Slavery, Slaveholding, and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore

Slavery, Slaveholding, and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore PDF

Author: Ralph Clayton

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 9781556138683

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book promises to become the standard work of the history of the slaves, slaveholders, and the free black population of Antebellum Baltimore. For five years, Mr. Clayton has collected, transcribed, and cross-indexed a great variety of documents: applications for certificates of freedom, slave schedules, field assessor work books, census schedules, mortality schedules, general property tax records, city directories, newspaper advertisements and articles, the Schomburg collection at the Pratt Library in Baltimore, original letter manuscripts, and acts of the General Assembly of Maryland. The growth of Baltimore's black community, free and slave, was supported by two geographical factors of Baltimore. The city's thriving harbor offered a large employment market that attracted free blacks and offered slaveholders the opportunity to hire out their slaves. And Baltimore's position between the North and the South made it a logical station for escaped slaves either trying to reach the North or hoping to blend in with Baltimore's large free black population. The result of Mr. Clayton's labors is a comprehensive, fascinating, and sometimes painful view of an important period in the history of Charm City for which researchers everywhere will thank him.

The Price of Freedom

The Price of Freedom PDF

Author: T. Stephen Whitman

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0813165091

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common. Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical role in freeing themselves from slavery. Yet it was an imperfect victory. Once Baltimore's economic growth began to slow, freed blacks were virtually excluded from craft apprenticeships, and European immigrants supplanted them as a trained labor force.

Birthright Citizens

Birthright Citizens PDF

Author: Martha S. Jones

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-06-28

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1107150345

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.

Freedom's Port

Freedom's Port PDF

Author: Christopher Phillips

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780252066184

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.

Black Baltimore, 1820-1870

Black Baltimore, 1820-1870 PDF

Author: Ralph Clayton

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Effect of Immigration on the Negro in Baltimore 1850-1860 describes the effects of predominantly non-Black immigration into the city on the lives of the free and slave Blacks before the Civil War. Slaveholders of Baltimore, 1860 discusses the social history of the slaves, and provides a listing of all slaveholders enumerated in the 1860 Federal Census. Slaves by Name. Notices of runaway slaves were routinely published in the newspapers and now provide an important resource for family historians. This article provides an index to such notices in the Baltimore Sun for the years 1837-1864. Baltimore Free Black Households with Slaves, 1820-1840. In a city like Baltimore not all slaves were required to live on the premises of their master, and they frequently appear in the households of other Blacks who often were friends or relations. In addition, a surprising number of free Blacks were themselves slave holders. Black Families of East Baltimore, 1870. This first census after Emancipation is the first to identify all Blacks by name, age, birthplace, etc. and is of great value to family historians and sociologists. This article provides a listing of every Black in Wards 1 to 6 of East Baltimore. Laurel Cemetery, 1852-1958 gives a brief history of the cemetery and a partial reconstruction of interments there.

Slaves Without Masters

Slaves Without Masters PDF

Author: Ira Berlin

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A vivid and moving history of the quarter of a million free blacks who lived in the South before the Civil War. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Family Or Freedom

Family Or Freedom PDF

Author: Emily West

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2012-10-18

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 081313692X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people and potential members of the labor force; their very existence undermined popular justifications for slavery. It is no surprise that, by the end of the Civil War, nine Southern states had enacted legal provisions for the "voluntary" enslavement of free blacks. What is surprising to modern sensibilities and perplexing to scholars is that some individuals did petition to rescind their freedom. Family or Freedom investigates the incentives for free African Americans living in the antebellum South to sacrifice their liberty for a life in bondage. Author Emily West looks at the many factors influencing these dire decisions -- from desperate poverty to the threat of expulsion -- and demonstrates that the desire for family unity was the most important consideration for African Americans who submitted to voluntary enslavement. The first study of its kind to examine the phenomenon throughout the South, this meticulously researched volume offers the most thorough exploration of this complex issue to date.

The Men of Mobtown

The Men of Mobtown PDF

Author: Adam Malka

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-03-22

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1469636301

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality. Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.

Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom

Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom PDF

Author: Calvin Schermerhorn

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-06-15

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1421400898

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

“Elegantly argued . . . convincingly shows the centrality of enslaved men and women to the transformation of the coastal upper South’s commercial life.” —TheJournal of Southern History Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms—to save their families despite that new economy. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom proposes a new way of understanding the role of American slaves in the antebellum marketplace. Rather than work against it, as one might suppose, enslaved people engaged with the market somewhat as did free Americans. Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade. “Displays exhaustive research, a well-crafted argument, and is a valuable addition to antebellum slave historiography.” —H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews

Gleanings of Freedom

Gleanings of Freedom PDF

Author: Max Grivno

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2011-12-05

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0252093569

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.