“Though
We Are Not Slaves, We Are Not Free”:
All-Female Black Households in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, 1860
By Laura Kopp
Although free blacks living in
1860 escaped the restrictions and hardships of slavery, their lives were
no easier than those living in bondage. They faced the new difficulties
that accompanied independence in a country held tight by the slave system.
By 1860, the free black population in Maryland reached 83,942 persons and
represented the largest free Negro population in any of the Southern states.[i] However,
Maryland legislators went to extreme lengths to dispute a black person’s
claim to freedom. Female freed slaves experienced discrimination because
of both their gender and race, yet many ex-slave women were forced into
this harsh environment. In 1860, free female blacks comprised 52.3% of the
free Negro population in the Upper South.[ii] In addition, “the sexual imbalance of the free Negro
caste in the cities placed many black women at the head of their household”
as a result of the greater proportion of freed slave women to men and their
lack of mobility.[iii]
Thus, women often arranged their own homes and provided for their children
without the presence of a male figurehead. Anne Arundel County, Maryland
presents an excellent case study for the examination of all female households
and the dynamic familial structures that resulted from such homes.
In reaction to the large population of free blacks residing in
the state, many legislators enacted laws that curtailed the influence of
blacks within society and the economy. Thus, black women and men received
no help from the state’s government in establishing their independence
from the institution of slavery. Many white people feared the growing
numbers of free blacks in the state and in 1783, the Maryland government
passed a law that prohibited the importation of slaves into the state and
denied newly freed blacks the rights of citizenship.[iv] The movement
of blacks into and out of the state was regulated in 1843 with the passage
of a law that required blacks to obtain permits from the orphans’ court
if they wished to remain outside of Maryland for more than thirty days.
The court only granted these permits if three “respectable” white people
vouched for them. Without these permits, free blacks who remained outside
of Maryland for more than thirty days were blocked from reentering the
state.[v]
The concern over free blacks continued in Maryland and in
the 1850 Constitutional Convention delegates nervously considered why
blacks emigrated from the state in fewer numbers than whites. Mr. Jacobs,
chairman of the Committee on the Free Negro Population of Maryland, stated
[The negro] remains where he is, increasing and propagating
his kind, nurtured and reared in all the vices, ignorance, wants and
degradations, characterizing a class of our population called free, but
in reality the veriest [sic] slaves on earth, from the very force of
circumstances surrounding them, and over which they can never have any
control.[vi]
The 1850 Convention also passed a law that required emancipated slaves
to leave the state within thirty days of manumission. In another method
to slow the increase of the black population, it was also decided “no free
person of color shall immigrate to, or come
within this State to reside.” Finally, no free person of color was permitted
to hold or purchase real estate within the state of Maryland.[vii] Black
women confronted the ramifications of these restrictive and discriminatory
laws within their own lives and many fled the state in accordance with
the law.
However, some free black women remained in Maryland and attempted
to construct homes out of the resources they could muster. An examination
of black all female households in antebellum Maryland requires an understanding
of the general nature of the United States Federal Census. The definition
of a 19th century household largely came from the record keeping
methods of the census takers. The census takers listed any group of people,
whether with or without kinship ties, living in the same structure as a
household. In most cases, even if a family viewed the wife as head of household,
the husband was listed first because of the sexual hierarchy. The order
most preferred resulted in uniform household appearances listed as male
(husband), female (wife), children by age order, extended kin and non-kin,
and blacks. In addition to this organization, census takers felt an intense
desire to identify a head of household at all costs. Before 1850, anyone
over the age of 16 could assume the official role of head of household
if no one else was available. Disobedience to this regulation resulted
in a fine for the household. After 1850, the government raised the legal
age from 16 to 20 but kept the fining procedure in place.[vii]
Another technicality arose for census takers when they approached
the topic of female occupation. Many women acted as internal heads of
household by taking care of their children, the needs of their husbands,
and cleaning their homes. Even people in the mid-1800s realized that
such activities deserved mention in the “occupation” category of the census.
