer of 1812 aggravated the economic situation. In January 1813 the Royal Navy blockaded Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River, and then it sent raiding parties that in May 1813 reached as far north as Havre de Grace at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. In August 1814 the British occupied, and then burned, Washington, D.C. The following month the Royal Navy bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor.

In December 1814 the Treaty of Ghent was ratified, and the War of 1812 ended. Peace in Europe effectively ended the transatlantic trade that had fueled the decade-long grain boom in the Middle Atlantic states. As European grain production rose after 1815, the price of grain steadily dropped to prewar lows. British farmers enjoyed healthy harvests between 1809 and 1812, and Parliament enacted import tariffs, known as the Corn Laws (1815), to further encourage this agricultural recovery. American farmers saw the link between European peace and the domestic economic recession. In an 1819 letter to an Easton newspaper, one planter bemoaned the fact that in Europe “thousands have exchanged implements of war for those of peace. From consumers they have become producers, and our farm products are not needed…. Our income will be reduced.”5 Farmers in the Middle Atlantic states could take comfort in the fact that the trade between Baltimore and the Caribbean remained brisk even after 1815, but Portugal and Spain, like Britain and France, also closed their doors to American grain farmers when European agriculture rebounded.

Ironically, European markets were closing just as grain production surged in the Middle Atlantic and Chesapeake area. Before the wars, grain production was concentrated in southeastern Pennsylvania and the Delmarva Peninsula, but by the 1810s, grain production had spread to northern Virginia. In the 1780s, hundreds of farmers had migrated to northwestern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania to open grain farms, and by the 1810s these new farms were fully operational. The market for foodstuffs was saturated, and with more ground under cultivation, Eastern Shore planters worried about the impact of lower prices and stiffening competition on their own profit margins. Established planters knew that twenty years of intensive grain agriculture had significantly eroded the soil. They wondered if they could continue to produce either the quantity or the quality of wheat for which they had gained fame.6 In 1818 Edward Lloyd lamented that farmland of the Upper Eastern Shore was “nearly exhausted” and “our agriculture is sinking to its lowest stage of degradation.” In 1821 Frisby Tilghman complained to James Hollyday in Natchez that even the most “industrious and attentive” farmers “can make nothing and that farming on the Eastern Shore is scarcely worth pursuing.”7 Grain planters faced another crisis in 1819, when a nationwide commercial panic prompted banks across the United States to restrict credit and to call in loans. Incapable of paying their debts, many planters and small farmers lost their slaves and their land. John Kennard, who in 1814 wanted to hire a “Negro man who understands the farming business,” applied for debt relief in 1817.8

Eastern Shore planters were discouraged but not hopeless. Planters debated among themselves the question of how best to face the new economic reality.9 Robert Henry Goldsborough and other elite planters joined the Maryland Agricultural Society, an organization that promoted scientific agriculture. Members experimented with new field-management techniques, adopted new crops, diversified their livestock, and rewarded innovation. The Eastern Shore chapter of the Maryland Agricultural Society hosted exhibitions and awarded prizes to farmers for exceptional production or new agricultural inventions. In the 1820s and 1830s new transportation networks also contributed to the revival and diversification of Eastern Shore agriculture. The contest between Baltimore and Philadelphia to dominate the flour-milling industry provided much of the impetus for this new construction. Maryland deliberately invested in turnpikes in the 1800s, railroads in the 1820s, and steamships in the 1830s, all for the purpose of connecting grain-growing regions to Baltimore. The arrival of the railroad lowered the cost of shipping grain to Baltimore mills (and thereby increased profits for farmers). It also encouraged truck farming. In the 1830s and 1840s, Eastern Shore farmers still planted grains, but they also planted strawberries for urban markets and developed a commercial oyster industry.

Figure 3. A Plea for Charity, 1817. This newspaper notice illustrates the depth of economic hardship in rural Talbot County after the War of 1812. Noting the growing number of citizens suffering “from the great scarcity of the common necessaries of life,” concerned citizens propose a meeting of all “charitably disposed persons” to discuss strategies for poverty relief. For the Republican Star. To the Humane and Benevolent Citizens of Talbot County. February 4, 1817, Republican Star, or Eastern Shore General Advertiser. Courtesy of University of Vermont.

Resettlement in the Deep South was another option for those Maryland planters who had the resources and the temerity to undertake it. Cotton production boomed during the Napoleonic Wars, and prices continued to rise steadily until the Panic of 1819. Cotton prices collapsed after the panic, and they remained unsteady through the 1820s, but westward migration continued, and cotton production still increased even as prices fluctuated wildly. Some of the most prominent planter-slaveholders moved their plantation operations from the worn-out farms of the Eastern Shore to the virgin lands of the Deep South. Planter Edward Lloyd VI moved two hundred slaves from his Maryland estate to open a new plantation in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1837.10 Fellow planter James Hollyday transported his slaves to a start-up plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, a process that apparently took time and a certain amount of cooperation from the slaves. Soon after Hollyday settled in Natchez, he sent his cousin and a slave named Emanuel back to Maryland to collect the remainder of his slaves. In an 1819 letter to his mother, Hollyday predicted that “his black majesty” Emanuel would receive “a hearty welcome” from the slaves who would “rejoice in the opportunity of getting accurate information of their relatives and connexions here.” At the same time, he worried that Emanuel “had the power to speak many things against the country [Mississippi] and a word from one of their own colour will be very apt to outweigh all the persuasion that can be used by a master.”11

Maryland planters unwilling to make the move to the Deep South could subsidize their lifestyles by selling surplus slaves to the new class of interstate slave traders, scornfully known as “Georgia men.” Slaveholders had been reluctant to sell their slaves in the interstate slave trade as long as Maryland agriculture thrived, but attitudes changed in the 1820s, and slaveholders who were once disdainful of slave traders now eagerly sought their services. Why the change? One reason is that Maryland was rich in labor by the 1820s. The state had a large and diverse labor supply that included slaves-for-life, term slaves, free African Americans, child laborers, and, increasingly in the 1830s, Irish and German immigrant laborers. Even more important was a change in attitude toward hired labor. The experience of the past thirty years had taught Maryland employers that in certain industries hired labor was as good as, if not better than, the labor of slaves-for-life. Just as John Beale Bordley had predicted, Marylanders had discovered the benefits of the mixed labor system and embraced it.

