Download or read book Slavery Slaveholding and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore written by Ralph Clayton and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book promises to become the standard work of the history of the slaves, slaveholders, and the free black population of Antebellum Baltimore. For five years, Mr. Clayton has collected, transcribed, and cross-indexed a great variety of documents: applications for certificates of freedom, slave schedules, field assessor work books, census schedules, mortality schedules, general property tax records, city directories, newspaper advertisements and articles, the Schomburg collection at the Pratt Library in Baltimore, original letter manuscripts, and acts of the General Assembly of Maryland. The growth of Baltimore's black community, free and slave, was supported by two geographical factors of Baltimore. The city's thriving harbor offered a large employment market that attracted free blacks and offered slaveholders the opportunity to hire out their slaves. And Baltimore's position between the North and the South made it a logical station for escaped slaves either trying to reach the North or hoping to blend in with Baltimore's large free black population. The result of Mr. Clayton's labors is a comprehensive, fascinating, and sometimes painful view of an important period in the history of Charm City for which researchers everywhere will thank him.
Download or read book Freedom s Port written by Christopher Phillips and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community. He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.
Download or read book The Price of Freedom written by T. Stephen Whitman and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common. Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical role in freeing themselves from slavery. Yet it was an imperfect victory. Once Baltimore's economic growth began to slow, freed blacks were virtually excluded from craft apprenticeships, and European immigrants supplanted them as a trained labor force.
Download or read book Birthright Citizens written by Martha S. Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.
Download or read book Black Baltimore 1820 1870 written by Ralph Clayton and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Effect of Immigration on the Negro in Baltimore 1850-1860 describes the effects of predominantly non-Black immigration into the city on the lives of the free and slave Blacks before the Civil War. Slaveholders of Baltimore, 1860 discusses the social history of the slaves, and provides a listing of all slaveholders enumerated in the 1860 Federal Census. Slaves by Name. Notices of runaway slaves were routinely published in the newspapers and now provide an important resource for family historians. This article provides an index to such notices in the Baltimore Sun for the years 1837-1864. Baltimore Free Black Households with Slaves, 1820-1840. In a city like Baltimore not all slaves were required to live on the premises of their master, and they frequently appear in the households of other Blacks who often were friends or relations. In addition, a surprising number of free Blacks were themselves slave holders. Black Families of East Baltimore, 1870. This first census after Emancipation is the first to identify all Blacks by name, age, birthplace, etc. and is of great value to family historians and sociologists. This article provides a listing of every Black in Wards 1 to 6 of East Baltimore. Laurel Cemetery, 1852-1958 gives a brief history of the cemetery and a partial reconstruction of interments there.
Download or read book Slaves Without Masters written by Ira Berlin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1981 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and moving history of the quarter of a million free blacks who lived in the South before the Civil War. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The Men of Mobtown written by Adam Malka and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality. Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.
Download or read book Family Or Freedom written by Emily West and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people and potential members of the labor force; their very existence undermined popular justifications for slavery. It is no surprise that, by the end of the Civil War, nine Southern states had enacted legal provisions for the "voluntary" enslavement of free blacks. What is surprising to modern sensibilities and perplexing to scholars is that some individuals did petition to rescind their freedom. Family or Freedom investigates the incentives for free African Americans living in the antebellum South to sacrifice their liberty for a life in bondage. Author Emily West looks at the many factors influencing these dire decisions -- from desperate poverty to the threat of expulsion -- and demonstrates that the desire for family unity was the most important consideration for African Americans who submitted to voluntary enslavement. The first study of its kind to examine the phenomenon throughout the South, this meticulously researched volume offers the most thorough exploration of this complex issue to date.
Download or read book Almost Free written by Eva Sheppard Wolf and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South. There were several paths to freedom for slaves, each of them difficult. After ten years of elaborate dealings and negotiations, Johnson earned manumission in August 1812. An illiterate “mulatto” who had worked at the tavern in Warrenton as a slave, Johnson as a freeman was an anomaly, since free blacks made up only 3 percent of Virginia’s population. Johnson stayed in Fauquier County and managed to buy his enslaved family, but the law of the time required that they leave Virginia if Johnson freed them. Johnson opted to stay. Because slaves’ marriages had no legal standing, Johnson was not legally married to his enslaved wife, and in the event of his death his family would be sold to new owners. Johnson’s story dramatically illustrates the many harsh realities and cruel ironies faced by blacks in a society hostile to their freedom. Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed. It could actually be easier for a free black man to earn the favor of elite whites than it would be for blacks in general in the post-Reconstruction South. Wolf demonstrates the ways in which race was constructed by individuals in their day-to-day interactions, arguing that racial status was not simply a legal fact but a fluid and changeable condition. Almost Free looks beyond the majority experience, focusing on those at society’s edges to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of freedom in the slaveholding South. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication
Download or read book Schooling Citizens written by Hilary J. Moss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, Schooling Citizens narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.