Before 1870, many enumerators listed wives’ occupations as “house keeper,”
which confuses many modern readers who automatically think of paid domestic
work. To avoid such problems, in 1870 census takers began listing domestic
wage earners as “house keeper” and wives as “keeping house.”[ix] While
many records indicate that women’s roles within the home were acknowledged
as occupations, black women running households on their own could not usually
afford such luxuries as simply keeping house.
Many black women in the Upper South considered themselves lucky if they
could acquire a job because of harsh competition among free blacks for
paid work. By 1840, five out of six Southern blacks resided in the Upper
South and struggled against one another for jobs.[x] In addition,
black workers of both genders found themselves driven from the workplace
by proscriptive laws, white employers, and acts of violence.[xi] White citizens
of Maryland exemplified similar hostilities toward black workers and they
attempted to negate any economic opportunities. In 1858, eighty-one citizens
of Anne Arundel County stood before the Maryland House of Representatives
“praying the passage of a law to prohibit free Negroes from fishing and
crabbing in said waters.”[xii] The House denied the petition but the message
behind such proposed restrictions epitomized white sentiments toward free
blacks.
As European immigration increased, free blacks discovered yet
another stumbling block to their economic success. Many employers showed
their racial preferences by hiring white immigrants for jobs previously
filled by free blacks and many boasted of all white businesses and personal
servants. In 1851, a Maryland colonizationist commented that with regard
to the workforce, “the white man stands in the black man’s shoes, or else
is fast getting into them.”[xiii] Black women trying to keep their families
alive could not afford to lose their only source of income.
However, some black women in Maryland procured occupations in the
traditional service industries needed by white members of society. Out
of one hundred and ninety black working women in 1860 Annapolis, ninety-nine
of them were employed as servants and eighty-one as washerwomen. The remaining
employed women worked as seamstresses, domestics within white homes,
or in other miscellaneous occupations.[xiv] In 1860
Annapolis, Jemimiah Dorsey found employment as a washerwoman and supported
her family of three children on a personal property amount of $100.[xv] An employment
opportunity popular among rural free blacks was working as a farm hand.
Women from District 1, a rural region in Anne Arundel County, such as
Willie Hawkins, Dinsy Parker, Elizabeth Garrett, Maria Johnson, Charlotte
and Mary Ann Carroll, Elizabeth Butler, Rebecca Powell, and Susan Crowner
were farm hands.[xvi]
They found this work familiar from their lives as slaves and in high demand
by white farmers.
Historically, black women contributed significantly to the American
labor force as a way to supplement their husbands’ low incomes or to
independently support their families. In fact, national data from 1890
showed that “the percentage of black women who were gainfully employed
was more than twice that of white women.”[xvii] Without
work, many black women and children found themselves living with relatives
or in utter poverty until employment opportunities arose. Most jobs were
not steady and many black women in Maryland lived in ramshackled houses
that reflected conditions for blacks throughout the antebellum South.[xviii]
Some white women in Anne Arundel County also found themselves competing
for wages in order to support their households. Sixty-one white all-female
households existed in Annapolis and District 1 alone. Many of the women
who headed these families entered the work force as domestics and seamstresses.
Mary Hutton, a woman living in Annapolis in 1860, plied her skills as
a milliner while caring for her three children. It is interesting to note
that while Hutton needed to work, she also kept a servant girl, Catharine
Pointer, in her home.[xix] Obviously, she did not live hand-to-mouth
like many black women workers who cared for their families without the
assistance of servants.
