CHAPTER 11

Not-So-Conditional Termination in the Northern Chesapeake

Attitudes about ending slavery in the Chesapeake Bay area during the Nat Turner era, like most things southern, varied with geographical location. Furthest south in this oldest enslaved area, the post-Turner Virginia legislature considered the state too far south for government “unnaturally” to remove blacks. Furthest north in the Chesapeake, legislative action on removal was considered more natural. Ending slavery without removing blacks was also considered more possible. In the mid-1840s, Delaware’s legislature even decided that private manumissions without removal of blacks was proceeding so famously that public action was irrelevant.

Delaware solons were right, at least about Delaware. Individual manumissions were eroding the institution rather totally in Delaware, rather swiftly in northern Maryland, rather slowly in southern Maryland. Wherever irresolute masters might drift in Virginia, slavery was slowly drifting from the northern Chesapeake. Meanwhile, freed blacks were staying.

Maryland slaveholders were not upset that slavery was weakening. But the establishment, distressed that free blacks were remaining, initiated another legislative slavery debate in the wake of Nat Turner. That revealing Maryland story makes the more famous Virginia Slavery Debate of 1832 no southern exception—not even in 1832.

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The Maryland Slavery Debate of 1832 is especially important because it did not occur in some white-belt area such as Delaware or western Virginia or eastern Tennessee, where slavery was never massively present. Maryland, an early bulwark of the North American Slavepower, retained as widespread a black belt as existed in the northern third of the South. If Maryland, and especially southern Maryland, was not southern, then nothing was southern except the Deep South. Lower South planters feared precisely that possibility.

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No such fear existed when the American nation was founded. In 1790, about one out of six southern slaves lived in Maryland. Almost one out of three Maryland inhabitants were slaves, a ratio a little under Georgia’s (35%) and a half fatter than any Border South state’s percentage would be in 1860 (Kentucky would be the leader at 19%).

Early national Maryland and Virginia were comparable in many ways. In 1790, the two Chesapeake Bay regimes both had low percentages of free to enslaved blacks (Maryland 7%, Virginia 4%) Each state contained a wealthy tobacco-exporting squirearchy, which was most extensive south in each commonwealth. This Slavepower disproportionately dominated both states’ legislatures.

Still, if similar Chesapeake Bay topography made for similar eighteenth-century beginnings, two geographical differences made for different nineteenth-century outcomes. First of all, Maryland possessed an almost exclusively Atlantic Seaboard locale. Only one Maryland county, significantly called Allegheny, jutted significantly into the mountains. Maryland slaveholders never had to endure Virginia planters’ nemesis: nonslaveholders assaulting from across the Alleghenies.

But Maryland’s more northern locale was as antithetical to slavery as was Virginia’s more western extension. Free labor Pennsylvania spread across Maryland’s entire northern border. In the Old Dominion, only largely nonslaveholding western Virginia had a nonslaveholding northern neighbor.

Maryland’s more northern locale lent greater opportunity to observe northern-style racial control. Southern whites usually supposed that racial control required either enslaving or removing blacks. Some Yankess had once thought in those terms. New York and New Jersey slaveholders often chose to dump slaves south before post-nati emancipation could occur. But northern states, by ultimately outlawing that unseemly form of removing blacks, indirectly ruled that freedmen who stayed could be easily controlled. Disenfranchisement, job discrimination, segregation—those sufficed for white safety, north of slavery.

Southerners scoffed that northern racial control worked because the North had few blacks to control. Maryland put scoffing to the test. The state was far enough north to find northern ways tantalizing but sufficiently southern to have dense black populations to control.

Enthusiasm for northern solutions was greatest in Maryland’s northernmost sections. North Maryland, here defined as the most northern tier of Maryland counties, bordered on Pennsylvania. All five North Maryland counties were north of the Chesapeake Bay. Only one county, and that one but briefly, ever contained more than 20% slaves. Blacks comprised only 18.5% of North Maryland’s population in 1790, only 13.7% in 1860. Such northern-style racial ratios invited northern-style racial experiments.

Still, North Maryland was far enough south to be something of a slave society—especially in the beginning. In 1790, the area possessed 21,000 slaves, three-fourths as many as Georgia. Slaves comprised 17% of the population, as high a percentage as Kentucky’s. Even Baltimore City was 9% enslaved—with more slaves than lived in Richmond.