Download or read book Money over Mastery Family over Freedom written by Calvin Schermerhorn and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Elegantly argued . . . convincingly shows the centrality of enslaved men and women to the transformation of the coastal upper South’s commercial life.” —TheJournal of Southern History Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms—to save their families despite that new economy. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom proposes a new way of understanding the role of American slaves in the antebellum marketplace. Rather than work against it, as one might suppose, enslaved people engaged with the market somewhat as did free Americans. Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade. “Displays exhaustive research, a well-crafted argument, and is a valuable addition to antebellum slave historiography.” —H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews
Download or read book Knights of the Razor written by Douglas Walter Bristol and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They advocated economic independence from whites and founded insurance companies that became some of the largest black-owned corporations.--L. Diane Barnes "Alabama Review"
Download or read book Gleanings of Freedom written by Max Grivno and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.
Download or read book Escape to the City written by Viola Franziska Müller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-09-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viola Franziska Muller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves that sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Muller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.
Download or read book Black Slaveowners written by Larry Koger and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-12-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, this authoritative study describes the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. It reveals how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom and how some free Blacks purchased slaves for their own use. The book provides a fresh perspective on slavery in the antebellum South and underscores the importance of African Americans in the history of American slavery. The book also paints a picture of the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks, and between Black and white slaveowners. It illuminates the motivations behind African-American slaveholding--including attempts to create or maintain independence, to accumulate wealth, and to protect family members--and sheds light on the harsh realities of slavery for both Black masters and Black slaves. • BLACK SLAVEOWNERS--Shows how some African Americans became slave masters • MOTIVATIONS FOR SLAVEHOLDING--Highlights the motivations behind African-American slaveholding • SOCIAL DYNAMICS--Sheds light on the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks • ANEBELLUM SOUTH--Provides a perspective on slavery in the antebellum South
Download or read book Remembering Baltimore written by Mark Walston and published by Remembering. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the tides of the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore's fortunes have ebbed and flowed through the years, from its bustling beginnings as a colonial port town, to its phenomenal growth in the nineteenth century and its rise to a position of prominence in the commerce of the nation, through the demise of the industrial age and the effects of the suburban flight of the twentieth century. Yet through all the ups and downs, the good times and bad, the city has maintained its unique identity?and has left a vibrant legacy of cultural and technological achievement, captured for posterity through the camera lens. With a selection of fine historic images from his best-selling book Historic Photos of Baltimore, Mark Walston provides a valuable and revealing historical retrospective on the growth and development of this great American city. Remembering Baltimore introduces viewers to the people, places, and events that helped define the town President John Quincy Adams dubbed the ?Monumental City.” Filled with more than a century of richly detailed images, Remembering Baltimore offers a revealing journey through time that will appeal to anyone with an interest in how the city contributed to America's rise to greatness.
Download or read book Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South written by Paul E. Teed and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the full spectrum of daily life among slaves in the Antebellum South, giving readers a more complete picture of slaves' experiences in the decades before emancipation. In their daily struggles to forge lives of dignity and meaning within an inhuman system, slaves in the Antebellum South demonstrated creativity, resilience, and an insatiable desire to be free. The Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South focuses on their struggles to create lives of meaning and dignity within a brutal and repressive system. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of the institution of slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. Readers can explore the family life, religious beliefs, political activities, intellectual aspirations, material possessions, and recreational pursuits of enslaved people. The book shows that enslaved people were tightly constrained by the harsh realities of the oppressive system under which they lived but that they found ways to forge lives of their own. The book synthesizes the latest and best literature on slavery and gives readers the opportunity to examine history through the lens of daily life using primary source documents created by slaves or former slaves.
