Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas

Abstract

Mariana Dantas’s Black Townsmen offers a meticulous comparative history of the rise of communities of enslaved and free people of African descent in Baltimore and Sabará. It argues that while the precise patterns of economic and social life differed in the two towns, slaves and free people of African descent shaped the urban milieu in both places through their labor. If many enslaved people used their leverage as urban workers to find pathways to emancipation, their newfound freedom remained constrained by economic and racist pressures. The monograph rests on solid empirical footing but occasionally bogs down in a quagmire of similarities and differences.Baltimore and Sabará are unlikely but intriguing choices for comparison. A port town on the Atlantic seaboard of British North America, Baltimore was first established by the Maryland Assembly in 1729, then slowly peopled over subsequent decades. The rise of the grain trade spurred Baltimore’s growth after 1750, and while Baltimore’s hinterlands did not hunger for slave labor as did the colony’s tobacco-growing region, urban slave owners put their human property to work in a wide range of activities ranging from domestic labor to shipbuilding. By 1810, roughly 10 percent of Baltimore’s 46,000 people were enslaved.Several thousand miles away in the Brazilian interior, Sabará emerged from Minas Gerais’s eighteenth-century gold rush to become a major city, larger than any North American city before 1800. While few Africans arrived in Baltimore, thousands came through Sabará on their way to misery and death in the gold mines. More slaves (roughly 20,000) lived in Sabará than Baltimore in 1810, and they made up a larger proportion of the city’s population (roughly one-third of the inhabitants.) Hence slaves in Sabará also did more of the work; as in Baltimore, they served as “jacks of all trades,” performing a diverse array of jobs (p. 73).Taking issue with Richard Wade’s hoary thesis that slavery was incompatible with urban life (a thesis based on the decline of slavery in cities and towns in the U.S. South in the nineteenth century), Dantas argues that the histories of Baltimore and Sabará show instead that slavery could be essential to urban development, even as urban conditions molded slavery in distinctive ways, including encouraging masters to hire out their slaves for wages or to manumit them. In keeping with much recent historiography on slavery, Dantas views slave hiring and manumission as the result of a process of bargaining between masters and slaves. Rather than a “breach” in the slave system, these practices were integral to its smooth functioning in cities and towns across much of the Americas.Manumission, of course, gave rise to free people of African descent. By 1810, they comprised more than 12 percent of the population of Baltimore and more than half of the population in Sabará — unusually high numbers for towns in North America and Brazil. In a useful contribution to the historiography of manumission, Dantas analyzes the different kinds of manumissions and carefully traces the patterns of manumission in both towns with respect to age, gender, and ethnicity as the sources allow. Of particular significance is the distinction between pretos (Africans and people of African descent) and pardos (people of mixed European and African ancestry) in Sabará. “By the turn of the nineteenth century,” Dantas finds, “the vast majority of pardos in Sabará were free persons, while the vast majority of pretos were slaves” (p. 134).As with slaves, Dantas explores the economic conditions of life for free people of African descent — their work, property ownership, and inheritance strategies. Sabará’s free people of color were wealthier than Baltimore’s. A telltale sign of the difference between Sabará and Baltimore is that many free people of color in Sabará owned slaves, while few in Baltimore did. Yet even in Sabará, free people of color were generally less wealthy than free white people. The freeborn tended to be wealthier than freed people (forros), and pardos tended to be wealthier than pretos, all of which reveals the continuing influence of slavery on people who were no longer slaves.This tightly focused monograph will appeal mostly to specialists in urban history and comparative slavery. The two case studies are deeply researched, the U.S. and Brazilian historiographies are admirably integrated, and Dantas’s emphasis on labor makes good sense as an analytical anchor. So is it unfair to want more? Perhaps, but Dantas’s use of baptismal records in Baltimore and Sabará hints at a missed opportunity to compare the Afro-Catholic experience in the two places. Black townsmen did not live by bread alone.