Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

Hirelings

African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

Jennifer Hull Dorsey

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1. Work

2. Migration

3. Family

4. Dependency

5. Community

6. Recession

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Figures

1. Joseph Chain advertisement, 1817

2. House Servants Wanted, 1817

3. A Plea for Charity, 1817

Maps

1. Map of the Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland

2. Map of the Delmarva Peninsula, ca. 1778

3. Map of Talbot County, 1878

Tables

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

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

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

2.1. Applicants for Certificates of Freedom as a percentage of whole free black populations, Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties, 1805–34

2.2. Sex and age structures of Certificate of Freedom applicants, Talbot County, 1800–34

2.3. Sex and age structures of Certificate of Freedom applicants, Queen Anne’s County, 1807–34

Preface

In 1997 historian Wilson J. Moses wished aloud that scholars would find something new to say about nineteenth-century free African Americans. Moses observed in Reviews in American History that the scholarship had become predictable, adding that there are layers of data in support of theses that are no longer subject to serious dispute. The field is ready for a revolution, he suggested.¹ The exploration in this book into the working lives of manumitted and freeborn African Americans may not revolutionize the field, but it is meant to fill an inexplicable gap in African American studies as well as the history of the early republic. It is a history of free African American laborers, their families, and communities, but it is also an exploration of the relationship between the early republic manumissions and the nascent wage labor system. It is the story of how agricultural employers made slaves into wage laborers and how two generations of African Americans experienced this transition from slavery to wage work.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, most historians have ignored the working lives of those African Americans manumitted in the first emancipation, the legislative abolition of slavery in the northern states between 1780 and 1804, concentrating instead on their family relations, religious institutions, social organizations, and political activism.² It is a curious omission when we consider that histories of other emancipations are so hyperfocused on emancipation as a labor problem. Take histories of the British emancipation (1833) and the U.S. emancipation (1865) as examples.³ Both historiographies are replete with microhistories of how emancipated slaves experienced the transition from slave labor to free labor. They emphasize how former slaves worked within and around plantation systems to create economic, social, and civic niches for themselves.⁴ They also emphasize the relationships between emancipation, political economy, and the concurrent rise of a free labor ideology. By comparison, histories of the first emancipation have concentrated on the economic impetus for emancipation, but they do not explain what happened next: Where did these former slaves belong in a wage labor system? How did the availability of African American wage laborers alter hiring practices in specific industries? How did the steady increase in wage laborers influence public policy? Finally, how did working for wages alter the lives of African Americans? How did work shape their relationships with employers, family, other free laborers, and enslaved workers?⁵

As I read through emancipation studies, African American community studies, labor history, and plantation studies, it occurred to me that free African Americans in the early republic shared more common ground with other emancipated people throughout the Atlantic world over the course of the nineteenth century than the existing scholarship allows.⁶ I realized that early republic emancipators were no less concerned with matters of political economy than subsequent generations. They pursued emancipation with an eye toward implementing a wage labor system, and they expected to manipulate this system to their advantage. The early republic emancipations made slaves into wage-earning manual laborers who joined a fast-growing population of working poor. In this book I focus on one segment of this population: free African American agricultural laborers who worked in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I explain how African Americans made the transition from slave labor to wage labor. I also consider this transition from the perspective of the slaveholders who made it possible and shaped its process. The story begins with the manumission of hundreds of slaves, and follows this manumitted generation and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, new associations, and new communities over the next half-century.

Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but in the colonial era they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the labor system. As free workers in a slave society, they contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters’ authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited their own households’ needs, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers, and migration became a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers’ control. Throughout it all free African Americans informed the early definition of free labor in early republic Maryland.