Marylanders closer to the tropics possessed many more slaves. South Maryland, here defined as the entire state below the northern tier of counties, was in the north-south latitude of, and usually close by, the Chesapeake Bay. The Eastern Shore of the Bay was locale of Maryland’s most famous plantation area and home of the Bay State’s most renowned slaveholding families: Bennetts, Chamberlains, Goldsboroughs, above all Lloyds, owners of that exquisite Talbot County plantation mansion, Wye House.

Maryland counties on the less famous Western Shore of the Chesapeake could never match the grace, power, and confidence Wye House exuded. But the Eastern Shore could not match the Western Shore’s proportion of slaves. Charles County of the Western Shore topped all Maryland counties in 1790 with 49% slaves. Counting both thickly enslaved shores, 11 of the 13 South Maryland counties had over 30% slaves in 1790. South Maryland’s 82,000 slaves then comprised 43% of its population, a percentage equal to, yes equal to, South Carolina’s.

But just as North Maryland, although largely a free white society, was something of a slave area, so South Maryland, while heavily enslaved, was something of a free labor commonwealth. Much of South Maryland was within the North’s trading system. The Eastern Shore early became Philadelphia’s trading hinterland through Delaware River connections. Later, increasingly free labor Baltimore marketed increasing proportions of Eastern and Western Shore products.

Easy access to urban markets gave South Maryland producers early incentive to diversify crops. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Maryland planters, while still prosperous from tobacco, profitably switched many acres to wheat. Virginians, farther from big-city wheat markets, made the transition later in the century, less thoroughly, and only after tobacco prices turned sour. Belated flight to mixed agriculture saved many Virginia titans from bankruptcy. But diversification never proceeded far enough to bring Maryland-style bonanza. Virginia planters could help feed immediate neighborhoods. Maryland planters could help feed hundreds of thousands in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

South Maryland’s greater access to urban markets and greater amount of wheat production had two northernizing results. First of all, grain farming made slavery seem less necessary. While slaves worked wheat and nonslaveholders grew tobacco, profit margins from using slaves in tobacco, a more labor-intensive crop, were objectively larger. More subjectively, grain farming seemed in the North American perspective more “natural” to free labor family farmers. Subjective assumption joined objective coin in inviting South Marylanders’ Yankee-style dreams.

Close connection with Philadelphia and Baltimore marketeers furthermore gave upper-class Maryland agrarians something of northern merchants’ mentality. Lloyds and Goldsboroughs, unlike planters further south, operated simultaneously as large-scale farmers and large-scale merchandisers. They served as mercantile outposts for Philadelphia and Baltimore traders. They handled their own factoring, buying, selling. They also started neighbors’ crops off to market. These merchants-as-planters and planters-as-merchants gained dual values along with doubled wealth. They internalized Philadelphia norms—confidence in free labor, desire for free education, zeal for unhindered capitalistic growth. Just as wheat production made slave owners conceive South Maryland could do without slaves, so mercantile endeavors led planters to comprehend free labor entrepreneurial advantages.1

Heavily enslaved South Maryland displayed northern inclinations by joining North Maryland in post-Revolutionary War experiments with the northern race relations option. During the national republic’s first two decades, while contiguous Middle Atlantic states were passing post-nati emancipation, Marylanders freed almost 25% of their blacks. By 1810, 30% of North Maryland’s blacks were free, as were 20% of South Maryland’s. Neither half of enslaved Maryland could evolve farther towards freedom and remain much of a slave area.

At this critical juncture, North Maryland sped past the halfway point towards becoming a northern racial order, while South Maryland’s transition almost stopped. Between 1810 and 1830, South Maryland’s free black population increased from 21,167 to 25,071. That 1% growth rate annually, under the southern norm for natural increase of blacks, indicated few manumissions. In contrast, North Maryland’s free black population jumped from 12,760 to 27,867, indicating many manumissions. Between 1810 and 1830 the proportion of South Maryland blacks who were free increased inconsequentially, from 20.4 to 24.7%, while the North Maryland proportion shot from 30.8 to 51.3%, halfway towards freedom.

By 1830, over half of North Maryland’s free blacks lived in Baltimore. Over three-fourths of the city’s blacks were free, up from one-fifth in 1790. In 1830, slaves comprised 6% of Baltimore’s total population, down from 9% in 1790 and heading down under 2% in 1850 and barely 1% in 1860. North Maryland’s dominating metropolis, the South’s largest city, was far more a free black than an enslaved black zone and far more dependent on free white wage earners than on any black laborers.

