Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland by Jennifer Hull Dorsey (review)

In early 1814 John Kennard, a Talbot County farmer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, knew that his next hire would be different. He had published the following advertisement in the Eastern Shore General Advertiser with change in mind: “Wanted to Hire: A Negro man who understands the farming business” (21). Those who read or heard of the notice understood that Kennard’s desire to hire a freed or freeborn African American rather than buy a slave or pay a white laborer reflected a shift in local labor practices. With the disappearance of northern slavery underway, roughly two generations of African Americans were entering an emerging “free labor” workforce for the first time. Their agricultural skills took on new value as commercial interests sought to exploit the Mid-Atlantic’s coastal harvests as well as the crops and natural resources from the hinterlands of western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. In Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland, Jennifer Hull Dorsey investigates how African Americans understood this change and attempted to shape the expectations of free labor by their entry into it.

It is this convergence of emancipation and the rise of wage labor that interests Dorsey most as she explores what she considers a historiographical gap regarding the lives of working African Americans in the early republic. To focus her study, she concentrates on the Eastern Shore of Maryland because of its large population of freed blacks and persistent dual labor system of slave and free labor during this period. By introducing examples of white employers such as Kennard, as well as black laborers such as agricultural worker Jacob Ross and tradesman Joseph Cain, Dorsey explains how the shift from slave to wage labor occurred and how a range of agriculture-related jobs (including truck agriculture and seasonal work) created opportunities for manumitted blacks in the arena between year-round field workers and urban-based roles. This gap has geographical dimensions, too, as Dorsey teases out the stories of those laborers physically moving and interacting with other commercial actors between plantation and port. The results build nicely upon Seth Rockman’s Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, a recent comprehensive look at Baltimore’s laborers during roughly the same period.

As their bonds loosened, free African Americans challenged the economic and social norms associated within a community so reliant on slave labor. By pursing a wage for work when it could be obtained and relocating when new employment opportunities beckoned, some African Americans achieved small measures of freedom, as merchants, farmers, and plantation owners created a more efficient allocation of available labor by seeking rural workers with skills. During this shift, and in practices that would be repeated in later decades and elsewhere by other newly freed blacks, Dorsey’s cohort and their children tried to curtail white employers’ authority by restoring families splintered by slave auctions when possible, creating community institutions such as churches and neighborhoods where practical, and negotiating their own work contracts when allowed.

Manumitted and freeborn African Americans turned to two institutions to establish their stake in the rising free labor ideology: the court system and the custom of issuing certificates of freedom. Both have been interpreted by historians as largely tools of white plantation masters who sought to limit the actions of manumitted slaves and their freeborn counterparts. In a particularly good effort, Dorsey flips the historical assumptions associated with these institutions to reveal examples in which blacks went to court to secure employers’ contract obligations (especially in securing better futures for children bound to labor) and pursue certificates of freedom to ensure their mobility (a necessity and an advantage during an era of free labor opportunities).

Ultimately, Hirelings demonstrates a need for further scholarship along similar lines, particularly on other coastal and backcountry regions during the early republic. Lacking other rural labor studies...