Why the Eastern Shore of Maryland? The choice was strategic. First, the Eastern Shore counties claimed a significantly larger population of free African Americans than other rural counties on the mainland before the Civil War. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the free black population on the Eastern Shore increased by 400 percent while the white population declined steadily. Of course, the free African American population in Baltimore had increased by 3,100 percent in forty years, but Baltimore also attracted a large number of European migrants, and those white migrants maintained a white majority. In 1830 white Baltimoreans outnumbered black Baltimoreans three to one. By comparison, the Eastern Shore of Maryland became a kind of Free Black Belt within the state. Second, the history of wage work on the Eastern Shore is well documented, if not thoroughly explicated. Barbara Jeanne Fields raised awareness of free black agricultural workers on the Eastern Shore and the important but indirect role that they played in the politics of antebellum Maryland in her 1985 book, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. Fields described the unique dual labor system that combined slave and free labor and the lengths to which agriculturalist and industrialist went to preserve it amid heated contests over the vices and virtues of wage labor. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground is a study of political economy, and it has figured prominently in my analysis.

The economic importance of the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia and Baltimore is another reason to look more closely at the free African American workers in this region. Throughout much of the eighteenth century Eastern Shore agriculture fueled the expansion of the milling and shipping industries in Philadelphia, making agricultural workers key players in the growth of the most dynamic economy in early American history. The economic relationship between Philadelphia, Baltimore, and their agricultural hinterlands can be traced to the early eighteenth century, when Eastern Shore planters began growing grains for export, a process detailed by historians Paul G. E. Clemens and Brooke Hunter. Historians have thoroughly explained the consequences of agricultural diversification on the economic development of the Eastern Shore. Jean B. Russo and Lorena Walsh, for example, have explained among other things how diversification altered plantation management and the work routines of slaves. Others have studied how a rising demand for skilled and unskilled labor in Baltimore and Philadelphia industries siphoned skilled labor from the countryside.⁷

What historians have not considered is how free African American laborers participated in this dynamic economy.⁸ One premise of this book is that the proximity of the Eastern Shore to the expanding economies of Philadelphia, and later Baltimore, mattered for how free African Americans experienced freedom. They participated actively in a regional exchange of people, ideas, money, and goods that had a pronounced effect both on their own communities and the demographic, economic, and cultural development of the greater Eastern Shore. Equally important, such opportunities for regional exchange and association across state lines encouraged free African Americans in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware to think of themselves as members of a regional community. Perhaps the most obvious example of how this regional exchange worked is in the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Only two years after African American Methodists in Philadelphia and Baltimore broke away from the Methodist Episcopal Church, an AME missionary appeared on the Eastern Shore. Why would the newly organized AME Church spend its limited resources on church-building efforts in the countryside? As we will see, the choice was neither coincidence nor accident but a natural outgrowth of African American migration between the Eastern Shore, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Nor were Eastern Shore planters immune to the influence of this regional exchange. In the colonial era several of the most prominent planter families on the Eastern Shore intermarried with the merchant elite of Philadelphia. They maintained estates in both Pennsylvania and Maryland, and they knew experientially the economic benefits of both enslaved and hired labor. These same planters were among the earliest to integrate wage laborers into the agricultural labor force, and although they did not know it, this choice altered the course of history. Specifically, it put Maryland on a different trajectory than Virginia and the rest of the slaveholding South. In the seventeenth century, Maryland and Virginia shared more similarities than differences: they were two Chesapeake colonies with economies underdeveloped by tobacco and slavery and governments beholden to the interests of the slaveholders who monopolized land and slaves. In the eighteenth century Maryland moved away from this heritage, in part because of a profitable alliance between Eastern Shore planters and Philadelphia merchants. Before the American Revolution Maryland gave up growing tobacco for grain, and, more important, it gave up slavery for a more complicated mixed labor system that included slaves and wage laborers. In the 1780s and 1790s Maryland and Virginia slaveholders manumitted slaves at comparable rates, and in both states some white men and women supported efforts to integrate former slaves into community life. However, Virginia contended with major slave revolts in 1800 and 1832, and white Virginians grew overtly hostile to black freedom. As early as 1806 the Virginia legislature instituted laws that mandated the expulsion of manumitted slaves. By comparison, a majority of white Marylanders, and most especially Eastern Shore plantation owners, accepted a wage labor system and could not imagine expelling black workers from it. As a result, the Maryland legislature was less concerned with expelling free African Americans and more concerned with shaping former slaves and their freeborn descendents into a reliable and dependent workforce.

