Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland

Abstract

Jennifer Hull Dorsey has set out to write a book that, in her own words, “is meant to fill an inexplicable gap in African American studies as well as the history of the early republic”: the history of African American laborers after the “first emancipation” (the early republic manumissions), when slaves were made into wage laborers (p. ix). She dutifully recognizes a few studies that address this particular history (with some important omissions), but she contends that most focus on the familial, social, religious, and political experiences of emancipated African Americans. Conversely, Hirelings proposes to “explain how African Americans made the transition from slave labor to wage labor” by following two generations of African Americans on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as they navigated a changing labor environment (p. x). Hirelings opens with a chapter that describes the rise of grain production on the Eastern Shore and its effect on the demand for African American labor. This is a familiar account of how the development of a less labor-demanding crop, coupled with the growth of the local slave population at a time when more whites were inclined to contemplate black freedom, resulted in increased manumissions and the formation of a sizable free population of African descent. Subsequent chapters form a narrative arc that tells a story of opportunity, promise, challenges, and decline as the book describes the differing experiences that two generations of Eastern Shore African Americans had with freedom. Ultimately, the picture that emerges for the Eastern Shore is similar to those that historians have already painted for other parts of Maryland, the upper South, or the Middle Atlantic: declining economic and social conditions for African Americans as economic fluctuations and European immigration limited their labor opportunities, and as the intensification of slavery in the Deep South and rising racism circumscribed their experiences with freedom.