The first 13 slaves in Maryland arrived on the docks of St. Mary’s in Southern Maryland in 1642, but much later on the Eastern Shore. International transportation was easy by ship from the Atlantic to the Chesapeake Bay and then up the rivers. Business in the 17th century was brisk. English traders bought the agricultural crops and lumber from the Eastern Shore and carried it to other nations on the Atlantic.
 
The lower Eastern Shore — south of the Choptank River — had sandy, marshy soils, very different from those of the upper Shore. They could not produce tobacco, but raised corn, wheat, livestock, and timber that English and Philadelphia merchants shipped to the West Indies.

The first Black people living on the Eastern Shore were not slaves, but free Blacks who immigrated to Somerset County from Virginia to escape punishment. They bought small lots of land and established their roots. Many of their descendants still live here: the Driggers and Johnsons, Robert Butchery’s offspring, and the Grinedge family. Some owned land, others were tenants, some married Whites and Indians, but they did not have the legal standing of Whites. The Maryland government prohibited them from serving in local militias and they couldn’t testify against Whites in a court of law.

On the upper Shore where soils were more suitable, there were small tobacco farms. Initially the English traded with the Indians for the plant, but that soon became unsatisfactory because they wanted larger quantities of tobacco than the Indians were willing to grow. They imported indentured servants who were English and Irish convicts who were sentenced to labor in Maryland. In the 17th century there were more convicts working on the Eastern Shore than enslaved Africans. The soils of the upper Shore were more fertile than those of the lower Shore, and ideal for growing tobacco.

In the 1660s, large plantations were established when Lord Baltimore granted English immigrant families extensive lands. They had the resources to hire laborers, indentured servants, and convicts. After 1680, they imported enslaved Africans. These families are still well known: the Tilghmans, the Lloyds, the Hollydays, and the Goldsboroughs.

The tobacco trade was very successful during the 1690s, and became the currency of the economy. These families imported large numbers of indentured servants and enslaved Africans to work the tobacco plantations. They became very rich and had great political influence in Annapolis. They adopted the customs and manners of the more-well-known Virginia elites. By the late 17th century, their businesses drove up the price of land and labor and forced out the lesser farmers, who moved up the rivers of the Shore to find land in Caroline County and even Delaware and Pennsylvania.

By the first part of the 19th century, the elite White families owned most of the best land. They intermarried and formed a kin network that kept the land and wealth in their hands. Half the Eastern Shore landowners formed a network that were all kin or married into the other families. This network connected them to the wealthy families of Philadelphia merchants. In fact, their descendants still dominate the economy and society of the Eastern Shore. By now, it is a checkerboard of genetic relationships between members of the ancient Black families with the White wealthy families, although the Black families did not and still do not share the wealth and power of the White families.

For more details on the colonial life on the Eastern Shore, I recommend Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland, by Jennifer Hull Dorsey, published in 2011. The author is professor of Early American History and director of the McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution at Siena College, in Albany, NY. I drew on her publication in the preparation of this article.

More detailed information on the lives of the descendants of Anthony and Mary Johnson, the first free Black family, is available in Changing Times: Chronicle of Allen, Maryland, An Eastern Shore Village by George R. Shivers, published in 1998. Professor Shivers is a native of Allen, in Wicomico County.

Both these books are available in the Maryland Public Library System.

The 18th century brought interesting changes to slavery on the Eastern Shore. Look for a report on this in future issues of Common Sense for the Eastern Shore.


Jeanette Sherbondy is a retired anthropology professor from Washington College and has lived here since 1986. In retirement she has been active with the Kent County Historical Society and Sumner Hall, one of the organizers of Legacy Day, and helped get highway /historical markers recognizing Henry Highland Garnet. She published an article on her ethnohistorical research of the free Black village, Morgnec.