From the Papers of the Maryland State Colonization Society: Potential Case Studies

I’ve expanded my record stripping to include all five counties (Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne’s, and Talbot) of the Eastern Shore that are covered in the U.S. Department of Education grant. Interesting individuals that I’ve encountered so far and are potential case studies:

-         Samuel Harrison, a wealthy landowner and slave owner in Talbot County, who manumitted over 100 slaves (most gradually) in his will. Many of the manumitted slaves were over the age of 45 and some were disabled, two conditions that  outlawed manumission.

-         A couple of cases of freed slaves whose manumissions were conditional on their emigrating to Liberia. I need to dig deeper, but it does not appear as if these particular people emigrated despite this condition.

-         Ebenezer Welch, a slave owner in Kent County, freed his “negro children” in his will.

-         James A. Jones, an African American butcher from Kent County and a delegate to the 1852 Colored Colonization Convention, who was pro-emigration but did not emigrate.

I’ve found many heartbreaking cases but the case of the boy Asbury is particularly sad because poor records management was the cause. Robert Butler of Queen Anne’s County gradually freed his slaves in his will, stating the date that each was to be free. However, in the case of Asbury, Butler’s will was torn in the space that specified Asbury’s term of service, leaving it as 18?7.

As a result:

Transcription: “Note: The Administrator feels himself at a loss to know the exact time of service of Negro Asbury, last the will of the testator was so badly defaced and torn that the figure between 8 and 7 was entirely obliterated and he has substituted the figure six as the most probable.”

The administrator may have guessed correctly, or may even have shortened Asbury’s term of service. Yet, it is unfortunate that his time in servitude had to be decided so arbitrarily due to a hole in paper.*

* Maryland State Archives Special Collections (Maryland State Colonization Society Papers) Extract of the will of Robert Butler,1834. MSA SC 5977, Reel 13249 p. 19. (http://mdhistory.net/msa_sc5977/scm013249/pdf/msa_sc5977_scm13249-0019.pdf)

Historical Adventures in Baltimore

Last week’s highlights were attending a lecture by local African American historian and genealogist, Agnes Kane Callum, and an all-day unconference called Bmore Historic.

Mrs. Agnes Kane Callum (in the center of the photo to the left) attended Morgan State University after being out of school for 28 years. She wrote one of her term papers about freed blacks of St. Mary’s County, Maryland, an experience which uncovered a wealth of information about her own family’s history. This spurred her to do additional genealogical research, tracing parts of her family tree to the 17th century. Mrs. Callum also earned a master’s degree from Morgan State and was a Fulbright-Hayes Fellow at the University of Ghana. She has published more than 25 books on African American history and genealogy, some of which are in the reference collection of the Maryland State Archives’ library. Her historical research of enslaved at the Sotterley Plantation helped save the historic site ruin. It was a pleasure to meet her and to see how much a dedicated local historian can contribute to knowledge of the past.

I finished the week by attending the Bmore Historic unconference at the Maryland Historical Society. It was a great way for public historians, librarians, historic re-enactors, museum staff, historic preservationists, and community developers to exchange information and form collaborations. In the morning, I attended a session on marketing woes and learned of some great ideas and resources for reaching local audiences. During lunch, some attendees gave “lightening talks” of less than 3 minutes about their current projects. I led an afternoon session on social media and received some great advice about formulating policies and tapping into interested audiences. 

Washington Monument

Mt. Vernon, Baltimore

To end the day, I went on a walking tour of the nearby historic district of Mt. Vernon. The neighborhood of Mt. Vernon erected one of the nation’s earliest memorials to George Washington (hence the name of Mt. Vernon). During the nineteenth century, Mt. Vernon was the neighborhood of choice for elite, white Baltimoreans. The home interiors were similar to those of robber barons and gilded age industrialists in New York and Newport, RI. We also stopped inside the beautiful Peabody Library (pictured, right).

It was a great week and I learned a great deal about Baltimore and Maryland history.

