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TASK FORCE TO STUDY THE HISTORY AND LEGACY OF SLAVERY IN MARYLAND (Final Report) 1999/12/31 MdHR 991422 MdHR 991422, Image No: 298 Print image (41K) |
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TASK FORCE TO STUDY THE HISTORY AND LEGACY OF SLAVERY IN MARYLAND (Final Report) 1999/12/31 MdHR 991422 MdHR 991422, Image No: 298 Print image (41K) |
| and migration to different neighborhoods, counties, or cities. Others argue that despite such newfound mobility and autonomy, blacks failed to change their historically subservient relationship to whites; that even the acquisition of land did little more than supplement their basic, subsistence oriented economy.8 Did freed and already free laborers enter an open market where they could pursue improved working conditions and higher wages, or did sharecropping and other mechanisms of labor management relations—even those advocated by their supporters-force them into a subordinate economic relationship with their ex-masters and employers? Judging from the Maryland evidence, it is clear that both forces were at work; that black farm laborers sought whatever autonomy they could amidst the opposing forces of a free market and coerced labor. This conclusion supports the findings of others. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch interpret freedmen's partial withdrawal from plantations as a response to limited post-emancipation "incentives," and Eric Foner defines a black autonomy which was neither totally free nor totally regulated. According to Gavin Wright, ex-slaves adopted a family oriented strategy which constituted a part of the "balance" between the competing claims of |