Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland by Jennifer Hull Dorsey

Abstract

In early 1814 John Kennard, a Talbot County farmer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, knew that his next hire would be different. He had published the following advertisement in the Eastern Shore General Advertiser with change in mind: "Wanted to Hire: A Negro man who understands the farming business" (21). Those who read or heard of the notice understood that Kennard's desire to hire a freed or freeborn African American rather than buy a slave or pay a white laborer reflected a shift in local labor practices. With the disappearance of northern slavery underway, roughly two generations of African Americans were entering an emerging "free labor" workforce for the first time. Their agricultural skills took on new value as commercial interests sought to exploit the mid-Atlantic's coastal harvests as well as the crops and natural resources from the hinterlands of western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. In Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland, Jennifer Hull Dorsey investigates how African Americans understood this change and attempted to shape the expectations of free labor by their entry into it.