Week Nine

It was quite a busy week! In addition to my record stripping of Maryland State Colonization Society records, I attended several events. Collaborating with another staff member, we completed an updated brochure for the Legacy of Slavery project. It was just in time for the November 1 opening of the Maryland State Archives exhibit, Flee! Stories of Flight from Maryland in Black and White, at the Banneker-Douglas Museum. With approximately 70 people in attendance, the event featured an overview of the exhibit by archives staff, a historical reenactment of a life of a runaway slave, and remarks on slavery and the Underground Railroad by historian Dr. Ira Berlin. I met and had exciting conversations with Theodore "Ted" Mack, chair of Maryland’s African American History and Culture Commission and his fellow commissioner, anthropologist Dr. Cheryl LaRoche. I also briefly met Dr. Berlin, a member of the commission that advises the work of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project at MSA.

Later in the week, I attended an OCLC webinar about ArchiveGrid, an archival discovery system. It’s meant to be a one-stop shop for researchers (from family historians to seasoned scholars) to search for archival collections around the world. Soon to be free (!), ArchiveGrid will allow institutions of all sizes and technological capabilities to contribute finding aids in several formats. OCLC hopes to work with SNAC and regional archival union catalogs. This may finally do for archives what WorldCat did for libraries.

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

To end the week, I attended a social media forum at the National Archives in D.C. Prior to the forum, NARA held a social media fair to highlight their social media initiatives with Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Wikipedia. Alex Howard (Government 2.0 Correspondent, O’Reilly Media) moderated the panel formed by Sarah Bernard (Deputy Director, White House Office of Digital Strategy), Pamela S. Wright (Chief Digital Access Strategist, NARA), and David Weinberger (senior researcher, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Highlights of the program:

• Pamela Wright gave us a sneak peek of NARA’s new Citizen Archivist Dashboard which will allow members of the public to volunteer their time and expertise such as by transcribing documents, contributing to a wiki, or uploading photographs of records that they’ve scanned. She also stressed the importance of government agencies considering records management implications BEFORE diving in to social media programs.
• Alex Howard gave a history of social media, ending with the significance of Google +, which adds a social layer to the entire web.
• David Weinberger, proclaimed an “internet philosopher” by Alex Howard, threw out the notion that social networks are not owned by the public (i.e., not open source or communally owned) but held in private hands, giving users very little input in how our information/contributions are used and managed.

Out and About

Mahan Hall, U.S. Naval Academy.

Last week, the Maryland State Archives hosted a War of 1812 workshop for Anne Arundel County. I attended the morning tours to Fort Nonsense, the U.S. Naval Academy Museum, and the Maryland State House, all places I had never visited previously. The tours were all very informative and helped me learn more about Maryland history. In the afternoon, I went to the Banneker-Douglass Museum, the state’s official repository of African American material culture, with other staff to help install our exhibit, Flee! Stories of Flight from Maryland in Black and White. The exhibit opening date of November 1 commemorates the ratification of the 1864 state constitution, which abolished slavery in Maryland. (Because Maryland was a border state during the Civil War, Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves there.)

On Saturday, I visited the Sojourner Truth Room, an African American research collection at the Oxon Hill Branch of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. The room is named for the Sojourner Truth Elementary School which formerly occupied the site. It’s a rare reminder of the black schools that were too often demolished and forgotten during the era when black students were usually integrated into white schools and not vice versa.

Ms. Ginny Moore standing next to a case of rare books.

Back to my visit, a friend of mine had met Ginny Moore, the collection’s librarian, at an ALA conference and highly recommended that I meet her when I got to Maryland. Before joining the staff of the Sojourner Truth Room, Ms. Moore had been a librarian in the D.C. public schools. Ms. Moore welcomed me like a member of her family before giving me a tour of the collection. We spent two hours talking about her work at the Sojourner Truth Room, her career as a librarian, and her life growing up in the South. She was familiar with the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland since Sojourner Truth staff had attended a workshop on the project at the archives.

One of the things I miss about being a student is having access to a research library. Therefore, I was thrilled to learn about the varied holdings at the Sojourner Truth Room. Collections include rare 19^th century slave narratives, autographed first editions by authors such as Coretta Scott King, the 42-volume set of the WPA Slave Narratives, the Journal of Negro History, a variety of encyclopedias, and scholarly works on African American history and culture. I enjoyed my visit to the Sojourner Truth Room, and look forward to returning!