Slaveholders had never been reluctant to sell their slaves for cash, but now the best prices for slaves came from the cotton-growing regions of the Deep South, not the grain-producing regions of the Middle Atlantic. Beginning in the 1820s, Maryland slaveholders employed professional slave dealers to broker these sales and transport their slaves from the Upper South to the Mississippi Delta. Over the next forty years interstate slave traders would forcibly transport more than one million enslaved African Americans. Frederick Douglass, who lived near Austin Woolfolk’s “grand slave mart” in Baltimore, reported in his narrative that Baltimore-based slave traders routinely sent agents “into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival through the papers, and on flaming hand-bills, headed ‘cash for negroes’.” Slave dealers also advertised in Eastern Shore newspapers for “A few families of Negroes, For which the highest price in cash will be given.” Even the comparatively small town of Easton in Talbot County sponsored an annual slave auction that was regularly attended by slave dealers and Deep South planters in the 1820s.12 Woolfolk stationed a full-time agent at Easton, and in just one slave-buying season, the agent paid slaveholders more than $22,000 for ninety-three slaves.13 Between 1819 and 1832, Woolfolk shipped 2,288 enslaved African Americans from Baltimore to New Orleans: 38 percent (876) of those men, women, and children had been purchased by Woolfolk’s Eastern Shore agent.14

The economic storm hit Baltimore and Philadelphia early and hard. Restricted trade and finance meant unemployment, underemployment, and a general narrowing of employment opportunities for free African Americans. Commerce and construction had drawn hundreds of free African Americans from the countryside to these cities throughout the 1790s and 1800s. Sailors, dockworkers, and tradesmen, who had enjoyed robust wages throughout the 1790s, experienced a steady decline in income and work after the 1807 embargo. However, it is arguable that African American artisans suffered more than others as they lost work, wages, and social status. In the 1800s, and even the 1810s, African American tradesmen were a small but visible component of urban workforces. In Philadelphia in 1816 roughly one in fifteen free black men identified himself as an artisan, including shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, and painters. In Baltimore, nearly 70 percent of the free African American men listed in the 1810 directory identified as skilled laborers. However, by 1820 the economic recession, combined with rising racial prejudice, forced many free African Americans out of their trades and into a fast-growing pool of unskilled day laborers.15 In 1819, 63 percent of the free African American heads of household were listed in the Baltimore directory as unskilled laborers, up from only 28 percent in the 1810 directory.

Reduced wages and chronic underemployment forced many urban African American families to seek public assistance. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society reported in 1801 that free African Americans, who in the 1790s had been “universally employed,” now solicited the agency for employment assistance. Others went to the city almshouses where they could obtain free clothing, meals, medical care, and temporary shelter. In 1827, 20 percent of almshouse residents in Baltimore were free African Americans. After the Panic of 1837, they made up 25 percent of the residents.16 The recession also had lasting demographic consequences for urban African American communities. Free African Americans consistently had higher death rates than whites and slaves, but black mortality rates soared in the 1820s and failed to improve in subsequent decades. Most free African Americans lived in overcrowded and insalubrious neighborhoods in Baltimore, and they were disproportionately affected by cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849.17

Of course, unemployment affected all working people, but it seems that it affected black and white laborers differently. In Baltimore, for example, skilled white workers may have been underemployed and underpaid throughout the 1820s, but they continued to practice their respective crafts and were not forced into the pool of unskilled day laborers. In the 1819 Baltimore city directory 80 percent of white household heads identified as either skilled or unskilled tradesmen, compared with just 37 percent of African Americans. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, an 1838 study of black tradesmen prepared by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society concluded that “23 percent of 656 skilled artisans did not practice their skills because of ‘prejudice against them’.”18 The study indicates that, in the context of a wartime labor shortage, white and black tradesmen worked alongside one another without incident, but when confronted with rising unemployment, white skin became a precondition for employment. In the 1820s and 1830s, thousands of Irish and German immigrants settled in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and these newcomers allied with native whites to resist working alongside or competing against former slaves for work. Initially, white workers peacefully petitioned for segregated crafts or workspaces. White carters in Baltimore organized themselves and submitted a petition to the Maryland General Assembly in 1828 urging the legislature to prohibit free blacks and slaves from working as draymen on the grounds that they were “more easily influenced by temptations to steal, less influenced by the desire of maintaining an honest reputation, and…less fear[ful] of the operations of the law than white people.”19 Employers and the state responded with a laissez-faire defense, insisting on the right of employers to hire whomever they wanted at wages determined by an unregulated labor market.

