The price of freedom : slavery and manumission in Baltimore and early national Maryland /

The slave population of Baltimore more than tripled between 1790 and 1810, when white masters in that city purchased large numbers of blacks largely from Baltimore County or Maryland. During the early period to 1815, slaves were employed largely as manual laborers in shipyards and craft shops. Whitman presents a detailed case study that explains the use of African American labor by J.K. McKim and Sons in their Maryland Chemical Works. It was there between 1825 and 1835 that McKim tried to employ 15 slaves, on average, to provide a core of stability among free white laborers and slaves in various stages of manumission in a labor-intensive alum-producing enterprise. McKim faced problems with absenteeism, which caused him to diversify the slaves' diet, pay time-and-a-half for overtime, and board the slaves out. Eventually runaways and absenteeism caused him to stop using forced industrial labor. Manumission, term-slavery, and hiring-out were complicated strategies for both master and slave as each struggled to gain ascendancy within the contemporary labor system. A must read for students who want to understand the ramifications of manumission. Illustrations; maps; tables. Upper-division undergraduates above. J. D. Born Jr.; Wichita State University

Whitman (history, Mount St. Mary's Coll., Maryland) examines the complexities of slavery and master-slave relations in early Federal Baltimore. The ownership of slaves was a sizable investment, and Whitman illustrates that masters minimized the risk of their running away by gradual manumission, freeing the slave after a certain period of service. He also shows that slave flight was often a means of extracting from the master more favorable terms of service within the condition of slavery. Whitman thus reveals that slavery was a more intricate process than most readers assume, involving hired slaves, industrial slaves, gradual freedom, and the status and condition of the freed slave. A scholarly examination of the subject appropriate for students doing research who can handle the statistics and demographics.‘Robert A. Curtis, Taylor Memorial P.L., Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.