Bringing to light the history of these forgotten workers in rural Maryland required a teasing of information about African American life from a diversity of sources authored primarily by white men. Both the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore claim sizeable and diverse collections of public and private records from the Eastern Shore. The observations and hiring practices of Eastern Shore planters Thomas Chamberlain, Richard Tilghman, Robert Lloyd Nichols, and Robert Goldsborough revealed to me the process by which former slaves were integrated as free workers into a plantation economy built on slave labor. Plantation records proved vital for understanding how, when, and where free African American workers fit in with the agricultural economy. Assessment records collected by county governments made it possible to place free African Americans in specific neighborhoods and to compare their property holdings over time. The Census of Negroes (1832) revealed that former slaves formed large households that included multiple generations of free kin. Certificates of Freedom issued by county courts indicated the difference that gender and status (manumitted or freeborn) made in how former slaves experienced freedom. County court minutes also revealed how planters enforced a growing body of discriminatory laws to control their workforce.

With the exception of the introduction, each of the chapters in this book revisits key themes in the history of the early republic from the vantage point of former slaves and freeborn African Americans on the Eastern Shore. The introduction provides historical context for the transition from slave labor to wage labor. It establishes a sense of place and offers a brief history of the society and economy of the Eastern Shore between settlement and the American Revolution. Chapter 1, Labor, addresses an important but obvious question: What employment opportunities were available to free African Americans in a slave society? The chapter describes the different types of work opportunities available to former slaves in an agricultural society. This chapter also challenges the standing argument that Maryland developed a dual labor system in the early nineteenth century.⁹ Dual implies competition or polarity, but in fact, employers and free African Americans more accurately experienced a labor system that integrated free, slave, and semifree (e.g., apprenticed children and term slaves) laborers. Mixed labor system better captures the complexity of labor relations between planters and their former slaves in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 2, Migration, considers the experience of migrant workers as well as the meaning of migration for African American laborers. Migration contributed to rural African Americans’ sense of belonging to a larger regional community that extended from the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia and Baltimore and beyond. Regional community, constructed through migration, is a theme that writers on the free African American communities of Baltimore and Philadelphia have overlooked. This chapter also considers white employers’ hostility to African American mobility and the steps they took to manage this migration to their advantage. It introduces the argument that this hostility to black mobility provided much of the impetus for the Maryland Black Codes.

Chapter 3, Family, examines how the practice of gradual manumission divided African American families between slavery and freedom, strategies for maintaining familial integrity across that divide, and free African Americans’ advancement toward autonomous households. It also examines the African American family as an economic unit. Free family members worked toward the freedom of enslaved family members, manumitted parents cared for their freeborn children, and adult children worked to support the elderly in autonomous households. Even in freedom, family members remained connected to one another by their obligations as spouses, parents, children, and siblings.

Chapter 4, Dependency, describes the legal regime created by the Maryland legislature to force free African Americans into wage dependence and how Eastern Shore planters engaged with it to their advantage. It also examines how free African Americans secured the services of the local government to protect their own investments in the Eastern Shore.

Chapter 5, Community, centers on the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its meaning for free men and women in rural Maryland. On the Eastern Shore, as elsewhere, the AME Church expressed the values, culture, and experience of a distinct group of free African Americans. It also connected these believers across the Middle Atlantic states, reinforcing their membership in a regional community.

Chapter 6, Recession, examines this watershed moment when the lucrative wartime trade in Eastern Shore grains collapsed and ended an era of relative prosperity and stability for rural free African Americans.