One outcome of this indifference to the economic concerns of white workers was an increase in racial violence. In Baltimore a mob of white Republican artisans attacked Federalist opponents of the War of 1812 in the summer of 1812, and then they turned on wealthy employers and unskilled workers. The mob attacked merchants (suspected of being British sympathizers), grain ships (destined for Britain or British allies), and free African American and Irish laborers. The riot, which lasted two months, opened a Pandora’s box of racial and class antagonism that would not be contained for decades and earned Baltimore the moniker “Mobtown.”20 Years later, in 1838, another white mob attacked the Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest African American Methodist church in Baltimore. In 1841 the editors of an antiabolitionist newspaper anticipated that “one hostile movement on the part of the negroes and their comrades, the abolitionists, would probably do more toward thinning the colored population than ten years’ labor of all the colonization societies put together.”21

Rural African Americans also experienced hardships, as a generation of free African Americans who had prospered for two decades working for wages in the countryside now watched their economic opportunities shrink. Talbot County offers a dramatic example of how they experienced the cycle of boom and bust in the countryside. In 1813 the wealth of rural freedmen rivaled and at times surpassed that of African Americans in Baltimore. The free African Americans in Talbot County were among the wealthiest in the state. The county also claimed the largest number of free African American property owners. According to the 1813 assessed persons list, 102 free African Americans, roughly 5 percent of the free black population in the county, owned real property. The population of free African American property owners in Talbot County was larger in both absolute numbers and percentages than that of the City of Baltimore. But, beginning in 1814, economic prospects worsened considerably for free African Americans. Between 1813 and 1826, the number of people who owned taxable property decreased by more than half. Six years later free African Americans in Talbot County were among the poorest in Maryland. After 1832 free black property owners in Baltimore enjoyed six times the wealth of the wealthiest freedmen on the Eastern Shore. Even among Eastern Shore counties there were great disparities in wealth, and African Americans in Talbot County fared poorly when compared with their neighbors in Kent, Caroline, and Queen Anne’s counties. In five Eastern Shore counties the number of black property owners increased, but the number of propertied freedmen in Talbot County stagnated after 1813.22

Such rapid and dramatic economic decline inevitably affected the structure and development of African American neighborhoods. In Philadelphia high unemployment resulted in more racial segregation and a steady decline in the number of free African Americans who owned personal property in the 1830s and 1840s.23 In both Philadelphia and Baltimore free African Americans who had once lived in largely interracial neighborhoods increasingly settled closer to the churches that were the social and intellectual centers of African American communities. Economic recession also had an impact on Eastern Shore communities, although in a different way.24 In the case of Talbot County, small villages like Trappe and Hole-in-the-Wall experienced steady growth in their white and black populations between 1804 and the 1810s. By 1817 the number of free black households in Trappe had increased from six to fourteen; the number of white households increased from thirty-one to thirty-nine. Similarly, in Hole-in-Wall the number of free black households grew from four to twelve, so by 1817 free African Americans represented 39 percent of the property owners. After 1817 the total number of black and white property owners in both communities declined, but not in the same way. Trappe lost mostly black property owners; as a result, by 1832 only 22 percent (ten households) were free African Americans. By contrast, Hole-in-the-Wall lost mostly white property owners. Although the number of African American property owners also declined from a high of twelve down to eight between 1817 and 1832, the more significant decline in white ownership resulted in a community in which 47 percent of the property owners were African American.

Talbot County was losing white residents, presumably to the cities or to the Deep South, but white out-migration was not a problem confined to a single county on the Eastern Shore. White residents had been leaving the Upper Eastern Shore for decades. By the 1830s those who stayed behind could not help but notice the effect of white flight on the demography of the Eastern Shore. In 1790 the white populations held slim majorities in Talbot (55%) and Queen Anne’s (53%) counties, but over the next twenty years, the white population declined to the point that the ratio of whites to blacks in Queen Anne’s County was one to one in 1810. By 1830 the majority of residents in both counties were African American.

Moreover, the shrinking population of slaves and white residents meant that free African Americans constituted a more significant portion of the population on the Eastern Shore with each passing year. In 1790, 1,076 free African Americans resided in Talbot County, compared with 4,777 slaves and 7,231 whites. That is, only 8 percent of the residents were free African Americans, compared to 37 percent slaves and 55 percent whites. By 1830 the free black population had doubled, the slave population had decreased by 13 percent, and the white population had decreased by more than 20 percent. In 1830, 20 percent of Talbot County residents were free African Americans, 34 percent were slaves, and 46 percent were white.25 Queen Anne’s County experienced a similar change. In 1790 only 3 percent of the residents in the county were free African Americans, while 43 percent were slaves and 53 percent were white. Forty years later, 20 percent of the residents in Queen Anne’s County were free African Americans, 34 percent were slaves, and 46 percent were white. By 1860 free African Americans outnumbered slaves, and they constituted 19 percent of the total population of the Eastern Shore.26

African Americans dominated the workforce of the Eastern Shore. They did not compete with Irish or German immigrants for work, wages, or housing, a fact that likely explains the lack of interracial violence in the countryside. Interracial violence happened, but it was not endemic, and it did not worsen in the 1820s and 1830s. In a span of fifty years the courts in Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties heard fewer than forty cases of assault and battery involving free African Americans. In a majority of these cases both the assailant and victim were African American. The handful of cases involving interracial violence suggests that disgruntled whites vented violence on African American property owners. Richard Jones, for example, assaulted James Tolson, a freedman, in 1825 when he refused to explain how he acquired a bundle of goods. In 1816 the Talbot County Court sentenced Robin, a freedman, and his daughter Poll to the county jail after they assaulted a white man who attempted to steal their geese.27 Presumably, free African Americans who had white patrons (employers or landlords) could have expected some protection against such harassment, but patronage did not guarantee safety. Judy Parrot, a freed woman, made arrangements with Frances Parrot to live in a “hut” on the plantation of Frances Parrot’s stepson, Benjamin Parrot, but her connections with the Parrot family did not protect her from harassment. Benjamin sold his plantation to Frederick Kemp, and the new owner moved to evict Judy from the hut. Initially, Frances Parrot supported Judy and refused to evict her, “contrary to the wishes of the plantations’ owners.” Judy’s fate was ultimately decided when Frederick Kemp and another youth forcibly evicted her by setting fire to her hut.28

