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 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 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 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 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 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 Citizenship Reimagined written by Allan Colbern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States have historically led in rights expansion for marginalized populations and remain leaders today on the rights of undocumented immigrants.
Download or read book What is a Slave Society written by Noel Emmanuel Lenski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogates the traditional binary 'slave societies'/'societies with slaves' as a paradigm for understanding the global practice of slaveholding.
Download or read book Becoming Free Becoming Black written by Alejandro de la Fuente and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.
Download or read book Dark Work written by Christy Clark-Pujara and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.
Download or read book Afro Americans in New Jersey written by Giles R. Wright and published by New Jersey Historical Commission. This book was released on 1988 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Many Thousands Gone written by Ira Berlin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
Download or read book Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County written by David F. Allmendinger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In August 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody uprising that took the lives of some fifty-five white people—men, women, and children—shocking the South. Nearly as many black people, all told, perished in the rebellion and its aftermath. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County presents important new evidence about the violence and the community in which it took place, shedding light on the insurgents and victims and reinterpreting the most important account of that event, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Drawing upon largely untapped sources, David F. Allmendinger Jr. reconstructs the lives of key individuals who were drawn into the uprising and shows how the history of certain white families and their slaves—reaching back into the eighteenth century—shaped the course of the rebellion. Never before has anyone so patiently examined the extensive private and public sources relating to Southampton as does Allmendinger in this remarkable work. He argues that the plan of rebellion originated in the mind of a single individual, Nat Turner, who concluded between 1822 and 1826 that his own masters intended to continue holding slaves into the next generation. Turner specifically chose to attack households to which he and his followers had connections. The book also offers a close analysis of his Confessions and the influence of Thomas R. Gray, who wrote down the original text in November 1831. Allmendinger draws new conclusions about Turner and Gray, their different motives, the authenticity of the confession, and the introduction of terror as a tactic, both in the rebellion and in its most revealing document. Students of slavery, the Old South, and African American history will find in Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County an outstanding example of painstaking research and imaginative family and community history. "The exhaustive research Allmendinger presents greatly enriches our historical understanding of the Southampton Rebellion through the eyes of its key victims. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County reveals important dimensions of the rebellion's local history and contextualizes the event, as Nat Turner did, within the context of slavery in Southampton County."—Reviews in History "Allmendinger’s great achievement is that he made full use of ‘new’ primary sources related to the uprising of 1831—new sources hitherto hidden in plain sight. Most importantly, he understood the significance of this material and knew exactly how to mine it for valuable new insights into virtually every aspect of Nat Turner’s rebellion."—Reviews in American History "No one has done more to corroborate and sync the details, nor to illuminate Turner’s inspirations and goals. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County is a model of historical methodology, and goes further than any other previous work in helping readers understand Turner’s motives and meaning."—African American Intellectual History Society "We are all in David Allmendinger's debt for the labor of research that has given The Rising in Southampton County its absent material context."—Law and History Review "Though the subject of countless histories, novels, videos, and websites, Nat Turner, the leader of the largest slave insurrection in U.S. history, remains an enigma; yet, in this new and challenging study, the life and times of the legendary revolutionary come into much better focus. A must-read for historians of slave resistance and all others interested in the history of antebellum Virginia and in particular Southampton County."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "Allmendinger approaches a well-trodden historical event from a distinctive perspective. [He] provides the most complete historical context surrounding the rebellion. Ultimately, Allmendinger succeeds in providing a more complete understanding of the community of Southampton, Virginia, and offers a better explanation for the motivations that led Turner and his followers down such a bloody path in 1831."—Choice David F. Allmendinger Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England and Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South.
Download or read book A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland s Eastern Shore written by Carole C. Marks and published by Delaware Heritage Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slavery s Exiles written by Sylviane A. Diouf and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.
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 253 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.
