In Hirelings, Jennifer Dorsey recreates the social and economic
milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and
black freedom existed side by side. She follows a generation of
manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and
grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities,
associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free
Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the
seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were
always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political
leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in
the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and
society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing
thriving African American communities.
As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans
contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they
remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority
over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous
households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating
labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and
worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved
to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a
strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers control.
They demonstrated that independent and free African American
communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these
actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a
pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor
system."
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