If free African American communities on the Eastern Shore contended with less violence than urban African American communities, they also coped with fewer resources. In Baltimore and Philadelphia the desperately poor could avail themselves of the services provided by almshouses, mutual aid societies, and various charities, but rural African Americans did not have access to these social safety nets. Talbot County had a poorhouse, and the Talbot County Trustees of the Poor did administer pensions to a few impoverished and disabled African Americans, but the trustees would not admit African Americans to the almshouse because it was “not sufficient to accommodate coloured people.” The trustees did not explain how the poorhouse was insufficient, but they were adamant and in at least one case refused a court order to admit a freedman.29 The poorhouse began admitting African Americans by 1815, but the rules for admission were inconsistent. Some African Americans who applied for relief were admitted, others were denied without explanation, and still others, including Richard Johns, were given the option of residing at the poorhouse or accepting a pension ($20 annually). In at least one case, the trustees authorized a pension and then demanded institutionalization. In 1813 George Warner, a free man, applied to the trustees of the poorhouse for financial support for an orphaned girl. A tenant farmer who leased fifty acres of land and owned livestock, Warner was a prosperous freedman, and the trustees did not hesitate in accepting his request. But they only offered him an annual pension of $1.50.30 Later, the trustees increased the amount to $2, but by 1815 they stopped payment and ordered Warner to “surrender her to the poorhouse.” When he resisted, the trustees ordered the poorhouse overseer to “go after and bring from George Warner the child of Charlotte Cooper deceased to be taken care of at the poorhouse.”31 Although the trustees did not specify why they wanted Warner to return the girl, one possibility is that it was more advantageous to the county to bind her to a white master than to pay Warner to support her.

At best, the poorhouse was an unreliable resource for rural African Americans. At worse, it was a tool for coercing labor from poor children. White and black families that came to the poorhouse in the economic crisis of the 1820s were less likely to get a cash pension and more likely to get a lecture on the benefits of indenturing their able-bodied children to local employers. In Baltimore the almshouse had routinely indentured orphaned children to local employers in the 1800s and 1810s, but the number of children placed with employers surged in the 1820s, an indication of the economic stress on poor families.32 Historically, the Talbot County Court had apprenticed more white children than black. In the 1820s that was still true, but apprenticeship as a labor institution changed in two important ways. First, after 1822 the apprenticeship contracts for white boys were less favorable than they had been in the 1800s and 1810s. In the 1810s, the majority of white boys apprenticed by the Talbot County Court were teenagers who were apprenticed voluntarily to master craftsmen with their parents’ consent and input. By comparison, the Talbot County Court apprenticed seventy-five white boys in the 1820s, and half of these were involuntarily apprenticed. At least one boy was a poorhouse resident, and eleven others were identified as orphans or fatherless (“illegitimate”). Children apprenticed in the 1820s were also younger than those apprenticed earlier. Half were younger than fourteen. Moreover, a greater percentage of white and black children were apprenticed to farmers rather than master craftsmen in the 1820s. Between 1808 and 1810, only 10 percent of the white male apprentices went to farmers, but between 1822 and 1828, 30 percent did. Six boys had been apprenticed to house carpenters between 1808 and 1810, but only one boy was apprenticed to a house carpenter after 1822.33

The second significant change in apprentice labor was its racialization. In 1809 the typical apprentice was a sixteen-year-old white teenage male who was bound with the consent of at least one parent to a master craftsmen. Between 1808 and 1810, the court apprenticed sixty-one white children and only nine black boys (and no black girls). Even as late as 1828, apprenticeship remained a path to a skilled profession for white teenage boys. By 1849 the typical apprentice was an eleven-year-old black teenage male who was bound with or without parental consent to a planter to do unspecified agricultural labor or domestic work. African American children had made up 40 percent of the apprenticed labor workforce in the 1820s, already significantly disproportionate to their population. By the 1850s, 74 percent of the apprenticed laborers were African American (sixty-two of eighty-three apprenticed children between 1849 and 1861). In 1856 the Talbot County Court apprenticed six white boys and eleven black boys. The three white boys were identified as orphaned or indigent or as poorhouse residents and apprenticed to farmers. Two of the three white boys who were voluntarily apprenticed by their parents would serve master craftsmen. By comparison, the court apprenticed all of the black boys as farm laborers or housekeepers with or without parental consent.34

Economic tumult took a toll on families, and especially laboring families, but it is also evident that some free African Americans were well positioned to weather the economic storm. In particular, freeborn African Americans, those born to parents manumitted in the 1780s and 1790s, had reached adulthood in the 1810s and 1820s and now stood to inherit their parents’ wealth. To be certain, it was not substantial wealth, but it was enough to distinguish the freeborn from the newly manumitted, who exited slavery without cash or capital. Tax assessments indicate that even in the late 1810s and 1820s freeborn African Americans began their working lives with a substantial material advantage over the newly manumitted. Freeborn people typically appeared in tax assessments for the first time in their twenties, but manumitted property holders typically did not accumulate enough taxable property until they were in their forties. Among the real property holders who appear in the 1817 tax assessment record, the manumitted property holders were, on average, twenty years older than the freeborn property holders.35

On the Eastern Shore the privileged freeborn included men like William Boston. Born free in 1788, he benefited from the economic foundation laid by an earlier Boston, a manumitted slave born in 1742. The elder Boston never acquired land, but by 1804 he owned livestock and personal possessions worth £31 Maryland currency that made it possible for the younger William to invest in land.36 Similarly, James Bantom Jr., born free in 1794, acquired his own property from elders at the young age of twenty-three, when he appeared as the owner of a lot near Trappe. Martin Bantom, also freeborn, was twenty-eight when he appeared as a property owner in the 1817 tax assessment. He would reappear in the 1822, 1824, 1826, 1830, and 1832 tax assessments. These men probably enjoyed some economic stability because of the labor and sacrifices of older members of the Bantom family, including James Bantom Sr. and Joseph Bantom, who also owned property at some time between 1813 and 1825.37 Finally, Phil Chaplain acquired land in 1804 that was occupied continuously by members of the Chaplain family through 1832.38 Although the overall number of free African American property owners declined between 1804 and 1826, most propertied freedmen managed to pass their property to their freeborn heirs. This persistent property ownership contributed to the stability of African American families and African American communities. Twenty-six percent of the eighty-three African Americans who appear in the 1813 tax assessment had held their assets since at least 1804. Similarly, in 1825 as many as 55 percent of the African Americans who owned taxable wealth had held that property since 1817 or earlier. Thirty-three of the sixty-one families, 54 percent, that appeared in the 1824 assessed persons list, including the Adams, Dorrell, and Chain families, had owned that property for at least twenty years.39