Cultural Adventures

Last week, I went to the Anacostia Museum for a fascinating lecture by Ida E. Jones, Ph.D., a historian and assistant curator at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, on her new book, The Heart of the Race Problem: The Life of Kelly Miller. Miller was the first African American admitted to Johns Hopkins University, where he studied for a Ph.D. in math, physics, and astronomy. Unfortunately, he was forced to drop out after two years due to an increase in tuition fees. He went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics and a law degree, both from Howard, where he became mathematics professor and later dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Jones described Miller as a conciliator in the debates between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Miller was a proponent of Washington’s self-sufficiency while also supporting a DuBois’ insistence on a classical education as the path to African American social and economic advancement. Miller also made important contributions to the burgeoning field of sociology, including his establishment of a department at Howard. Later in life, Miller clashed with Howard President Mordecai Johnson who vowed to block any campus recognition of Miller’s contributions to the university. Sadly, Johnson’s efforts were so successful that Miller’s 50 years of service to Howard were forgotten from Howard’s collective memory.  With her book, Jones’ is attempting to rectify this and to complicate the concept of race men and black intellectual history beyond the simple binary of the Washington-DuBois debates. After the talk, I met several interesting people, including some members of the National Association of Black Women Historians, who recommended local happenings for me to see and groups to join.

Hampton Mansion, on a hill overlooking the estate

Restored Slave Cabin

Over the weekend, I visited the Hampton plantation, which is now managed by the National Park Service. Unfortunately, the interpretative tour on the African American experience at Hampton had been postponed so I spent some time exploring the grounds and going on the tour of the mansion. The wealthy and well-connected Ridgeleys owned Hampton for over 200 years, at one time amassing 25,000 acres on the estate where 350 slaves toiled. I was aware of a famous photograph of Nancy Davis, an enslaved woman, pictured with her charge but just discovered that the little white girl was a Ridgeley from this plantation. According to the NPS website, Davis is the only African American buried in the family cemetery. Following Emancipation, Davis remained on the plantation working for the family until her death in 1908. After the Civil War, the family’s wealth, which was rooted in the agricultural output of the plantation, gradually declined until the last resident sold it a non-profit foundation which then donated it to the National Trust. 

Week Four at MSA

The current phase of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland program, which is funded by a Department of Education grant, is focused on five counties of the Eastern Shore (Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne's, and Talbot). To support our research of this region, I'm beginning to strip US census records for data about African Americans living in Dorchester County. This information forms part of a database that helps us cross-reference enslaved and free blacks in various state, local, and federal records.

As you know, another project I'm working on is the records of the Maryland State Colonization Society. One of my goals will be to find out who was being successfully recruited to emigrate, what their motivations were, and what the socio-political environment was like in Maryland. As the below letter from a recruiting agent shows, the Society was very particular about recruiting "the right kind" of black person to Liberia. The Society was focused on recruiting industrious, tee-totaling Christians. However, in correspondence from Liberia, Society officials frequently complain about the emigrants' lack of industry. None of the secondary sources that I've read have interrogated this label of laziness, accepting this as an apt description of many of the emigrants. On the other hand, scholarship on freed people in the United States has interpreted this perceived resistance to long-term work commitments in other ways such as a desire to be mobile in order to find dispersed family members or an attempt to avoid exploitative working arrangements. I hope my work with the Society's papers will uncover more of the voices of the black emigrants who exiled themselves from their native United States in hopes of a better future for themselves and

families.¹

From the first paragraph: "The visit of Jackson to this neighborhood has produced a happy influence in behalf of Colonization, and quite a disposition to emigrate on the part of the [illegible] people of color; The probability now is, that we have twenty, at least, from hereabouts, (and these too), of the right kind. By tomorrow we shall have, as many names as it is desirable should go this fall from one portion of our state." (emphasis added)

In my free time, I went to a wonderful panel about race in America organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I had the opportunity to meet Spencer Crew, former director of the National Museum of American History and former president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Dr. Crew, a professor at George Mason University, is teaching a course on the Underground Railroad and I hope the Legacy of Slavery website will offer him useful primary sources for Maryland. I also met Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita at Princeton, who signed my copy of The History of White People.

