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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: 300 Print image (43K) |
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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: 300 Print image (43K) |
| labor-management relations.10 Truly, whites had, in the words of Ira Berlin: created the institutions, standards of personal relations, and patterns of thought which helped them control free Negroes, extort their labor, and maintain social distance between the races. Faced with a greatly enlarged free black population after the Civil War, whites almost instinctively applied the lessons of the past.... [W]ith almost a century of experience to draw on, whites had little need to grope.11 Such attitudes were important throughout the reconstruction south in helping shape white treatment of freed blacks, but they had a devastating impact in Maryland where the pre-emancipation black population had reached such large proportions. Significantly, none of the historical forces which had led to the manumission of so many black Marylanders prior to 1864—the influence of the American Revolution, proximity to the antislavery north, and the shift away from labor-intensive staple crop production—resulted in a corresponding emancipation of white Marylanders' minds. For in the final analysis, the aspirations of black Marylanders failed to find a sufficiently sympathetic audience among whites to assure their realization. The intransigent opposition of conservatives and the ideological constraints of radicals combined to present black people with only limited |