The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland

by T. Stephen Whitman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813183589
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

T. Stephen Whitman is assistant professor of history at Mount St. Mary's College in Maryland.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations and Maps	ix
	List of Tables	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction	1
1	Slavery in Early National Baltimore and Rural Maryland	8
2	Industrial Slavery in Baltimore	33
3	The Black Drive for Autonomy and Masters' Responses	61
4	Manumission and the Transformation of Slavery	93
5	Free Black Family Strategies for Gaining Freedom	119
6	Political-Economic Thought and Free Blacks	140
	Conclusions	158
Appendix A	Baltimore Slaveholders, 1790-1820	167
Appendix B	Occupational Categories	170
Appendix C	Sale Prices of Term Slaves and Slaves for Life	175
	Notes	178
	Bibliography	216
	Index	233

Editorial Reviews

Whitman (history, Mount St. Mary's Coll., Maryland) examines the complexities of slavery and master-slave relations in early Federal Baltimore. The ownership of slaves was a sizable investment, and Whitman illustrates that masters minimized the risk of their running away by gradual manumission, freeing the slave after a certain period of service. He also shows that slave flight was often a means of extracting from the master more favorable terms of service within the condition of slavery. Whitman thus reveals that slavery was a more intricate process than most readers assume, involving hired slaves, industrial slaves, gradual freedom, and the status and condition of the freed slave. A scholarly examination of the subject appropriate for students doing research who can handle the statistics and demographics.Robert A. Curtis, Taylor Memorial P.L., Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

Library Journal

Baltimore has long been recognized as an anomaly, a southern city where, by the Civil War, slavery remained legal but the vast majority of people of color were free. The Price of Freedom offers a coherent, thorough, and well-researched explanation of how and why white Baltimoreans, who were not known for their abolitionist sympathies, allowed this situation to develop

William and Mary Quarterly

An interesting, intelligent, and important study of slavery and manumission.

Journal of Economic History

How nice to read Stephen Whitman's study of class and race—bereft of jargon and political cant—which captures the true subtlety of the relationships between blacks and whites during a time of rapid social, economic, and political change.

H-Net Reviews

Whitman provides an extraordinarily sophisticated look at the manumission process, producing a history that performs the difficult task of reflecting and separating the roles of paternalism, antislavery idealism, economic interest, and most important of all, the skill and intelligent choices made by slaves themselves in bringing about large numbers of manumissions in Baltimore.... Touches issues that have long been of concern to Afro-Americanists, and consequently this book has a significance that extends way beyond Whitman's discussion of Maryland or even the antebellum South more broadly.

Journal of American History

An original, path-breaking study.

Southern Historian

A must read for students who want to understand the ramifications of manumission.

Choice

A careful examination of the ways in which local, national, and international circumstances allowed the line between slavery and freedom to become quite blurred in Baltimore.

Labor History

Co-winner of the 1997 Maryland Historical Society Book Award.

From the Publisher

A vivid picture of the economic and social realities facing blacks in Baltimore during a time of 'self-led liberation'.

AB Bookman's Weekly

A fine study.... a penetrating and subtle analysis that substantially expands our understanding of the subject.

American Historical Review

Illuminates the complex amalgam of social forces and human motives that figured in a group of slaveowners' individual decisions to terminate their slave labor voluntarily.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

No one interested in slavery or the nation's economic development should miss this important book. Offers a nuanced view of how slavery could exist in a developing economy and of the link between slavery and freedom in an urban setting.

North Carolina Historical Review