Nell Irvin Painter, Rex M. Ellis, and Spencer Crew at the NMAAHC panel "America in Black and White"

1.  John H. Kennard to Dr. Easter, October 9, 1838, Maryland State Colonization Society Papers. Maryland State Archives, MSA SC 5977. http://mdhistory.net/msa_sc5977/scm013227/html/msa_sc5977_scm13227-0008.html

Visit to Maryland Historical Society

This is the former home of Enoch Pratt and site of MdHS since 1919. In 1882, Enoch Pratt donated more than $1 million to found a Baltimore City public library system that would be open to everyone, regardless of class, race, or color.

Lion keeping watch outside of MdHS

On September 13, I joined the Legacy of Slavery team members for a meeting with staff at the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) in Baltimore. MdHS is partnering with MSA on a U.S. Department of Education funded grant to document the Underground Railroad in five counties of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. 

After a productive meeting, we were given a tour of MdHS’ major exhibition, “Divided Voices: Maryland in the Civil War.” For me, a highlight of the exhibition was a newly acquired, beautiful flag of the U.S. Colored Troops, 4th Regiment. Donated by the “Colored Ladies of Baltimore,” it is extremely rare for a silk flag to survive for so long in such great condition. The flag was rescued by a member of the troop, Christian Fleetwood, after both members of the color guard were killed. His courageous actions won him the Congressional Medal of Honor, making him the first African American from Maryland to receive this award. The Library of Congress holds Christian Fleetwood’s papers including his diary, which describes his actions on that day. 

Maryland State Colonization Society: A Very Brief History

One of my main projects will be working with the recently digitized records of the Maryland State Colonization Society. I’ll be creating case studies and writing biographies in order to inform researchers and other members of public about the rich information within the records. Here’s a very general overview of the society’s purpose and history.

The Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS) was founded in 1817 as an auxiliary of the national American Colonization Society (ACS) with the goal of raising money for the parent organization. After ACS founded Liberia in 1822, MSCS was also tasked with recruiting free African American colonists for settlement. After Nat Turner’s 1831 Rebellion, MSCS was reorganized and funded by the Maryland General Assembly. According to the Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Papers of the Maryland State Colonization Society, Nat Turner’s actions led to increased restrictions on slaves and free blacks throughout the slave states. The Maryland General Assembly hoped that MSCS would help remove free blacks from the state and prevent the eruption of a rebellion similar to Nat Turner’s. The state also passed new laws prohibiting manumitted slaves from remaining in Maryland or for free blacks to settle in the state. In 1833, Maryland decided to found its own colony in Liberia at Cape Palmas. With funding from the Maryland General Assembly, MSCS agents canvassed the state to recruit colonists. Often, following in their footsteps were blacks and white abolitionists who dissuaded freedpeople from emigrating. Instead, they encouraged freed people to fight for equal rights in their native United States. In the end, only approximately 1,150 free blacks settled in the Maryland colony by the time that MSCS sent out its last expedition in 1861.¹

Liberia became an independent nation in 1847, and the Maryland in Liberia colony was annexed to the new nation as Maryland County in 1857. MSCS ceased operations in 1863, leaving the organization’s papers in the care of Dr. James Hall, the Society’s General Agent, business manager, and editor of the Maryland Colonization Journal. In 1877, Hall donated the records to the Maryland Historical Society. The papers were microfilmed in 1970 and digitized in 2011.

1. Hall, Richard. L. On Afric’s Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834-1857. (Baltimore, Md.: Maryland Historical Society, 2003), 346.

First Week

Last week was my first week at the Maryland State Archives (MSA) in Annapolis. I was warmly welcomed by Emily Oland Squires, Director of Research and Student Outreach, Chris Haley, Director of Research for the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland, Dr. Edward Papenfuse, the Maryland State Archivist, and the entire staff at the Maryland State Archives. 

I spent most of my first week familiarizing myself with the Legacy of Slavery and MSA websites. I also began training with different staff members throughout the Archives. First off were sessions on how to conduct research using Maryland vital records and the United States census. I have many opportunities to practice what I learn, including going into the stacks to look up 100 year-old birth and death records in huge bound registers. Finding information on a particular person often involves looking through an index on one floor and then going to another floor to find the actual birth record or death certificate. Many records may also be available on microfilm or electronically.

After about a month of training, I’ll start working on projects centered on the Legacy of Slavery, particularly on the records of the Maryland State Colonization Society. I'll discuss the Maryland State Colonization Society and the Legacy of Slavery Project in greater depth in future posts.