Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (review)

BOOK REVIEWS179 Sfovery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryfond during the Nineteenth Century. By Barbara Jeanne Fields. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Pp. xv, 268. $27.50.) Sfovery and Freedom on the Middle Ground analyzes Maryland's transition from the last stages ofa crumbling slave society to the first stages ofa modern capitalistic one. Professor Fields's portrait of die former fits historiographically upon the larger canvases painted by Eugene Genovese and Ira Berlin; her portrait of the latter extends into a Border state the contemporary American Marxist analysis ofpostslave societies. On theone hand, Professor Fields offers strong, subtle interpretations and discusses at several points the ways in which her views relate to those ofother scholars. That is one ofthe most intellectually engaging aspects ofher style. On the other hand, the footnotes in this book verge on being gratuitously combative , and I can only hope that the many historians whom she dismisses will consider her ideas in a more generous spirit than she displays toward dieirs, for she has some excellent material to offer. Fields lays to rest the assumption that Maryland slavery, because it had to accommodate itself to the polity of a Border state and because it coexisted with a uniquely high percentage of free blacks, was somehow more benign in character than slavery farther south. Instead, Maryland slaveholders were nervous and defensive, clinging to power in an unrepresentative legislature, and prepared to impose their own version ofpolice order upon Baltimore. Fields also musters finearguments to illuminate the paradox that small slaveholdings (the mostcommon holding in Maryland in 1860 was a single slave) may have proved more disruptive to the lives of individual black people than large slaveholdings. The chapters on the Civil War in Maryland and the fall ofslavery there are firmly rooted in the records of the Union army and Freedmen's Bureau, where Fields has done extensive research. Many ofher insights hit home. General Benjamin Butler, for example, hardly a hero in traditional accounts of Maryland during the Civil War, emerges as a realist who understood power. He gave his superiors "the luxury ofbenefitting by his action while clucking dieir tongues in disapproval." Her discussion ofdie ways in which army recruiting among blacks broke down the distinctions among previously free men, previously enslaved men, and fugitives from elsewhere is deftly done. Less persuasive is her cautious treatment ofthe mercurial rise and precipitous fall of the Radical coalition that passed the 1864 constitution, then evaporated in 1867. That phenomenon, which fits awkwardly into the story as Fields conceptualizes it, is not adequately addressed. The strongest portions ofthis monograph trace the social consequences ofthe postwar growth of industrial capitalism and the trend toward truck forming in many ofthe areas where slaves had once raised staples. Fields's analyses ofwhat happened to blacks in the course ofthese two processes is outstanding, and her painstaking survey ofblack farmers in three counties 180CIVIL WAR HISTORY in the 1880 census yield impressive evidence. She interprets the labor crises of 1877 as a sort ofpublic announcement that a new social order had emerged and all sides in Maryland recognized it. James C. Mohr University of Maryland My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civü War Era . By Jean-Charles Houzeau. Edited, with an introduction by David C. Rankin. Translated by Gerard F. Denault. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pp. xvi, 168. $20.00.) The publication of this account of events in New Orleans from 1863 through 1868 by a participant in those events, Jean-Charles Houzeau, accompanied by an extensive introduction on the life of Houzeau, is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Houzeau was a Belgian journalist and astronomer of aristocratic family, who came to the United States in 1857. His Enlightenment beliefs in progress and the importance of the environment over heredity appear in his writings and influence his actions throughout his life. Residing in Texas when the Civil War began, he made his way to Union-occupied New Orleans in 1862. He soon was writing articles for L'Union and then the Tribune, newspapers published by free persons of color in New Orleans. In November...