Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

1. Work

1 Work In January 1814, John Kennard of Talbot County placed an advertisement in the Eastern Shore General Advertiser that read: “‘Wanted to Hire’: A Negro man who understands the farming business.”1 Kennard may have intended to hire a slave-for-life or a term slave from a neighboring slaveholder. He may have also considered hiring a manumitted African American. Any Talbot County freedman who saw or heard of the advertisement knew what Kennard wanted from his new hire. The new hire would perform a variety of tasks related to grain production, including harrowing and plowing the soil, cutting the wheat with a cradle scythe, mowing the hay that Kennard grew for his draft animals, sharpening the plows, and maintaining the farm equipment. Kennard may have expected his new hire to recruit seasonal laborers, oversee their work, and distribute their pay. Compensation would have included wages, but Kennard may have also offered housing and provisions, and if his new hire was married, employment for his wife. It is strange that Kennard stated his preference for a man since everyone who read the advertisement understood that “the 22 Hirelings farming business” was men’s work. Although women worked alongside men during the harvest season, the hired work of a “Negro woman” was more typically domestic and might include housekeeping, laundering, cooking, and child care. Fifty years earlier Kennard would have filled this position by hiring a landless white man, a convict laborer, a tradesman who wanted seasonal work, or possibly an apprentice. Historically, Maryland “Negroes” were bought, not hired, but the manumission of hundreds of slaves after the 1780s gave Kennard the option of hiring a free African American for what was once a white man’s job. Beginning in the 1790s free African Americans worked for daily, weekly, or seasonal wages on the grain plantations that defined the economy and society of the Upper Eastern Shore. Some carved out economic niches for themselves as sawyers, barbers, ditchers, butchers, and peddlers; and a few others achieved the coveted status of landholder. Whatever their position in the hierarchy of rural labor, these former slaves maximized the potential of their status as a rural, laboring people to earn some money and to establish beneficial relationships with white employers. In the process, they transformed the century-old slave system of the Eastern Shore into a mixed labor system that balanced slave and wage labor. Maryland plantation owner John Beale Bordley was an early advocate of replacing slave labor with the hired labor of freedmen.2 In a manual for farmers titled Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs (1799), Bordley proposed a number of innovative agricultural techniques and weighed in on the subject of manumission and the transition to wage labor. He encouraged farmers and planters to consider how the transition to a wage labor system could potentially increase their profit margins as the region intensified agricultural production to meet the rising demand for food in the Atlantic world. Bordley, who owned more than one thousand acres of land and dozens of slaves in both Pennsylvania and the Eastern Shore, was uniquely qualified to lead such a discussion.3 With one foot in Pennsylvania , where manumission was compulsory after 1780, and one foot in Maryland, where the free African American population grew steadily after 1780, Bordley confidently declared that slavery was “done with in America.” It was time for Maryland farmers to “begin the inquiry” into alternate labor systems so “that they may be prepared for the change.”4 Work 23 Concerned that Maryland planters had insufficient experience with conducting “rural business with hired laborers,” Bordley urged them to carefully study the example set by Great Britain, with its long tradition of using “hirelings” in agriculture.5 Like other early republic landowners, Bordley believed that only the “considerable ignorant” made their lives as hirelings, while hardworking individuals joined the ranks of tenant farmers or smallholders. Essays and Notes suggests that without direction from their social betters, former slaves would act no differently than former indentured servants. The smart and skilled would ascend to tenancies or smallholdings, and the “ignorant” would remain marginally employed. Equally important, Bordley understood that the Maryland legislature would not follow the lead of Pennsylvania and convert slaves into apprentices , and so the burden of converting former slaves into wage laborers would fall to individual planters. The recent history of Eastern Shore planters with hired laborers was...