Material privilege did not shield African Americans from rising racism. Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, young men traveled to Baltimore and worked on the docks or in construction, but in the 1820s they probably worked alongside white workers who openly advocated a segregated workforce. White Marylanders had always been ambivalent about free African Americans, even as they embraced free labor, but in the 1810s and 1820s white attitudes toward free African Americans hardened. The War of 1812 did not revive the radical Spirit of ‘76 that had moved some revolutionary era slaveholders to manumit their slaves. If anything, the alliance between African Americans and the British military during the War of 1812 confirmed the suspicion of many white Marylanders that African Americans were aliens: aliens with treasonous thoughts and the disposition to act on them.

Nearly five thousand slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area fled to the British Navy during the War of 1812, and at least two hundred of these refugees were trained, organized, and integrated into an existing battalion of three hundred Royal Marines. Officially, the British military did not encourage slave rebellion, but it also did nothing to dissuade slaves from joining their ranks. The British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies reminded the Chesapeake commander to welcome any escaped slaves who requested enlistment, emphasizing that “you are in no case to take slaves away as Slaves, but as free persons whom the public become bound to maintain.”40 Seaman Charles Ball, a slave passing as a freedman, spoke with escaped slaves aboard a captured British vessel in 1813 and discovered men and women whose “heads were full of notions of liberty and happiness in some of the West India islands.”41 Even slaves who did not join the British military made white residents uneasy, and certainly, it did not help that the Maryland government acknowledged their vulnerability to slave rebellion. In organizing men into militia units, the Maryland government recruited “from those parts of the state least exposed to danger, not only from the British, but also from the Blacks who it appears have created considerable disquietude in many sections of the state.”42

What remained of the anemic antislavery movement in the 1810s joined forces with a nascent colonization movement after the War of 1812 to promote gradual emancipation with resettlement. African American resettlement in Africa or the Caribbean was put forth as a benign solution to the unsettled problems raised by black freedom. Colonization promised peace of mind to slaveholders, who were more convinced than ever that free African Americans posed a threat to their security. It also promised former slaves the opportunity for self-determination in an imagined African American republic. The Maryland legislature in its 1817–18 session endorsed the work of the American Colonization Society, and over the next fifteen years it adopted five resolutions urging the United States Congress to enact measures for African American resettlement.43

Colonization gained momentum in the 1810s and 1820s, but only in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) did Maryland make a concerted effort to realize a Maryland colony in Africa. In the aftermath of the rebellion, Eastern Shore planter Robert Henry Goldsborough made his own case for colonization. In a petition that he drafted, reportedly at the request of his “Fellow Neighbors,” he echoed the increasingly universal concern that free African Americans “are the immediate incentive that frets the slave population to rebellion.” He acknowledged the degraded state of free African Americans, who “constitute an intermediate order of beings between the citizen and the slave whose conditions here can never be bettered.” More surprisingly, he referred to free African Americans as “the foe all around you—in your fields, in the streets, under your window, in your parlour, in your bedchamber,” prepared to ally with the slave population to ambush the white citizenry.44 Considering his frequent encounters with free African Americans at his plantation and in Easton, Goldsborough could claim legitimately that free African Americas were everywhere. But knowing something of his lifestyle, it seems far-fetched that he felt personally threatened by them. After all, he trusted freedman Joseph Chain to shave him with a straight razor, and he allowed the butcher John Dorrell to bring cleavers and knives to the plantation where his slaves labored.

Goldsborough’s petition suggests that he suffered from selective negrophobia; he trusted the freedmen he knew, but remained wary of those he did not. It was a common affliction among Maryland employers, particularly in the countryside where free African American laborers routinely worked alongside enslaved laborers. So what was Goldsborough’s solution to the problem of an internal enemy? Invoking public safety, he proposed stricter regulation of their mobility but little else. He urged the state to prevent the emigration of African Americans into Maryland, and he echoed the call of other slaveholders in Maryland and elsewhere who wanted to make settlement in Africa a precondition for future manumissions. He further recommended that existing free African Americans could choose to move to Africa or stay in Maryland, but that those who stayed should seek the sponsorship of “substantial American citizens.” Presumably, Goldsborough’s status as a planter, former state legislator, and former U.S. senator qualified him as a “substantial American” and that he would offer up bonds to keep the freedmen he knew and trusted in his neighborhood—his Negroes. He also wanted the legislature to ban “inclusive assemblages” of free and enslaved African Americans, including worship gatherings. And, curiously, he called on the legislature to expunge from its Black Codes all laws that were unnecessarily severe and to replace them with unspecified “salutary provisions.”45

The legislature’s response to the Nat Turner Rebellion, “An Act Relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” codified some of these suggestions, but it offered few immediate solutions to the imagined problem of African American violence. The law focused almost exclusively on the problem of African American mobility, with the single exception of a provision that required free African Americans to obtain a license to own a gun. It prohibited alien freedmen from migrating into the state, and it imposed fines on employers who knowingly hired freedmen from out of state. The law did not expel free African Americans, but it absolutely frustrated their travel. Any freedman who left the state for more than thirty consecutive days could be denied readmittance, although freedman could be exempted from this provision if, before their departure, they notified local authorities of their intent to return. Wagoners, sailors, and other freedmen who traveled with their white employers were exempt from this provision, as were freedmen traveling back and forth between Maryland and Cape Palmas, Liberia, the colony organized by the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS). The new law also prohibited African Americans from gathering to worship without a white authority present, but again it made important exceptions. It exempted the African American churches in Baltimore and Annapolis as long as they received the “written permission of a white licensed ordained preacher [to congregate], and dismissed before 10 o’clock at night.” It is not clear that this provision was ever enforced, but if it was, then it seems that the same exemption was granted to other African American churches, as there is no evidence that the state closed any African American church.46

