Baltimore's Shifting Middle Ground
An 1850 Petition Reflects How Slaveholding Gave Way to Hiring Free Black Workers
In the midst of the research, our Lab shifted its approach to the 1850 “Memorial to the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore.” A first review revealed that 14 of the petitioners lived in slaveholding households. Then we noticed something unexpected. Almost three times as many signatories — 39 or 35% in total — lived in households that included free Black workers. Census data for 1850 permitted us to take a snapshot of these men’s homes. When Baltimore’s leading men called for schooling that prepared Black children for “humble stations,” we needed look no further than the people who worked in their homes to understand how they stood to benefit from Black education.
By 1850, when Baltimore’s City Council was presented with petitions that called for the public schooling of Black children, slaveholding was exceptional in the city’s elite households. The city’s Black residents, even as most were free, lived subject to laws and policy aimed at keeping them domestic workers and menial laborers.
In her 1985 classic, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century, historian Barbara Jeanne Fields explained Maryland’s in-between character. Situated between Pennsylvania to the north and Virginia to the south and west, as our followers know, Maryland grew up between the slave-labor states of the lower South and the free-labor states of the North.
Baltimore, was its own case. Rather than a divided city, in the decades before slavery’s demise Baltimore’s Black residents were predominantly free people, increasingly so between 1820 and 1860. Census returns evidence how, over those four decades, the number of free Black residents grew from just over 10,000 to more than 25,000. During the same period, the number of enslaved people in the city dropped by nearly 50%, from more than 4,300 in 1820 to just over 2,200 in 1860. Increasingly, slaveholding was exceptional in Baltimore’s white households. As the city’s labor force transformed strikingly, free men, women, and children — Black workers, along with immigrants from Ireland and Germany — predominated.1
Life inside the homes of the 1850 petitioners reflects this general shift: They were far more likely to hire free Black workers than to own slaves. Fourteen petitioners lived in slaveholding households. In contrast, 39 of the 112 signatories — 35% in total — were men whose households included live-in, free Black workers. For example, merchant David S. Wilson reported that four free Black workers lived with his family: Daniel Brodley, Amelia Davidge, Theresa Ward, and W. Henry Myers.2 Lawyer Samuel Donaldson employed one free Black person, a man named William Cooney.3 Coach maker John Curlett employed one woman, Susan Pike.4 Insurance company head Jacob G. Davies was recorded as relying upon three free Black workers: Hester Blake, Mary Blake, and [Laura] Booth.5
Looking ahead to the 1860 census reflects how household labor continued to change. While in 1850, some petitioners reported using free and enslaved labor in their homes, ten years later the same men no longer held slaves, employing free people instead. Shipping merchant Alexander Kirkland held one enslaved person in 1850 while also employing two free Black workers: Martha Manning and Nancy Palmar.6 Ten years later, in 1860, Kirkland had five free “servants” at home, two born in Ireland and three Black Americans.7 Similarly, confectioner William Lanahan held three enslaved people in his home in 1850, while a free Black man, John Lowry, also worked for him.8 By 1860, Lanahan was no longer a slaveholder, staffing his home with three free Black workers: Emory Moore, Lucy Gator, and Ann Wilmer.9
These household arrangements wove Black and white Baltimoreans into relations that were as intimate as they were hierarchical. Proximity did not give rise to comfort or confidence. Instead, it was a companion to suspicion and contempt, especially as the hallmarks of a free Black community — religious, fraternal, and political associations — grew visible. In 1830, Gerard T. Hopkins, uncle to Johns Hopkins, was among the men who complained to the City Council of “the annoyances arising from the obstruction of a certain … way by an … number of the colored population collecting thereon.” The Council declined to act but the petitioners’ concern echoed throughout the city.10 As historian Christopher Phillips explains, by the 1850s legislative proscriptions on free Black people were tightening. They were subjected to labor contracts, forfeited wages for time lost, blocked from manumission, and banished from the state when they did win freedom. In the state capitol, Annapolis, anti-free Negroism was on the rise and, by the end of the decade, lawmakers in Annapolis considered either “re-enslaving” all free people or forcing them to leave Maryland.11
Education, in this climate, remained controversial. The widespread learning that public schools could offer, was at odds with efforts to control and constrain the lives of Black Marylanders. The 1850 petitioner’s were aware this and thus called for educating Black children “in such elements of learning as may prepare them to fill, with usefulness and respectability, those humble stations in the community to which they are confined by the necessities of their condition.” (Emphasis added.) In 1850, 53 of the petitioners relied upon, at home, black domestic workers, enslaved and free. These same men knew well the “humble stations” they expected Black children to grow into. Their petition called for schools to “prepare” young people to “fill” roles to which they were “confined”: cooks, valets, coachmen, housekeepers, nursemaids, and gardeners, among them.
By 1850, Baltimore’s labor force was changing, with free Black laborers vastly outnumbered by those who remained enslaved. And in that year’s calls for public schooling for Black children the interests of a new and burgeoning free Black community converged with the interests of some elite men.12 Public education would, white petitioners urged, satisfy the “true interest of the white population.” For Black Baltimoreans, this same vision fell short. Black children might be enabled to read, write, and figure, but they’d still be destined to fulfill Baltimore’s humblest stations in the homes of the city’s white elite.
— MSJ, with Matthew Palmer
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Hard Histories veteran, Dr. Emma Katherine Bilski, took to the virtual pages of Contingent Magazine last week, in an essay titled “The Treaty on the Severn River,” to underscore, as she puts it, “Baltimore is Native American land.” Dr. Bilski’s essay looks closely at the 1652 Maryland–Susquehannock treaty and asks “What might happen if we held Maryland (or the city of Baltimore) to its treaty obligations to tribal nations?”
Baltimore City Archives, “The Demography of Baltimore City: Sources.” Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Freedom in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (New York: Routledge, 1999). See also, Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Eighth Census of the United States. 1850. Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 10, p. 217.
Eighth Census of the United States. 1850. Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 10, p. 119.
Eighth Census of the United States. 1850. Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 20, p. 585.
Eighth Census of the United States. 1850. Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 10, p. 135.
Eighth Census of the United States. 1850. Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 14, p. 911.
Ninth Census of the United States. 1860. Maryland, Baltimore City, Ward 14, p. 132.
Eighth Census of the United States. 1850. Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 16, p. 277.
Ninth Census of the United States. 1860. Maryland, Baltimore City, Ward 14, p. 119.
“Report & Resolution on the Petition of Gerard T. Hopkins & Others. April 27, 1830. First Branch, Baltimore City Council,” Baltimore City, Baltimore City Archives (City Council,) Administrative Files, 1830, BRG 16-1-43. Maryland State Archives. In 1830, the household of Gerard Hopkins included two free Black people, presumably domestic workers. Fifth Census of the United States, 1830, Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Ward 9, p. 338-339, National Archives and Record Administration.
Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997): 204.
On the dilemma of interest-convergence, see Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 3 (January 1980): 518-511.