support himself.     Whatever can educate his mind and equip his body for self-care is in the right direction.    Everything else tends to lager houses,   idleness,   vice."12   A year later, he added "If he can get a living let him get it; if he cannot, let him go without, only throw no obstacles  in his way."13    And in 1867, he told a black audience "Upon you is the  ...  responsibility of demonstrating ...  your fitness
"1 4
Hndnntes
1.       Among  the  available  literature  on  Maryland  during Reconstruction,  the most important to  date  is  Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery  and   Freedom   nn   the  Middle   Ground:   Maryland   during  the Nineteenth  Century  (New Haven and  London,   1985).     Impressive  in both its historical  and analytical  sweep,  Fields' book provides a broad account of the  suppression of black labor in Maryland in the nineteenth century.    As such it offers both more and less than this study.     It provides a discussion of the periods both before and after emancipation which  are  not  addressed here,  but  limits  to  one chapter its  coverage  of the  period  immediately  following emancipation.     The  importance  of Fields'  emphasis  on the class origins of black coercion is should also be noted.    In Slavery and Freedom  and elsewhere  (especially her chapter in J.  Morgan Kousser