Another area of economic opportunity open to white women, but not accessible
for free blacks, existed in farming. Southern historian, Drew Gilpin
Faust, emphasized that in “the overwhelmingly agricultural South the
individual household was the fundamental unit of . . . ‘production and
reproduction’ – the place where the most important as well as social and
cultural work of civilization took place.”[xx] Many white
female heads of household attempted to maintain farms without the guidance
of a man. Matilda O’Hara, a single white woman living in District 1 of
Anne Arundel County, tried her hand at farming in 1860. Her household included
herself, two black female farm hands, their four children, and a fourteen-year-old
slave girl. The 1860 Census lists her real estate property at a value
of $5,520 and her personal property as $700. However, within ten years
Matilda O’Hara moved in with a male family member, most likely her brother,
and numerous other female relatives.[xxi] O’Hara
had the luxury of generous family members who welcomed her when her independent
endeavors failed, a factor that simply did not exist for many black women.
Unlike Matilda O’Hara, not all white women failed at farming and
many owned substantial numbers of slaves, often inherited from deceased
family member. Ann Murray, who headed a household of two adult daughters
and a teenage son, owned sixteen slaves in 1860.[xxii] Although
it is unclear how Murray came to possess these slaves, upon their deaths
many prosperous men left all of their property to their wives. In the
will of George Mackubin, he wrote “I give and bequeath to my said wife,
Absolutely, in lieu of her thirds, all my slaves – and all my House-hold
and kitchen furniture including my plate.”[xxiii] This
simple statement shows whites’ careless views of slaves as less than human
by lumping them together with kitchen cutlery. After George’s death, Eleanor
Mackubin indentured at least one of the slaves to Clivestina Robangs in
exchange for money.[xxiv]
Thus, white female heads of household had many ways of self-sufficiency
that remained unavailable to free black women.
The most heart wrenching experience for free black women came from
leaving parts of their families in bondage. While one Baltimore politician
felt that manumissions “will go on; that nothing can stop them,” many black
families were separated by voluntary or required grants of freedom.[xxv] In addition,
many masters did not grant deeds of freedom but instead willed the manumissions
upon their death. This meant that many of these freed slaves were unable
to support themselves because of age or infirmity.[xxvi] Some
free blacks were able to purchase their family members or make bargains
with former masters to reunite their families. 
Ally Shaw, a free black woman living in District 8 of Anne Arundel
County, made an intelligent yet difficult agreement with James Deale in
1857. She indentured her two sons, John and James, to Deale in exchange
for her husband’s freedom from slavery. Shaw understood that this decision
allowed her children to temporarily serve Deale while her husband escaped
the permanent bond of servitude.
Other women found ways to remain near their family members despite the
different freedom statuses of their husbands and children. Nancy Brashears
Anderson, the mother of John B. Anderson and his thirteen siblings, headed
a household located near her enslaved husband in Anne Arundel County. [xxvii] Alfred
Sellman owned Anderson’s husband, Benjamin, while their children were born
free because of Nancy’s status as a free woman. Thus, Nancy chose to live
in the dwelling next to Sellman’s property, which allowed her and their children
to visit Benjamin Anderson more frequently. [xxviii] While this arrangement allowed
familial ties to remain intact, many black women found themselves permanently
separated from their loved ones by extraordinary distances.
The experiences of free black female heads of household
is extremely difficult to document because of the transient lifestyles
led by many black women. Once free, state laws forced them to leave their
homes and everything known to them since birth. If
these women found ways to remain in the state, they faced hostility
at every turn from legislators, white citizens, immigrant workers, and former
owners. All the while they struggled to keep their families intact. Black
female heads of household had far fewer economic opportunities than their
white counterparts as a result of restrictions on property ownership, occupational
availability, and a lack of inherited wealth. The black women of Anne Arundel
County, Maryland suffered no less than other freed slaves. They experienced
racism, faced unemployment, wallowed in poverty, and witnessed the continued
servitude of their family members. These former black slave women now faced
the danger and uncertainty of raising families in a state that still championed
permanent slavery. They felt that “we reside among you and yet are strangers;
natives, and yet not citizens; surrounded by the freest people and most
republican institutions in the world, and yet enjoying none of the imunities
[sic] of freedom . . . Though we are not slaves, we are not free.”[xxvii]
Thus, many women fled Maryland with their families and disappeared from
the census records of the state.
Notes