Slavery was decaying almost as fast in the North Maryland countryside. In 1830, 35% of North Maryland’s non-Baltimore blacks were free, up from 19% in 1790 and escalating towards 55% in 1850 and 63% in 1860. This freeing of slaves came naturally to a countryside, like a city, close enough to the North’s migrating white population to gain an alternative labor source. Between 1790 and 1830, rural North Maryland whites increased almost 50%, modest compared with the quadrupling of Baltimore’s whites but massive compared with South Maryland’s zero white population growth.2

This northern-style white population growth, in the region of Maryland halfway towards adopting northern-style race relations in 1830, made stagnating South Maryland politically vulnerable. Back in 1790, South Maryland had contained slightly less than 50% of the state’s whites. By 1830, the Slavepower’s region still retained its former 60% of the state’s malapportioned legislative seats but could claim only 35% of the state’s whites. If pressure for a one-white-man, one-vote legislative reapportionment, à la Virginia, proved irresistible in Maryland—and pressure was building—North Maryland might gain the power to reaccelerate South Maryland’s now barely moving evolution from slavery to freedom.

A third of the way into the nineteenth century, South Marylanders, despite having slowed their transition towards a free society, could not be confident that the slowdown would continue. The area’s entrepreneurial titans, influenced by Philadelphia mentalities, possessed dubious ideological resources to fight northern world views. The region contained many free blacks, potential sources of all kinds of trouble. In the wake of Nat Turner and the Virginia Slavery Debate, South Marylanders, still controlling the malapportioned legislature, saw need to act before no action would help.

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In Maryland as in Virginia, citizens petitioned the legislature meeting after the Nat Turner revolt, asking that slavery be debated. Maryland petitions ranged from the extreme northern position that slavery was “unholy” and free blacks “well-ordered” to the extreme southern position that “liberation of slaves was repugnant” and free blacks “incompatible with the welfare, happiness, and prosperity of this state.” Petitions were referred to a joint committee of the two legislative houses.3

Slaveholders ran the committee. All members save one represented South Maryland. The North Marylander owned six slaves. The chairman and dominant member of the committee, Henry Brawner, was a large southern slaveholder who represented a dominant slaveholding community. Brawner owned 58 slaves worth some $30,000, putting him in the top 2% of North American masters.4 His area, Charles County at the southern extreme of the Western Shore, possessed 57% slaves in 1830, the highest percentage in Maryland and in the top 1% of southern counties. In Brawner’s committee and especially in Brawner personally lay whatever potential existed for a Maryland counter-revolution, Deep South-style.

The Brawner committee report urged a halt to North Maryland’s evolution towards a free black society.5 But instead of pushing North Maryland backwards towards slavery, Henry Brawner would push all blacks, slave and free, outside of Maryland. This large slaveholder desired a white, free-labor utopia.

Brawner called slavery “an admitted and awful evil.” In addition to wearing out the word “evil”—he used it nine different times—Brawner sought synonyms. “Injurious,” “infected,” “destructive,” the “blighting cause” of “the stain upon” Maryland’s “otherwise bright escutcheon”—on and on went the abolitionist vocabulary.

Brawner especially hated slavery for halting white migration to Maryland. “The most careless observer,” wrote Brawner, could see that North Maryland counties with a “slight degree” of slavery drew more whites and were thus more prosperous than South Maryland counties, all “largely infected” with slavery. Brawner pointed out that neighboring Pennsylvania, altogether free of the “curse,” had expanded nine times faster than Maryland since 1790.

In underpopulated America, Brawner continued, zero population growth left everything impaired. South Maryland’s sparse white population presented “an insuperable obstacle” to “almost every species of improvement,” including free public education and all “higher cultivation.” But remove slavery, that “obstacle to the march of mind,” and Maryland would gain the white migrants to rival northern states “not only in population, prosperity, and wealth, but in the higher and more noble endowment of intellectual and scientific attainments.”

Brawner’s argument tossed away North Americans’ central reason for adopting slavery. Brawner’s ancestors had brought Africans to the Chesapeake to solve the American problem: too much land, too few laborers. But that momentous so-called non-event, African slave trade closure, plus that obviously momentous event, the explosive growth of the cotton frontier, had removed many Chesapeake blacks to the Cotton Kingdom. Deep South land speculators and planters still found, as had Chesapeake entrepreneurs a century earlier, that gangs of slaves best brought labor to virgin resources.

