History

There were many paths from slavery to free labor in the Americas and the Caribbean. In some cases, freedom came with a thunderclap amid civil war and revolution. Elsewhere, governments sounded slavery’s knell through a prescribed process of immediate or delayed emancipation. The people of northern Maryland experienced a different kind of emancipation in the decades preceding the Civil War. Final freedom came when Maryland adopted a new constitution in 1864, but slavery along the Mason-Dixon Line had been collapsing under the combined weight of slave flight, manumission, and the interstate slave trade since the 1820s. This dissertation examines the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed among northern Maryland’s labor regimes during the region’s gradual transition from slavery to free labor. Having expanded into the Maryland piedmont during the flush decades of the Napoleonic Wars, slavery experienced a sharp decline in the lean years that followed the Panic of 1819. Faced with mounting slave resistance and stagnant demand for wheat, their primary staple, landowners struggled to forge a more efficient