But why not forcibly expel free African Americans and settle the security question once and for all? Virginia actually offered a working model for expulsion that Maryland could have adopted. In the aftermath of Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800) the Virginia legislature seriously considered the resettlement of its free African American population, but ultimately settled on expulsion. The legislature discussed schemes that included resettling free African Americans in British West Africa and the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase, but neither was implemented. The British would not accept colonists associated with a rebellion, and President Jefferson would not accept people of African descent in a land that he imagined reserved for white farmers. Instead, the legislature adopted a series of expulsion laws that effectively stunted the growth of the free African American population over the next half-century.

In 1806 the Virginia legislature required all newly manumitted slaves to leave the state or petition the legislature, or the county courts after 1816, for permission to stay. The rate of manumission steadily declined after 1806. In Loudon County, for example, the manumission rate dropped by 80 percent between 1790 and 1806 (sixty-three petitions filed) and between 1806 and 1818 (nine petitions filed). One explanation for the decline is that expulsion laws discouraged manumission. Slaveholders manumitted slaves with the expectation that they could replace them with more economical laborers. Slaveholders had little incentive to manumit slaves when they had no assurance that they could replace a slave with a hireling. Slaveholders, like slaves, also knew that petitioning for residency was not just a formality. The legislature and county courts denied petitions, and the whole procedure provoked great anxiety among petitioners.47 Another explanation for the declining manumission rate is that the expulsion laws discouraged African Americans from purchasing their own freedom. Slaves who had to choose between slavery among family and friends in their natal homes or freedom in exile without family and friends were less inclined to seek manumission by self-purchase.48

Over time, the enforcement of expulsion laws, combined with declining rates of manumission, achieved their desired affect. On the eve of the Civil War, Virginia had more slaves and fewer free African Americans than any other Chesapeake state. Only 10 percent of African Americans in Virginia were free, compared with nearly 50 percent of African Americans in Maryland, 70 percent in Delaware, and 78 percent in the District of Columbia.49

An expulsion policy might have worked in Maryland in the 1830s. Nat Turner’s Rebellion had mobilized white support for colonization, and the newly incorporated Maryland State Colonization Society (1831–32) provided the infrastructure to implement a resettlement scheme. But rather than expelling free African Americans the legislature adopted new policies that served only to keep alive the shared wish of employers that, with enough regulation and proper enforcement, former slaves would become dependent laborers. Maryland could have followed the Virginia example of depopulating the state of free African Americans by rigorously enforcing the expulsion laws, but Maryland, and in particular planters like Robert Henry Goldsborough, did not really want to expel free African Americans. Instead, what Goldsborough and other rural employers wanted was to use the threat of expulsion (or re-enslavement) as a coercive tool to push “good Negroes” into the arms of white employers and “shiftless Negroes” out of the state.

Someone like Goldsborough, a legislator, planter, slaveholder, and employer of free labor, doubly benefited from “An Act Relating to Free Negroes and Slaves” and every subsequent act that reiterated the expectation of free African Americans’ dependence on white employers. The legislation addressed his security concerns by expelling free African Americans from out of state or unknown African Americans and simultaneously addressed his labor concerns by giving “good” African Americans incentive to seek him out for employment or patronage. Moreover, in choosing this path in 1832, the legislature lost its chance to expel free African Americans. In the 1800s and 1810s, free African Americans were auxiliary laborers in a slave economy, but within a generation, free African American workers were indispensable, an integral part of the labor force. Employers would not willingly part with them. Years later, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia (1859) motivated Maryland slaveholders to issue new calls for the expulsion of free African Americans, but once again employers roundly resisted. As Barbara Jeanne Fields concluded in her 1985 analysis of this debate over expelling free African Americans in the 1850s: “The perennial movement to colonize free black people in Africa failed for a number of reasons internal to the movement itself—the resistance of black people themselves, the absence of a serious financial commitment—but the most important reason was that, whatever white Marylanders might say or think about the danger and mischief of the free black population, the economy of the state could not dispense with them.”50

To African Americans the efficacy of the colonization movement was less important than its existence. It symbolized the white majority’s total abandonment of the antislavery movement. At the height of its influence in the Middle Atlantic states, the antislavery movement achieved three monumental public policy victories with the support of allies variously motivated by religious principles, political ideals, and economic ambition. Antislavery activists had successfully pressed the U.S. Congress to stop the transatlantic slave trade; convinced many slaveholdings states, including Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, to liberalize manumission laws; and, most famously, lobbied the Pennsylvania legislature to adopt gradual emancipation. But the antislavery movement failed to convince white Americans to adopt policies that would promote economic opportunities for former slaves, such as providing education or job training, even at a time when many white Americans readily acknowledged that doing so would accelerate assimilation. Even in comparatively progressive Pennsylvania, former slaves acquired such social services only through the private initiative of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and other benevolent associations. In the 1820s white Americans still expected former slaves to improve their condition by their own initiative, but now they also insisted that only in an undeveloped African colony could free African Americans achieve their fullest potential.

African Americans insisted that they had a right and a responsibility to fight for full freedom in their home country. They denounced colonization because it denied them the right to self-determination in America and because they recognized that colonization advocates included not just lapsed emancipationists but also slaveholders who wanted to remove free African Americans to protect their slaveholding interests. Equally galling, the American Colonization Society formed in 1817 in Philadelphia only reluctantly consulted African American leaders who had expressed an interest in emigration.