Henry Brawner called free wage earners the better alternative in areas selling off slaves. He here repeated the theory about drawing laborers to less tropical climates which had helped rally an Illinois majority against slavery. Four decades earlier, some midwestern capitalists, speculating that slaveholders might surge to the Midwest, had urged repeal of the Northwest Ordinance’s barrier against slavery. In the early 1820s, at showdown time for slaveholders who had sneaked black apprentices through the Ordinance’s loopholes, Governor Edward Coles of Illinois had countered that Yankee free laborers would populate the prairies fastest, if only the state totally barred slaveholders. Now in 1832 in Maryland, Henry Brawner applied Coles’s logic to the next tier of states southwards. By calling slave labor detrimental to increased labor, he summoned the most lethal argument against slavery in labor-starved, development-crazed America.

Brawner prayed that South Maryland might “be delivered” from slavery, but not in North Maryland’s “unfortunate way.” “Removal” of freed blacks he called “essential.” The Maryland legislature should encourage emancipation and insist on deportation. Pushing blacks out would reduce and eventually eliminate both South Maryland’s quantities of slaves and North Maryland’s quantities of free blacks.

Removal of blacks, declared Brawner, would be cheap and easy, for “slavery in our state has been wearing out of itself.” Many slaves, this large slaveholder cheered, “have heretofore been sold away, and no doubt this will still continue.” The South Maryland leader could not however abide Maryland masters who have “emancipated one-third of their slaves” without removal. That sort of freedom was “to say the least of it, of most doubtful benefit,” to blacks as well as whites.

Brawner urged the legislature to require and pay for deportation to Africa after emancipation. The prospect of sending “family friends” where blacks could be truly free, plus the vision of giving white families freedom from a black presence, would escalate voluntary manumissions. The “evil,” after being “greatly reduced by the free will offerings of patriotism and benevolence,” would become “a light burden,” if state aid became “necessary in its final extinction.” To Maryland’s Brawner even more explicitly than to Virginia’s Archibald Bryce, state-financed colonization was meant to be an “entering wedge,” removing first free blacks, then black slaves, and in the process attracting white migrants to boost the area’s wealth.

Henry Brawner’s entering wedge was sharper than Archibald Bryce’s. In Bryce’s Virginia, compulsory deportation of blacks was defeated. The indecisive Old Dominion legislature had left freed slaves free to reject their free ticket to Africa, to the disgust of Henry Brodnax. Maryland’s Brawner agreed with Virginia’s Brodnax. The legislature must make sure the experiment began by forcing some blacks to leave. Brawner’s committee report urged cash and sanctions to make deportation a condition of future manumission.

When massing behind the Brawner report, South Marylanders sought to commit the state to ending slavery by colonizing blacks. By seeking to kill the Brawner report, North Marylanders sought to continue manumissions without removal. North Maryland wished to resume marching towards a North where freed blacks were easily controlled. South Marylanders wished to commence marching towards the “better” sort of North where no blacks were present.

Legislative malapportionment made this phase of the clash no contest. South Maryland, with 35% of Maryland’s white population, had over 60% of the legislative votes. Brawner’s bill thus passed 37–23. South Maryland voted for it, 31–6. North Maryland voted against it, 17–6.6

The act appropriated up to $20,000 in any one year, and up to $200,000 in twenty years, to facilitate emancipation-colonization. The money could be used to finance passage to Africa, to develop an African area to receive Maryland blacks, and to advertise Africa as a mecca for free blacks. Slaves manumitted in the future were required to leave, unless a court gave those with “extraordinary good conduct and character” an annual license to stay. Each county clerk had to report any new manumission within five days. A clerk failing to comply was fined $10. A $5 reward went to any informer who tattled on a non-complying clerk. Thus did South Maryland seek to put teeth in its effort to stop North Maryland’s racial evolution.7

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The teeth were too blunt, for the act sought to violate the southern understanding that each locality should determine its own affairs. South Maryland’s attempt to dictate communal mores and customs to North Maryland was like Madison County, Mississippi, trying to dictate lynch law to Hinds County. But this time no armed mob was crossing county lines and no Patrick Sharkey had to transform an outhouse into a fortress. This time, $5 and $10 fines were the only firepower sustaining imposition of the invading locale’s will on the invaded.

