From the Eastern Shore Grain Boom to Manumission of Enslaved Workers
Jeanette E. Sherbondy • August 17, 2021
In the last half of the 18th century, the shift to corn and wheat farming produced a grain boom that enriched the Eastern Shore slaveholders and radically changed the role of enslaved labor. Wheat farmers needed many men only at the wheat harvest; otherwise there was an excess of enslaved workers. A baby boom happened at the same time that doubled the enslaved population between 1755 and 1782. Slaveholders, however, wanted fewer enslaved workers. Their solutions were to sell them or hire them out for profit or free them, but selling them was their preference.
Other opportunities to use enslaved labor opened up in a variety of industries. Small landholders and tenants could now buy workers, something they never dreamed they could. A growing Baltimore had many mechanics and artisans who needed laborers, as did merchants. Baltimore business drew the extra enslaved workers away from the Eastern Shore as purchased or hired labor. Enslaved workers from the Eastern Shore ended up in the rest of Maryland. The Baltimore population of enslaved workers increased 70%!
In 1781 the idea of free Blacks, free African Americans, was not frightening to Whites because there had been no incidents even though over a thousand enslaved people were freed during the 1770s. The Maryland Quakers came out against slavery, and then the Methodist Conference in 1780 declared that slavery was “contrary to laws of God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society.” (Dorsey p. 28) The Maryland legislature ended the ban on manumission by last will and testament, and there was an astonishing rate of manumission between 1790 and 1830 on the Eastern Shore. In 1790 there were 3,907 free Blacks and 37,591 enslaved people, but 30 years later there were 15,700 free Blacks on the Eastern Shore, and 31% of all African Americans were free. The Eastern Shore had a larger free population than the rest of Maryland.
Historian Jennifer Hull Dorsey states that the Eastern Shore’s deepening involvement in the important Atlantic grain trade spurred all these changes. The integration of the Eastern Shore into the global grain trade boom contributed to African American freedom. In the 1790s the Eastern Shore slaveholders started hiring newly manumitted African Americans as seasonal workers.
All was not well, however; the Eastern Shore planters sold their excess enslaved people for profit, but then they complained bitterly that the free Blacks picked up and moved for their own economic gain. They wanted controls on the movements of the manumitted African Americans. The African Americans knew their freedom depended on their mobility, the right to move or not move.
Maryland Whites in 1830 were a majority. Maryland was different from other southern states, which had large majorities of Blacks and a small minority of Whites. To Marylanders, rebellion didn’t seem likely, but escape was common.
The slaveholders tried to recapture enslaved people who escaped. However, the escaped workers protected themselves as well as they could. Henry Highland Garnet, the famous abolitionist, preacher, and ultimately U.S. ambassador to Liberia, was born enslaved in Kent County. He escaped with his parents and other relatives in 1824 and they established themselves in New York City. They were hunted down by hired “slave catchers,” but Henry and his father escaped.
Freed African Americans knew how slavery had cruelly broken up their families. New independent communities of free Blacks began to develop, such as the urban neighborhood of Scott’s Point within Chestertown. They were located dockside. The Caulks formed their own rural community at Morgnec, five miles from Chestertown on the Chester River. Isaac Caulk acquired some property and was aided by local planters. His family was the seed for Morgnec, which was basically a kin group, as were all the rural free Black settlements. Isaac appears as a free mulatto landowner in 1783 and by 1800 he and Jacob Caulk, who was maybe a brother or father of Isaac, both had large families at Morgnec. Their descendants claim, “We have always been free!”
The main source for information about the grain boom and manumission of slaves was Jennifer Hull Dorsey’s history Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland (2011). George Shivers published “Henry Highland Garnet: Minister, Abolitionist and Fighter for Justice” in The Key to Old Kent: A Journal of the Historical Society of Kent County, (2015) volume 9, number 1, pages 8-26. Jeanette E. Sherbondy published her ethnohistorical and ethnographical research on Morgnec in the same volume: “Cork Town (Morgnec): A Free African American Village in Kent County”, pages 91-113.
Jeanette E. 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.
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
Marylanders will not forget this vote.
More than 30,000 of our neighbors in Maryland’s first congressional district will lose their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid because of provisions in the GOP’s heartless tax cut and spending bill passed last week.
Right now, Congress is working on a fast-track bill that would make historic cuts to basic needs programs in order to finance another round of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.
The House Agriculture Committee recently voted, along party lines, to advance legislation that would cut as much as $300 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, helping more than 41 million people in the U.S. pay for food. With potential cuts this large, it helps to know who benefits from this program in Maryland, and who would lose this assistance. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compiled data on SNAP beneficiaries by congressional district, cited below, and produced the Maryland state datasheet , shown below. In Maryland, in 2023-24, 1 in 9 people lived in a household with SNAP benefits. In Maryland’s First Congressional District, in 2023-24: Almost 34,000 households used SNAP benefits. Of those households, 43% had at least one senior (over age 60). 29% of SNAP recipients were people of color. 15% were Black, non-Hispanic, higher than 11.8% nationally. 6% were Hispanic (19.4% nationally). There were 24,700 total veterans (ages 18-64). Of those, 2,200 lived in households that used SNAP benefits (9%). The CBPP SNAP datasheet for Maryland is below. See data from all the states and download factsheets here.
Apparently, some people think that the GOP’s “big beautiful bill” is a foregone conclusion, and that the struggle over the budget and Trump’s agenda is over and done. Not true. On Sunday night, the bill — given the alternate name “Big Bad Bullsh*t Bill” by the Democratic Women’s Caucus — was voted out of the House Budget Committee. The GOP plan is to pass this legislation in the House before Memorial Day. But that’s not the end of it. As Jessica Craven explained in her Chop Wood Carry Water column: “Remember, we have at least six weeks left in this process. The bill has to: Pass the House, Then head to the Senate where it will likely be rewritten almost completely, Then be passed there, Then be brought back to the House for reconciliation, And then, if the House changes that version at all, Go back to the Senate for another vote.” She adds, “Every step of that process is a place for us to kill it.” The bill is over a thousand pages long, and the American people will not get a chance to read it until it has passed the House. But, thanks to 5Calls , we know it includes:
Let's talk about our Eastern Shore Delegation, the representatives who are supposed to fight for our nine Shore counties in Annapolis, and what they actually got up to this session.
