Baltimore’s port
The growth of wheat as a key crop for northern Maryland boosted the importance of Baltimore’s port as European cities were eager to pay good prices for the commodity. Baltimore’s accessible harbor and location at the cross roads of agriculture and international trade made it a prime location for commercial development. Historian Adam Malka (2018) noted, “During the years following the American Revolution, Baltimore Town transformed into one of the continent’s largest cities, and at the heart of its transformation sat a magnificent harbor” (p. 20). By the first decade of the nineteenth century, well over five dozen flour mills operated on the springs surrounding Baltimore (Malka, 2018, p. 21).
The expanding wheat trade created opportunities for laborers, which attracted growing numbers of transplants looking for work from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds (Gould, 1931).
Free and Enslaved blacks
For Black people the city offered both hope and despair. A growing number of free Black persons moved to take advantage of the jobs offered at the port and in the mills. However, their population grew alongside Black enslaved laborers in Baltimore setting up a constant reminder of the racial hierarchies to which even free Black people remained subject. Millward (2015) noted,
Black families, whether enslaved or free, lived in a world of contradictions. Free blacks witnessed the realities of enslavement daily, and enslaved men and women often worked alongside free blacks and were aware that they were being paid for their labor. Freedom produced contrasting experiences, depending on one’s social location. (p. 5)
Like much of the commerce in early American port cities, the booming trade and growing port economy relied upon the labor of enslaved persons. In Baltimore, Pratt Street and its neighboring avenues housed slave traders who sold enslaved people from their store fronts. Shackled groups of enslaved persons were driven down Pratt Street to the docks at Fells Point for transportation to New Orleans where they would face public auction and sale to the highest bidder. Pratt Street was also the location of large brick buildings known as slave jails. These slave jails were used by traveling slave holders to prevent their slaves from escaping overnight (Shane, 1999). While wheat and textiles invited economic boom, the city’s success grew on the backs of the enslaved Africans brought to Baltimore to be housed, transported, and sold.
Influenced by abolition and the legal changes surrounding slavery, the City of Baltimore prohibited “the importation of slaves” in 1783. While slowing the number of Atlantic slave ships that visited the city, demand for wheat and other products passing through the port kept slavery tied to the economic health of the city and the state (Berlin, Grivno, & Brewer, 2007, p. 28).
African Ideas of slavery
Even as the legal system in Maryland and across the colonies moved to deny Africans their rights, Africans themselves retained a vision of resistance that refused to embrace slavery as a permanent institution. Jessica Millward (2015) noted in her biography of a freed slave,
Africans who lived along the Gold Coast [modern-day Ghana] possessed an entirely different viewpoint of slavery from the one that existed in the New World. Oral tradition passed down from those who survived the Middle Passage held that slavery was not an absolute—it was not permanent, it was not inherited, and in most cases, it was not perpetual. To the Akan peoples, slavery was a status, a consequence of actions or events, not the totality of the person. The enslaved were regarded as human beings who were entitled to certain rights and privileges. (p. 43)
These competing visions of slavery in Maryland impacted the populations in many ways. For enslaved Africans, it kept communities close and gave them a reason to continue to resist and assert their rights. Berlin (1998) noted
The minuet between master and slave, when played to the contrapuntal music of paternalism, was a constant, as master and slave continually renegotiated the small space allotted them. But the stylized movements—the staccato gyrations, the seductive feints, the swift withdrawals, and the hateful embraces—represented just one of many dances of domination and subordination, resistance and accommodation. (p. 4)
African’s ideas of slavery and labor, of themselves and their worth, fueled their resistance. However, living in the world of the white man meant living in a world where Black ideas or values did not matter. Definitions of what it meant to be white, Black, enslaved, or free were written by the dominant culture. For whites, racial slavery became the backdrop against which they defined their legal and political framework (Morgan, 1975).
Morgan (1975) argued that the enslavement of Black persons directly impacted white men’s development of a political ideology of liberty that protected white status. He notes that the English colonists gained “a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day [in slavery] what life without it could be like” (p. 376). As a result, racialized slavery informed Maryland’s founding legal structures and informed its enforcement of those laws before, during, and after the American Revolution (Morgan, 1975; Musselwhite, Mancall, & Horn, 2019).
The Constitutional Convention
Describing the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison noted that slavery fueled conflict between the Northern and Southern delegates.
[T]he real difference of interest lay, not between the large & small but between the N[orthem] & Southn. States. The institution of slavery & its consequences formed the line of discrimination... [hence]the most material [of differentiating interests among the states] resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the U. States. (Wiecek, 2018, p. 62)
To appease both sides, delegates agreed upon what has become known as “the Three-Fifths Compromise.” While the “compromise” sought to find middle ground, it assumed the legality of slavery and provided tacit support by mandating that three of every five enslaved persons be used in the formula to determine states’ federal taxes and the number of states’ congressmen elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (p. 63; Van Cleave, 2010, p. 120).
While the three-fifths compromise remains the most well-known example of the tacit acceptance of slavery in the Constitution, the Constitution defended the institution in multiple ways:
Article 1, Section 2 - Counts slaves as 3/5th of a person;
Article 1, Sections 2 and 9 - Bases tax formulations on the 3/5ths principle to avoid indirectly encouraging emancipation of enslaved people;
Article 1, Section 9 - Protects the Atlantic slave trade until 1808;
Article 4, Section 2 - Forbids the emancipation of fugitives and requires escaped slaves be returned to their masters;
Article 1, Section 8 - Empowers Congress to call up states’ militias to suppress insurrections, including slave insurrections;
Article 4, Section 4 - Obligates the federal government to protect states against domestic violence, including violence perpetrated by slave insurrections;
Article 5 - Provisions outlined in Article 1, section 9, clauses 1 and 4 were not able to be amended (these relate to the abolishment of the slave trade and taxation);
Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 - Forbids the federal government and states from taxing exports with the goal of exempting goods made by enslaved persons from export duties (Wiecek, 2018, p. 62).
Historian Linda Kerber (1997) noted, “At its founding moments, the United States simultaneously dedicated itself to freedom and strengthened its system of racialized slavery” (p. 841). The foundational legal document of the United States assumed slavery’s legality, reinforced its racial hierarchy, supported the slave owners when it came to fugitive slaves, and put the full military might behind stopping slave insurrections. The Constitution was to reflect ideals of liberty and freedom. In reality, for all non-whites it represented the crowning achievement of white dominance in the New World and embedded a racialized system into the DNA of the United States.
Naturalization act of 1790
Even before all of the States had ratified the Constitution, the young Republic faced the question of citizenship. Historian Linda Kerber (1997) noted that the Constitution addressed the issue by defining the “boundaries of citizenship [by] enunciating the obligations not to commit treason and not to harbor fugitive slaves. (The traitor seeks to undermine the citizenry; at the other extreme, the fugitive seeks to blend into it.)” (p. 834).
In 1790 Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the United States for two years. This effectively kept all enslaved and free Blacks persons citizenship. Kerber wrote of this act, “By racializing the qualifications for newcomers, the first naturalization statute recalibrated the relationship to the political order of the free [B]lacks and free whites who were already resident in it and set strict limits on future access to citizenship” (p. 841). The racial qualifications required for citizenship revealed in, yet another poignant way, the underlying racists ideas and ideologies upon which early American laws were based.
The first two-hundred years of Black experience in North America – from their arrival in 1619 to 1799 – had transformed the old European ideas of the inferiority of dark skin into a structured cultural norm. Legal statutes, political practices, and social mores aligned to ensure that African Americans inhabited a different plane of existence from white Americans.