Separating Freedom from Slavery

Every scholar can probably name a handful of defining moments in his/her intellectual development. Some of those moments are profound, while others are profoundly ordinary. In writing this review I was reminded of one particular incident of the latter variety. In his classic work, In Small Things Forgotten, James Deetz has a brief discussion of the origins of the front porch on Southern homes.¹ In eighteenth-century Virginia, the front porch became a mainstay of the conspicuously convivial home of the slaveholding gentry. However, the front porch was common in west Africa, thus African slaves built homes as they had back in Africa. In using a combination of archaeological and historical sources, Deetz discovered that this quintessentially American feature of Southern homes was actually rooted in African slavery. This example of the seamless blending of cultural influences taught me to look beyond fixed categories because ostensible fixity often masks underlying hybridity.

In the antebellum period, Americans used a set of fixed dichotomies to make sense of the country’s rapid expansion and development. Three central dichotomies included North and South, white and black, and freedom and slavery. Yet, in his work, Max Grivno joins a chorus of recent scholars who have demonstrated that these dichotomies were far from distinct in practice. In Gleanings of Freedom, Grivno demonstrates that along the Mason-Dixon Line in northern Maryland, farmers used “motley crews” made up of both free and enslaved laborers to assemble their workforces. Despite the fact that he labels it a “hybrid system,” Grivno stops short of suggesting that free and enslaved labor were interchangeable at the border. Quite the contrary, he claims: “The tangled intersection where labor systems collided and where local and national forces converged was the setting where the slavery-free labor boundary emerged” (p. 22).

Grivno begins in post-revolutionary Maryland and ends in 1860 just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, but the Panic of 1819 is the tipping point in his narrative of northern Maryland’s development. From the 1790s until 1819, the economy boomed, but following the Panic, Marylanders experienced a protracted bust period. In fact, Grivno suggests that the Panic of 1819 actually lasted about twenty years in northern Maryland, a roughly symmetrical counterpoint to the previous twenty-plus years of economic expansion. Prior to 1819, Marylanders embraced the use of slave labor; after 1819 they became convinced that slavery would eventually have to die out. Before 1819, labor arrangements “muddied the neat distinctions between slavery and freedom, black and white” (p. 26). After 1819, “the labor market neither blurred nor obscured the boundaries between these regimes” (p. 97).

In his first two chapters, Grivno establishes a rough chronology for the development of Maryland’s economy and, in so doing, the framework for his argument. There were a few critical components of northern Maryland’s economic expansion prior to 1819. First, European wars cut the supply and raised the price of wheat, opening a door for Maryland farmers. Second, internal improvements created an infrastructure that connected Maryland farmers to national and international markets. Third, the decline of the tobacco economy along the coast gave northern Marylanders access to a surplus in enslaved laborers. These three factors set the stage for boom times, and farmers in northern Maryland scrambled to assemble workforces to meet the demand. Grivno often refers to labor arrangements as “patchwork affairs” because they combined a variety of forms of labor. Maryland farmers were not convinced that slavery was the most efficient form of labor, nor were they ready to commit to hired wage labor. As a result, employers paid little heed to ethnicity, race, or legal status when assembling a workforce; instead they evaluated the individuals as workers. During this early period, both slave and free labor expanded side by side, and did not compete or clash with each other. There was plenty of room for both systems in the expanding economy.

That all changed when...