Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (review)

T. Stephen Whitman takes up a formidable task of synthesis in this intelligent and well-crafted new work. Drawing on a wide reading of secondary sources as well as published primary sources and his own important work on early national Baltimore, Whitman tells a complex, multisided story of the evolving forms and impact of opposition to slavery in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware from the American Revolution through the end of the Civil War. In the process, he weaves a multitude of major and minor individuals, events, and historiographical debates into a coherent and compelling interpretation of nearly a century of conflict surrounding the South’s peculiar institution.

Central to this interpretation is Whitman’s observation that “the story of ‘antislavery in the Chesapeake’ is in fact several intertwined narratives” (xiv). These various narratives and the relationships among them, particularly the different yet interdependent trajectories of white and black efforts to contest slavery, serve as the book’s main themes. Whitman insightfully traces the ways in which changing white attitudes and actions shaped the opportunities for and limitations on black activism, but he also demonstrates that black assertiveness in turn forced issues related to slavery into public consideration and thus continually reshaped white sentiments. This central dynamic gains an added level of complexity from Whitman’s attention to regional variations in the way this process worked within the Chesapeake. Indeed, the gradual disintegration of the Chesapeake as a coherent region constitutes an important theme in its own right, making the book far more illuminating than a purely state-level study would be.

The first part of Whitman’s book provides a familiar account of the rise of slavery, the evolution of African American culture in the eighteenth century, and the challenge to slavery presented by the American Revolution and black efforts to turn the situation to their advantage. Whitman casts the Chesapeake as a “middle ground” (22) between the Northeast, where slaves and their white allies succeeded in using the ideological and economic upheaval of the Revolution to overthrow slavery, and the Deep South, where slaveholders rapidly reconsolidated their control. In the Chesapeake, Revolutionary struggles over slavery “produced no decisive outcome” (22), and slavery remained a political and social problem into the early national era. Here, as throughout the book, Whitman is particularly effective in highlighting the ways in which white attitudes about slavery “rarely fit neatly into compartments of liberty versus servitude” (40) but rather were shaped by a host of economic and political as well as moral concerns. “Opposition to the Atlantic slave trade,” for instance, “could combine reservations about slavery in the abstract with a determination to protect the value of existing slave property and the social status of slaveowners” (42).

When white antislavery came into conflict with those economic and political interests, it inevitably lost. Even the most conservative gradual emancipation proposals met with stony silence at best. The initial success of efforts to promote private manumission quickly provoked a white backlash, and organizations and individuals devoted to helping slaves achieve or protect their freedom through the courts faced increasing legal obstacles and popular hostility. Often, white antislaveryites themselves seemed less interested in aiding black men and women than in benefiting white society, and free blacks became a focus of white contempt among both pro- and antislavery forces. “Whites’ embrace of antislavery” in this period, Whitman concludes, “was thus tentative, feeble, and quickly withdrawn” (72).

Nevertheless, the nature of white economic calculations about the benefits of slavery and the relative success of antislavery activism began to diverge in different parts of the Chesapeake and helped to shape black strategies in important ways. In Delaware and northern Maryland, for instance, proximity to Pennsylvania made slaveholders more willing to negotiate freedom on favorable terms, rather than risk losing their entire investment in slave property through flight. By 1810, 76 percent of Dela-ware’s black population was free...