I am grateful to the many people who have assisted me in the preparation of this book. Above all, I thank George, Josephine, and Casey for their patience, enthusiasm, good humor, and confidence. I could not have completed this work without them.

I want to recognize the mentorship of Alison Games, who guided and encouraged me at the earliest stage. Alison, Adam Rothman, and T. Stephen Whitman filled the margins of preliminary drafts with thoughtful comments and advice, and I am indebted to them for what they have taught me about the craft of writing history. Equally meaningful were my conversations with Lois Green Carr, Jean B. Russo, and Lorena S. Walsh, scholars whose work continues to inspire me. I thank Douglas Egerton, Jon Sensbach, Peter H. Wood, and Gregory H. Nobles for gracious feedback on research that I presented at various academic conferences. I also thank Joseph Miller for the opportunity to discuss my work at the 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Roots: African Dimensions of the History and Culture of the Americas (through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).

I am deeply indebted to Christopher Clark and Paul G. E. Clemens who read the complete manuscript and submitted reports to Cornell University Press. Their careful feedback and helpful suggestions spurred me to rethink my work, to address its weaknesses, and to appreciate its strengths.

Colleagues at Georgetown University, Arizona State University, and Siena College read the manuscript at different stages in its development. In particular, I thank Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, Jon Enriquez, Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Michael J. Socolow, and Michael Stancliff for taking time away from their own projects to read my work and nudge me forward in the writing process.

Fellowships from the Department of History at Georgetown University and a number of summer research grants from the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University underwrote much of the research of this book. It is a pleasure to extend my heartfelt appreciation to the knowledgeable and efficient archivists at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Maryland Historical Society, and the Maryland State Archives, who directed me to many of the manuscripts that I needed to write this history.

Finally, I am grateful for the opportunity to work with Cornell University Press and with acquisitions editor Michael J. McGandy, who has shepherded me through the publication process.

Please note that I have opted to use modern spellings of all the town names. For example, Ivytown is listed as both Ivytown and Ivory Town in nineteenth-century records; Ivytown is the contemporary spelling.

Map 1. The Upper Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Introduction

The waterways of the Delmarva Peninsula have shaped the economic and social development of the Eastern Shore of Maryland from settlement to the present. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English merchants who directed transatlantic trade easily accessed the Delmarva Peninsula and its settlers through the Elk, Sassafras, Chester, Miles, and Nanticoke rivers that flow from Chesapeake Bay. Merchants carried people, credit, manufactured supplies, and news to the peninsular communities. They also transported agricultural produce and lumber products to other destinations within the Atlantic world. Of all the bayside rivers the Choptank is arguably the most important for explaining the history of the Eastern Shore, in that it divides the territory into two distinctive agricultural regions. The Upper Eastern Shore, located between the Choptank and the Elk rivers, claims rich, deep, fertile, and well-irrigated soil suitable for staple agriculture. South of the Choptank, sandy soil, a marshy inland, and extensive woodlands prohibited the development of plantation agriculture. Instead, settlers in the Lower Eastern Shore harvested quick-growing perishables as well as valuable naval stores, including lumber, tar, and pitch from the woodlands. Although the poor quality of the soil on the Lower Eastern Shore prohibited tobacco production, the settlers were not exactly handicapped in the imperial economy. Merchants from England and Philadelphia found reliable West Indian markets for the corn, wheat, livestock, and lumber products harvested on the Lower Eastern Shore.¹

Shipping and boating were equally important to the regional economy of the Delmarva Peninsula. Residents routinely plied the smaller rivers in dugout canoes, barges, and skiffs. Those who lived inland transported goods along the rivers and across land to larger landings on Delaware Bay. Everywhere, people fished, gathered oysters and crabs, and plucked terrapins from the salty waters. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, Eastern Shore shipbuilders in St. Michaels, Talbot County, provided Philadelphia and Baltimore merchants with cargo vessels.

