Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

Introduction

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 2 Hirelings 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 Introduction 3 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...