Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

Preface

Preface In 1997 historian Wilson J. Moses wished aloud that scholars would find something new to say about nineteenth-century free African Americans . Moses observed in Reviews in American History that the scholarship had become predictable, adding that there are “layers of data in support of theses that are no longer subject to serious dispute.” The field is ready for a revolution, he suggested.1 The exploration in this book into the working lives of manumitted and freeborn African Americans may not revolutionize the field, but it is meant to fill an inexplicable gap in African American studies as well as the history of the early republic. It is a history of free African American laborers, their families, and communities, but it is also an exploration of the relationship between the early republic manumissions and the nascent wage labor system. It is the story of how agricultural employers made slaves into wage laborers and how two generations of African Americans experienced this transition from slavery to wage work. With a few noteworthy exceptions, most historians have ignored the working lives of those African Americans manumitted in the first x Preface emancipation, the legislative abolition of slavery in the northern states between 1780 and 1804, concentrating instead on their family relations, religious institutions, social organizations, and political activism.2 It is a curious omission when we consider that histories of other emancipations are so hyperfocused on emancipation as a labor problem. Take histories of the British emancipation (1833) and the U.S. emancipation (1865) as examples.3 Both historiographies are replete with microhistories of how emancipated slaves experienced the transition from slave labor to free labor. They emphasize how former slaves worked within and around plantation systems to create economic, social, and civic niches for themselves.4 They also emphasize the relationships between emancipation, political economy, and the concurrent rise of a free labor ideology. By comparison, histories of the first emancipation have concentrated on the economic impetus for emancipation , but they do not explain what happened next: Where did these former slaves belong in a wage labor system? How did the availability of African American wage laborers alter hiring practices in specific industries? How did the steady increase in wage laborers influence public policy? Finally, how did working for wages alter the lives of African Americans? How did work shape their relationships with employers, family, other free laborers, and enslaved workers?5 As I read through emancipation studies, African American community studies, labor history, and plantation studies, it occurred to me that free African Americans in the early republic shared more common ground with other emancipated people throughout the Atlantic world over the course of the nineteenth century than the existing scholarship allows.6 I realized that early republic emancipators were no less concerned with matters of political economy than subsequent generations. They pursued emancipation with an eye toward implementing a wage labor system, and they expected to manipulate this system to their advantage. The early republic emancipations made slaves into wage-earning manual laborers who joined a fast-growing population of working poor. In this book I focus on one segment of this population: free African American agricultural laborers who worked in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I explain how African Americans made the transition from slave labor to wage labor. I also consider this transition from the perspective of the slaveholders who made it possible and shaped its process. The story begins with the manumission of hundreds of slaves, and follows this manumitted generation and their freeborn Preface xi children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities , new associations, and new communities over the next half-century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but in the colonial era they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the labor system. As free workers in a slave society, they contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters’ authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited their own households’ needs, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers, and migration became a strategy for meeting their needs...