Waterways also served as natural boundaries between Eastern Shore counties. Kent County, the oldest county on the Upper Eastern Shore, was established in 1642. It lies between the Sassafras and Chester rivers. Talbot County, the most southern county on the Upper Eastern Shore, lies between the Miles and Choptank rivers. Queen Anne’s County, created out of part of Talbot in 1706, lies between Kent and Talbot, bound by the Chester and the Miles rivers. In 1773 the Maryland government carved Caroline County partly out of Queen Anne’s County. It is unique among the counties of the Upper Eastern Shore because it has no coastline although the Choptank River cuts through Caroline and flows into Chesapeake Bay. In the eighteenth century the government built roads that offered Caroline residents comparatively easier access to Delaware Bay. Thereafter, the economies of the most westward counties of the Upper Eastern Shore were directed away from Chesapeake Bay and toward Wilmington and other commercial centers on Delaware Bay.

Early immigrants to the Eastern Shore came from every direction, crossing either Chesapeake Bay or the Atlantic Ocean, enticed by cheap land and the possibility of high profits in a booming tobacco economy. Among the first settlers were former indentured servants who felt pushed from the mainland because they lacked the necessary capital to undertake large-scale tobacco production. Others included religious dissenters, especially Quakers, who arrived in the 1660s to escape persecution by Virginia authorities. Quakers initially settled on the Lower Eastern Shore, but the Presbyterians and Anglicans who dominated the religious life of the region harassed them. By the eighteenth century these Quaker communities had relocated to the Upper Eastern Shore, where they thrived notwithstanding their members’ status as religious dissenters. Everywhere on the Eastern Shore, Protestant settlers outnumbered Catholics, but in the eighteenth century, Jesuits established plantations in Talbot and Cecil County at the head of Chesapeake Bay bordering Pennsylvania and Delaware. These plantations provided a spiritual safe haven for Catholics, who had been disenfranchised by the Maryland colonial government in 1718. Penal laws prohibited Catholic clergy from carrying out missionary work, but from their plantations, the Jesuits sustained Catholicism, administering the sacraments and providing a religious education to Catholic settlers.²

Beginning in the 1630s thousands of English and Irish convicts were sentenced to labor in Maryland, and some undoubtedly went to the Eastern Shore to work for the emerging great planters. A second wave of convict laborers arrived in the 1750s and 1760s, and while most went to Annapolis and Baltimore, some landed on the Eastern Shore. One estimate holds that one in ten adult white men in Queen Anne’s County in 1755 was a British convict.³ In the seventeenth century, convict laborers outnumbered enslaved laborers, but by the eighteenth century, British convicts likely worked alongside African slaves throughout the colony. The first people of African descent on the Eastern Shore of Maryland were a handful of free Africans who migrated northward from Virginia in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Some came to escape persecution, others to take advantage of inexpensive land. Little is known about their experience, but their names appear sporadically in a handful of early court records: the Driggers and Johnsons of Somerset County, Robert Butchery of Dorchester, and Grinedge of Talbot. It seems the free Africans were anglicized (adopted English customs, culture, and language) and Christian. Some were landowners and others were tenants, and some intermarried with whites, but the colonial government nevertheless looked on them with suspicion, prohibiting them from serving in local militias and denying them the right to testify against whites in court.⁴

In the 1630s the landscape of the Eastern Shore was dotted with family-operated tobacco farms. But the economy and society underwent a significant transformation in the 1660s when the proprietor of Maryland, Lord Baltimore, granted thousands of acres to key allies who had the economic means to develop large-scale tobacco plantations. The colony was engaged in a border dispute with Virginia, and the proprietor encouraged this settlement to secure Maryland’s claims on the peninsula. These immigrants were Englishmen of middling means with ample capital to hire tenants, import indentured servants and convicts, and, beginning in the 1680s, to import African slaves. They included the Tilghmans, the Lloyds, the Hollydays, and the Goldsboroughs, families whose names are now synonymous with the golden age of colonial Maryland.