Excerpt from The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634-1860

The subject Of the free negro has not been left untouched. Sidelights on the earlier period are to be found in Mac c'onnac's White Servitude in Maryland, and some in formation occurs ih certain of the general and special his tories, but in Brackett's The Negro in Maryland is found a predecessor in which the space devoted to manumission and the free negroes nearly equals that given to the slaves. Dr. Brackett's faithful chronicle Of the formal history has made his work an inevitable help in its field. Although the present study is narrower in scope, and although in its chapters II, III and X, especially, it retraces many of the steps taken in the preceding work, in chapters II and X, at least, it draws upon lucrative materials from which the earlier work derived nothing mentionable. It has seemed meet to interweave what these sources yielded with the formal history, and thus to give further account of the following matters: the reasons for the manumission Of some negroes and the failure to manumit others, how manumission was understood and executed by the owners Of negroes, the territorial distribution Of the free negroes and slaves, the genesis, development, retardation and fiasco Of the colonization movement and the clash Of economic interests over the negro question in state politics. Furthermore, although Brackett has given the law and some Of the other facts about apprenticeship and vagrancy, and al though the materials contained in Bishop Payne's History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church were indispen sable to the chapter on the church, chapters IV-IX (inclu sive) attempt to cover ground that had not been previously cultivated intensively.

The work whose results are presented was first under taken at the instance of the Carnegie Institution Of Wash ington, D. C. A subvention from that source made possible the assembling Of most Of the materials used. The writer wishes further to make acknowledgments to Mr. Alfred H. Stone, Professor J. C. Ballagh and Dr. B. C. Steiner for assistance and counsel, to the library staffs Of the Peabody Institute and the Maryland and New York His torial Societies and to the custodians Of state and county archives and Of certain church records and business account books for permission to use materials and for assistance dur ing the researches, and finally to his wife who aided for months in exploring many volumes of newspapers and public records.

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