African Americans vigorously opposed the American Colonization Society, but most also defended the right of individual African Americans to choose emigration. After all, free African Americans had always understood mobility as integral to freedom and voluntary migration as a legitimate act of self-determination. It is also clear that African Americans looked more favorably on other African American–led colonization programs. In the 1810s Bishop Allen publicly endorsed Captain Cuffee’s mission to bring Christianity, commercial farming, and legitimate trade to Africa. He also gave encouragement to his friend Rev. Daniel Coker, cofounder of the AME Church, as he prepared to lead an AME mission to Liberia in 1820. Bishop Allen enthusiastically supported an emigration plan to Haiti, going so far as to recruit settlers, and in the 1830s he expressed excitement about African American–led emigration initiatives to Canada.

What attracted Bishop Allen to emigration? One explanation is that it resonated with his personal experience as an itinerant and missionary. Undoubtedly, he was delighted that pious, self-reliant men like Paul Cuffee and Daniel Coker would bring African American Christianity to Africans and African-descended people throughout the Atlantic world. Another explanation is that the political and economic realities of the 1810s and 1820s forced him to take emigration seriously. He could see that the emancipation impulse had died in America and that the United States would not extend full citizenship to free African Americans anytime soon. He also worried about how the economic and social unrest of the 1820s would affect African American youth. He knew that the next generation would not enjoy the same opportunities that he had. In exploring emigration, Bishop Allen conceded that perhaps African Americans would only experience full citizenship, racial equality, and unfettered economic opportunity as ex-patriots living in Haiti or Canada after it adopted emancipation.51

Richard Allen spoke eloquently and passionately about colonization, but he did not win many adherents to the cause. Ordinary African Americans respectfully listened to Paul Cuffee, Richard Allen, and Daniel Coker, but they were not persuaded. In fact, a majority of free African Americans throughout the Middle Atlantic region fiercely resisted colonization on principle. By the 1820s, the opposition had organized an anticolonization movement with a distinct leadership that included among others William S. Watkins, a freeborn African American living in Baltimore. In an 1829 editorial published in the abolitionist newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation, Watkins articulated the principal arguments against colonization. He stated that free African Americans had a right and a responsibility to continue the fight for emancipation and civil rights in America. Leaving at the present moment would guarantee the ascent of slavery and prohibit the possibility of full citizenship for those who stayed behind. Most important, he proclaimed that free African Americans were a chosen people, selected by God to carry on the emancipation struggle, even as white Christians abandoned it. Watkins acknowledged that free African Americans would face perils and experience disappointments in America, but he also assured them that “if ever there was a people who could look up to Heaven with unshaken confidence for protection, it is that people whose sufferings are not the consequences of their crimes…. We have one straight forward course to pursue–one marked out by the hand of unerring wisdom. This course we intend to pursue, without giving ourselves any uneasiness to the issue.”52

The anticolonization movement thwarted the best efforts of the colonization agents to recruit settlers with a simple but effective strategy. Volunteers followed agents of the American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society as they walked through the cities and towns looking for new recruits, and once an agent had pitched resettlement and left, the anticolonization volunteers stepped forth to present their own arguments against emigration. The leadership of the MSCS regularly complained to the Maryland legislature that every agent returned from a recruitment drive convinced that he had recruited one hundred families to emigrate, but never more than half came to Baltimore Harbor on the scheduled day of departure. Anticolonization volunteers had dissuaded the others, changing their minds with what the MSCS labeled “abolition doctrine.” On at least one occasion anticolonization volunteers met the émigrés at the docks, boarded a ship bound for Africa, and successfully persuaded half of the passengers to disembark.53

William S. Watkins asked his black countrymen, “Why should we abandon our firesides, and every thing associated with the dear name of home—undergo the fatigues of a perilous voyage, and expose ourselves, our wives and our little ones, to the deleterious influences of an uncongenial sun, for the enjoyment of a liberty divested of its usual accompaniments, surrounded by circumstances which diminish its intrinsic value, and render it indeed ‘a dear earned morsel’?”54 Watkins knew that most African Americans would not abandon their family, friends, or natal culture, but a fraction of his countrymen did leave “home” for Liberia, the West Indies, and Canada. Nearly one thousand freeborn and manumitted African Americans went with the MSCS to Cape Palmas, Liberia, between 1836 and 1857. It is worth considering what motivated these emigrants: Why did they go? What did they expect to find? How well did Cape Palmas meet their expectations?

In truth, many did not go by choice. A significant number of the Cape Palmas settlers were manumitted on the condition that they leave the United States. In May 1838 the schooner Columbia carried thirty-six passengers to Cape Palmas; of these, twenty-nine were former slaves manumitted by Georgia slaveholders. The slaveholders had paid the MSCS to resettle them.55 Still others may have left for Africa with the hope or expectation that their voluntary migration might leverage slaveholders into manumitting family members who remained enslaved. A letter from Jacob Gibson to the MSCS suggests that this was his own family’s experience. In 1834 Jacob Gibson and his wife, Rebecca, emigrated with seven of their children from Talbot County to Cape Palmas. In 1835 Jacob wrote from Africa to John H. B. Latrobe, president of the MSCS, and Rev. William McKenney, an MSCS agent, to request assistance in recovering the enslaved children left behind. He pleaded, “I will be ten thousand times obliged to you, if you will make an effort to get my children free, and sent out to me. Neither of you, perhaps, know the pain a father feels at being separated from his offspring.” It is hard to imagine why Gibson would have voluntarily left his children in Maryland, unless he expected they would soon follow. Perhaps he had struck a deal with a slaveholder or with the MSCS that his children would be manumitted after his successful settlement in Africa. In 1839 nine more members of the Gibson family arrived in Cape Palmas from Caroline County, Maryland, although it is unclear if any were Jacob’s children.56