North Marylanders proved unwilling to surrender values for pennies. North Maryland clerks usually failed to report manumissions. North Marylanders usually failed to tattle on offending clerks. When a stray North Maryland clerk sent in names of manumitted slaves, North Maryland judges usually gave new freedmen annual license to stay. Forcible deportation of freed slaves forced few to leave.8

The debacle measured the weakness of South Maryland’s counterrevolution. Only massive sanctions can force social movements backward. $10,000 fines for nonperformance of lawful duty and $5,000 bribes for ratting on illegal noncompliance might have forced North Marylanders to obey South Marylanders’ edict. Instead, the largest loophole in South Maryland’s law, allowing North Maryland judges to give any freed black annual license to stay, permitted legal, cost-free nullification. Five- and ten-dollar fines hardly deterred more illegal nullifications.

South Marylanders continued to display their irresolution by failing to pass tougher statutes when their weak law was nullified. No regime can allow a rule designed to save its conception of social control to be flouted. South Maryland had imposed its will, as expressed in law, against North Maryland’s will, as expressed in its willingness to obey. In this confrontation, South Marylanders did not so much blink as close their eyes when North Marylanders ignored milktoast sanctions. South Marylanders never piled on new laws forcing removal. North Marylanders continued freeing slaves without removal. No fresh Maryland slavery debate would occur until the eve of the Civil War. Then the Maryland Debate over Re-enslavement would provide another measure of South Maryland’s uncertainty.

The loopholes in the 1833 deportation law and South Maryland’s failure to close them hinted that despite his righteous rhetoric, Henry Brawner believed North Maryland not altogether wrong to let at least some blacks stay. By 1830, 25% of South Maryland’s blacks were free. The freedmen produced needed labor rather than convulsive insurrection in the months after Nat Turner. Indeed, two blacks on Brawner’s plantation were free. No disorder resulted. South Marylanders, in truth, respected many of “their” free blacks, which is why they decreed that courts should allow respected freedmen to remain.

Maryland’s most enslaved area, in sum, was too free itself to insist very strongly that freer areas force manumitted slaves on African-bound galley ships. Henry Brawner, Maryland’s excuse for a reactionary, disliked coercive slavery himself too much to coerce free blacks remorselessly. His South Maryland area, despite black ratios in Lower South ranges, was too akin to Philadelphia to act like Charleston. And South Carolinians thought Virginia’s upper class could not be counted on!

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Just as Marylanders went farther (but not much farther) than Virginians in forcing slaves and blacks out, so the Maryland legislature went farther (but again, not much farther) than the Virginia legislature in seeking to convince blacks freed in the past to remove themselves. Virginia appropriated $30,000 for five years, solely for blacks’ free tickets to Africa. Maryland appropriated $200,000 for 20 years, to be used, in part, to convince blacks to accept free tickets.9

As Marylanders saw it, free blacks would reject transportation to the American Colonization Society’s dismal Liberia colony. So while most of Virginia’s $30,000 went unspent, most of Maryland’s $200,000 was spent on developing a colony supposedly worthy of crossing oceans. The Maryland Colonization Society, in the years after 1832, lavished funds on its own New World mecca, Maryland in Africa, a colony near Liberia.

The rest of Maryland’s $200,000 appropriation was largely spent on agents to advertise utopia. Lecturers offered free blacks not only free passage but also a headstart upon arrival. Migrants were promised rent and board for six months, five acres to farm for life, and a low-interest loan for improving the farm, to be forgiven if the pilgrim remained in paradise. New arrivals also received immediate citizenship. Entrepreneurial democracy, American-style, would come to Afro-Americans willing to desert America.

To load the choice for libertarian Africa still more, the Maryland legislature of 1832 sliced back free blacks’ life-style in enslaved America. Free persons of color in Maryland could not vote, serve on juries, or hold offices. Any free black caught without “visible” means of support could be hired out for a year. If unemployed ten days after service was over, sheriffs could again sell the vagrant “as a slave” for a year. The white sheriff “deciding” a free black was “idle” received 6% of the year’s “wages.”10

With a choice between restricted freedom in Maryland and total freedom in Maryland in Africa, white Marylanders were convinced black Marylanders would consent to migrate. This worst of American problems would then be solved in a classic American way. Afro-Americans would choose to leave their bad Old World, in this case America, for liberty and opportunity in a new world across the sea. The richest American black, wrote the Reverend Mr. Richard Fuller of Baltimore, like the poorest European white, “lives and moves and has his being amidst humiliation.” But in Maryland in Africa, boomed the Reverend Mr. James B. Hall, blacks could vote, sit on juries, prosper, become “MEN, in the largest sense of the word.”11

