In Patricia Reid’s “Margaret Morgan’s Story: A Threshold between Slavery and Freedom, 1820-1842”, she recounts the Morgan family’s predicament in terms of the laws of Maryland and Pennsylvania which were in constant flux and ambiguity. The Morgans lived in the ultimate border state, Maryland, in which “the status between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ was regularly blurred.” They had been free for some years, manumitted by their owner, however the unclear nature of the laws in the states made it simple for slaveholders and catchers to capture any black they saw and transport them back into servitude. Margaret noted this and the increasing paranoia among Maryland legislators that free blacks posed a bad example for the enslaved and that they were bad for business. These revelations pushed her to move her family further north, to Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
Maryland was seen as one of the important bastions of slavery that if it were to give way to abolitionist sentiment, the rest of the slave states would soon follow, expanding these interests. Slave owners and the governmental legislators they influenced had other plans though. They gradually began to institute harsher restrictions to make it more difficult for blacks to maintain their free status. They were forced to prove their freedom in more than one way, often in manners that were greatly inconvenient. These laws and statutes only served to put a tighter leash on the Maryland blacks who were free and looked to extract them from the state as a whole. Maryland occupied a unique position as a state wanting to benefit from the all the profits that slavery provided for the powerful slave-holding class.<\/p>\n
As Reid says, “Marylanders depended on northern and southern insterstate comity to govern relations with respect to slaves and slaveholders migrating in and out of the state.” Maryland was at the crossroads of the north and the south, slavery and freedom. Their legislators made a conscious decision in the 1830s, just as the Morgans were leaving to Pennsylvania, to give slavery a grand welcome back into society. Maryland used their close proximity to the North and South to install “new legal parameters…discriminatory statutes that both the North and South employed.” I agree with Ian’s post this week asserting how a short distance between just a few states could make a large difference in terms of how slaves could be prosecuted in a court of law. I concur with his statement that, “for slaves, this seemed a blessing in disguise, as it was a close state in terms of difference in which they could feasibly assimilate into society.”<\/p>\n
I liked the method in which Reid made her argument and used the microhistory of Morgan and her case to illustrate how slavery and freedom legislation was progressing during the period. Her writing is very clear and concise and her use of primary sources and block quotes only served to legitimize her explanations. She inserted short facts about slave-catching, one of which particularly caught my attention: the conviction of slaveholders could yield up to US$2000 or 7 to 21 years of hard labor. I would not have expected slave catchers to have been prosecuted so harshly at that time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Patricia Reid’s “Margaret Morgan’s Story: A Threshold between Slavery and Freedom, 1820-1842”, she recounts the Morgan family’s predicament in terms of the laws of Maryland and Pennsylvania which were in constant flux and ambiguity. The Morgans lived in the ultimate border state, Maryland, in which “the status between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ was regularly blurred.” … <\/p>\n