Those who emigrated voluntarily hinted at their expectations and hopes in letters sent home. The MSCS published these letters as propaganda, and so they must be read critically. But the MSCS also balanced accounts of happy settlers with a nearly equal number of accounts of unhappy settlers. For example, in 1837, the MSCS published a “Brief History of Individual Colonists,” a profile of eight colonists and their experiences. It reported matter-of-factly that half of those profiled regretted their choice and wanted to return to America. One settler had enjoyed noteworthy success as a farmer and was a “well-behaved, moral man, and very capable of managing the business in which he was engaged,” but the MSCS conceded that he was nevertheless “determined upon returning to the United States, and solemnly declares he would rather live a slave in America, than a freeman in Africa.”57

Letters drafted by contented settlers reveal something of their expectations of the Cape Palmas settlement. Generally, they wrote with satisfaction about opportunities for education, civic participation, religious freedom, and liberty from white oversight. Fifty-year-old Stepny Harper, who emigrated from the Eastern Shore with his wife, Ann, and two small children, aged eight and six months, mentioned his good health and his chance to be a “voter.” Thomas Jackson, who arrived with his wife, Milly, in 1832, reported with pride that he had been appointed an associate judge. Another colonist wrote that he would return to America when “a black man can have his liberty so far as to have a seat in Congress.” William Polk stated he felt “safe” in Cape Palmas, and he “had no wish to return to stay, unless I could be looked upon as a white man. This I know is not possible.” Eliza Jane Wilson, who emigrated from Queen Anne’s County, wrote to her father of her family’s good health, the pleasant weather, and the ease with which she substituted palm oil for lard in her cooking. She also wrote, “Here I can come and go as I please and there is no one to trouble or trample me.” Levi Norris of Calvert County similarly indicated his relief at being able to work and live without the “frowns of a white man.” Jacob Gibson discussed the “good church” in his Cape Palmas community and his children’s education. Thomas Jackson also wrote of the pleasure of hearing some of the children read. In its “Brief History of Individual Colonists” the MSCS included an unnamed family with five daughters who “are constantly attendant on the school.”58

The fate of children was a recurring theme in letters, and with good reason, as children made up a significant portion of the emigrants. Between December 1832 and December 1835, five vessels carrying a total of 286 passengers arrived safely in Cape Palmas. At least 126 of these passengers (44%) were children under the age of fourteen. In 1832 the ship Lafa-yette sailed from Baltimore to Cape Palmas with 146 passengers, including 63 known children under age fourteen (44%). Eliza Jane Wilson arrived at Cape Palmas with 37 other passengers, including 20 children (51% of the passengers). Children made up 60 percent of the passengers (16 of 27) on the schooner Harmony in 1835.59 It seems that parents went to Cape Palmas with the hope or expectation that their children would have a better future in Africa than in America. Levi Norris wrote that “those that would want to raise their children as white people do in America, this is [the] very place to do it; for a man that comes out here don’t only free himself, but a generation.”60 Cape Palmas promised parents the opportunity to give their children what they needed to determine their own futures: liberty, education, and, perhaps most important, land. Free African Americans knew that landownership was the key to self-determination.61 The MSCS noticed that the promise of future landownership in America was one of the most compelling arguments of the “abolition doctrine.” In its 1839 report to the Maryland legislature agents of the MSCS reported that anticolonization volunteers would tell prospective emigrants “that their right to the land they cultivate, is better than their owner’s, for they have earned it by their labour on it.”62

Those who migrated to Cape Palmas were not willing to wait for that “right” to materialize in Maryland. Stepny Harper wrote that he was “well satisfied with the land” in Cape Palmas, and Jacob Gibson reported that the “soil has the appearance of being good.” Gibson owned a five-acre lot and was pleased with its “situation and soil.” Levi Norris reported, “Every thing I plant in my lot seems to grow well.” He had built a “decent frame house” and was pleased with it, knowing it was “more than I would have got if I had remained in America.” Eliza Jane Wilson reported that since her arrival, seven months earlier, her “house is nearly done and produce planted around it.” The family with five daughters in constant attendance at school arrived in Cape Palmas with fifty dollars and applied their capital to the construction of a “good dwelling house.” The family owned property “in town” and a small farm “under good cultivation,” and the family was “entirely free from debt.” According to the MSCS, the family’s patriarch “declares that he is very glad he removed to Africa, is better situated than he ever was, or hoped to be in America.” Another family was comparatively “poor and destitute,” but they still claimed a good home, acreage under cultivation, and ample food. They were content, according to the MCSC, because they “are well clothed and fed” and “nearly free from debt.”63

Landownership, and all that it promised, enticed some African Americans to Cape Palmas. It was not the only factor, but it may have been the deciding factor for many of the emigrants, and especially Eastern Shore emigrants. After all, some of these men and women probably had known individual members of that generation of self-made African American men and women who, by their own industry and faith, had rescued themselves and their loved ones from slavery and built homes, churches, and free African American neighborhoods. In other words, emigrants like Levi Norris wanted a chance at Isaac Maccary’s life. Norris knew he would not have it in Calvert County, Maryland, in the 1830s, but perhaps he could have his chance in Cape Palmas. Two years after his arrival in Cape Palmas, Norris reported to skeptics and friends back home that, for the first time, “I stand on my own ground, and no man can say, stand off, for I am better than you.”64

What the settlers knew was that legal freedom was not enough. Two generations of free African Americans had lived and worked in agriculture, shipping, and a variety of other industries in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Most had working relations with white men and women, and some had personal relationships with white neighbors. Some were raised in mixed-race families, and many grew up in interracial neighborhoods, either in the country or the city. In 1790 or 1800 free African Americans had good reason to think that they had an ownership stake in Maryland even if they were not full citizens. Their lived experience told them as much. But after 1815 everything was different. The generation of African Americans who grew up after the War of 1812 learned that legal freedom guaranteed little.