The magnitude of that promise, urged John H. B. Latrobe, insured success. Latrobe, for two decades president of the Maryland Colonization Society and subsequently president of the American Colonization Society, was fond of denouncing as “unfriends” friends who relied solely on colonization societies. If black removal depended only “upon the American Colonization Society, even though Congress threw open to it the treasury of the nation, the work would never be accomplished.” Money starts but does not build colonies. Successful new worlds flourish because of that common impulse “of humanity—THE DESIRE TO BETTER ONE’S CONDITION.” The lure of better conditions, having brought Europeans to America and taken “Englishmen to Asia,” will carry “EVERY FREE PERSON OF COLOR” to Africa.12

Maryland free blacks made Latrobe a poor prophet. They joined Virginia brethren in considering Africa more like Siberia. Despite enticements of free passage, free land, free citizenship, despite being lectured at about wondrous mangroves and Tanh trees and chandelier lilies, Maryland free blacks preferred semi-freedom in baleful Baltimore. Less than 1% of Maryland free blacks ever accepted their free bout with the stranger’s fever. Maryland in Africa, barely a thousand souls strong, could barely hold off hostile African tribes. In the 1850s, the colony gratefully accepted Liberia’s offer of annexation.

The demise of Maryland’s $200,000 paradise, together with Maryland’s failure to force non-volunteers to voyage, undermined Henry Brawner’s not-very-reactionary reaction. South Maryland had done nothing effectual to stop North Maryland from evolving toward a realm of freemen, black and white. By 1850, 71% of blacks in North Maryland and 30% of blacks in South Maryland were free. The whole state was 45% emancipated. Here at last, Conditional Terminators seemed to put termination ahead of conditions. But even here, manumission was proceeding at a glacial pace.

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Delaware moved faster towards manumitting slaves without removing blacks. The almost-emancipated state was the last reminder of days when slavery had tolerably flourished in the Mid-Atlantic region. Back in 1790, at the first federal census, New York had reported 21,000 slaves, New Jersey 11,000, Delaware 8,887, or 15% of its population. At that time, Delaware had only 3,899 free blacks, 7% of its population.

During the early nineteenth century, Delaware joined more northern Mid-Atlantic areas in undercutting the institution. By 1830, Delawareans owned only 3,292 slaves, or 4% of the state’s population. Meanwhile, the state contained 15,855 free blacks, or almost 21% of its population. Almost five times more blacks were free than enslaved in “slaveholding” Delaware, a state with a higher percentage of blacks than Kentucky, Missouri, or Tennessee.

Despite southern-style black ratios, Delaware’s almost-emancipation might be dismissed as another northern state’s abolition, except that Delaware’s most slaveholding area was geographically in the same latitude as heavily enslaved South Maryland. Two-thirds of Delaware’s slaves were concentrated in Sussex, the most southern of Delaware’s three counties. Sussex, due west of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, contained as fine soil. The county dispatched some tobacco and more wheat up the Delaware River system to Wilmington and Philadelphia. The difference between Eastern Shore Delaware and Eastern Shore Maryland was that Sussex County, Delaware, contained three times as many free blacks as slaves, while neighboring South Maryland counties contained twice as many slaves as free blacks.

In Delaware’s Sussex County, with its not-so-small 24% black ratio, planters easily controlled free blacks without slavery. Justices of the peace could hire out free blacks who supposedly lacked “good and industrious habits.” Employers received “all the rights of a master.” With quasi-slavery coercing the exceptional Delaware free black who did not consent to labor, even Delawareans who disliked free blacks conceded “that they supply too much … labor to be dispensed with.” Why, then, impose conditions on termination, at least in areas with Border or Middle South type black ratios?13

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Delaware’s free black regime raised yet another question about South Maryland’s enslaved society. Could so densely enslaved a black belt survive so close to so much black liberty? On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, slaves did not have to flee across some wide Ohio River to find most blacks practicing freedom. Almost-emancipated Delaware was a step on hard ground away. Or to put this fugitive slave problem in perspective, in addition to South Maryland’s difficulties having increasingly free black North Maryland in the same state, most of Maryland’s Eastern Shore had to tolerate a largely free Delaware neighbor.

