Full Book Title: Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground : Maryland During the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Fields, Barbara Jeanne.

Publisher/ place/ date:  New Haven : Yale University Press, c1985.

Format: Book

Description:  xv, 268 pages : map

Access: Go to this book’s record on the Southern Maryland Regional Library Association’s catalog.

Keywords: Slavery, Maryland, History, African Americans, Race relations, Enslaved people

Time Period:

1828 – 1860 Antebellum America

1860 – 1877 Civil War and Reconstruction

1877 – 1896 The Gilded Age

1896 – 1916 The Progressive Era

Themes:

African American People and Culture

County:

Calvert

Charles

St. Mary’s

Other

Summary:  During the tumultuous Civil War era, the border state of Maryland occupied a middle position both geographically and socially. Situated between the slave-labor states of the lower South and the free-labor states of the North, Maryland—with a black population almost evenly divided between slave and free—has long received credit for moderation and mediation in an era of extremes.

Barbara Fields argues that this position in between concealed as intense and immoderate a drama as enacted in the Deep South. According to Fields, “The middle ground imparted an extra measure of bitterness to enslavement, set close boundaries on the liberty of the ostensibly free, and played havoc with bonds of love, friendship, and family among slaves and between them and free black people.” Moreover, the work of destroying slavery and constructing a society of free labor proved to be as difficult in Maryland as in the former Confederacy—even more difficult, in some respects.