Eastern Shore slaveholders, while brooding about the regime next door, at least were encouraged that Delawareans had staved off legislative emancipation. As early as 1803, the Delaware House of Representatives came within a tie vote of abolishing slavery. In 1847, in another example of the nonsense involved in calling the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1832 the only or last southern reconsideration of slavery, the Delaware legislature again drew close to abolition. A bill in the classic post-nati vein, freeing Delaware slaves born after 1860, sailed through the House of Representatives, only to lose by a single vote in the Senate. In both chambers, Delaware’s two northernmost counties voted 80% aye. The unanimous Sussex County delegation had just enough support in the Senate to stave off the guillotine.14

Legislative near-miss, which had been like an earthquake in Virginia, caused nary a tremor in Delaware. “Never,” reported the Delaware Gazette, “have we seen so important a measure produce so small a sensation.” Postponing legislative emancipation until 1860 left time “enough for all the Negroes to run away.”15

The Gazette, Democrats’ chief Delaware newspaper, called legislative emancipation unnecessary for a complementary reason: because masters were running away from slaves. “Slave labor is far more unprofitable in Delaware, Maryland, and parts of Virginia, than free labor.” Slaveholders half a continent from the Cotton Kingdom profited more from money in the bank. Banks did not run away. Emancipation would come “by the very process which is continually going on, viz the gradual emancipation of slaves by their masters.”16

The Delaware Republican, Whigs’ chief newspaper, pointed to another gradual process. Diffusion of free white laborers into the Border South and of black slave laborers into the Lower South “operates as certainly and as surely as any of the laws which govern our bodies. We cannot escape it if we would.” In grain states, where “climate is congenial, free labor is obtaining the mastery over slave labor, and the system of chattel slavery is dying out. This is the case in Delaware, in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, or at least in some portion of each of them.” This truth was “as incontrovertible as that the earth itself exists.”17

With Delawareans calling Thomas R. Dew’s too far north truth incontrovertible, Lower South warriors in the late antebellum period hoped that “another truth might be universally understood.” Slaveholders should understand “that instead of having fifteen slave states, they really had only fourteen.”18 Or, because of Maryland, was the pre-Civil War Slavepower only thirteen states strong?

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The answer was obscure. Conditional Termination, true to its irresolute nature, had eroded but not eliminated slavery in the Northern Chesapeake. At the creeping pace of the first half of the nineteenth century, North Maryland figured to be just about emancipated around the beginning of the twentieth century. South Maryland figured to take longer to be free. Nineteenth-century Delaware indicated that, even at those remote moments, a Maryland almost manumitted might cling to vestiges of the institution.

Maryland’s Henry Brawner, whose moment on southern center stage was one of the briefest and most illuminating, epitomized why slavery’s fate too far north was working itself out so slowly. The man was as divided as his class and his state. Brawner developed the lethal argument that a lily-white Maryland would have more laborers. Yet his less-than-lethal law hardly stopped North Maryland’s evolution towards a white-migrant-repelling, free black commonwealth. Furthermore, this reformer who believed free whites outlabored slaves and that black slaves outlabored free blacks still worked his own plantation with 58 slaves and two free blacks. No wonder slavery’s fate was obscure in the state where compromised Henry Brawners governed.

The North Chesapeake, the exceptional area where apologetics produced extensive manumissions, ended up being the exception proving an important rule: Conditional Termination was more corrosive for the perpetualist zeal it compromised than for the emancipationist victory it hastened. Zeal, for or against slavery, was the antithesis of this compromised mentality, as was haste to decide either way. In Archibald Bryce’s Virginia and in Henry Brawner’s Maryland in the aftermath of Nat Turner, apologetic mentalities drew drifting establishments towards the middle, against doing or dying for perpetuation or for termination. Men geographically and ideologically adrift in the middle, especially men who prayed that slavery would ease away and the Union would endure forever, would not hasten a showdown that would leave them crunched between fanatical Northerners above and rabid Southerners below.

This long-term local drift had an important short-term national consequence. Maryland and Virginia, while struggling towards state colonization experiments in 1832–3, were simultaneously willing to consider better financed federal experiments. The old nay-sayer was determined to nullify such considerations. Lest Chesapeake Bay apologists attempt to use federal authority to remove blacks, important South Carolinians felt compelled to render that alleged authority null and void.

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