Over 8,000 enslaved Marylanders enlisted in the US Colored Troops between the spring of 1863 and the end of the war two years later.
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Hundreds of free Black people in Baltimore supported the Union army by working on fortifications and hospitals around the edges of the city. The onset of the Civil War in 1861 marked a new beginning for Black Baltimoreans seeking greater freedom for themselves and their neighbors. Former Marylander Frederick Douglass joined thousands of other Americans, including Black Baltimoreans known and unknown, in protesting the decision by risking their own lives and freedom to help enslaved people escape the South and, after 1854, the United States along the Underground Railroad. Taney and six other justices ruled that “the enslaved African race” and free people of color could make no claim to freedom or citizenship under the US Constitution. In the Supreme Court’s notorious 1854 Dred Scott decision, when Maryland native and Chief Justice Roger B. They pushed back against the publicly funded Maryland Colonization Society, a group that sought to transport free Black Marylanders to west Africa petitioned Baltimore City to establish public schools for Black students and protested the exclusion and discrimination experienced by Black workers. The state legislature swiftly enacted repressive laws placing new strict limits on the rights of both free and enslaved Black Marylanders.īlack residents in Baltimore resisted. 1 Maryland’s slaveholders panicked, envisioning similar violent slave insurrections led not by enslaved people, but by the state’s free Black residents. In retribution, white slaveholders killed approximately three dozen Black individuals without a trial, until the local militia stepped in to make mass arrests. During the rebellion, Nat Turner traveled through the area encouraging enslaved people to join him and killing white slaveholders and their families before the rebellion was suppressed by a local militia. By 1831, over 10,000 enslaved people and over 17,000 free people of color lived in Baltimore.įollowing Nat Turner’s August 1831 rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, however, the reaction of white slaveholders threatened the safety and independence of this growing community. In the city, these men and women organized to build independent Black churches, such as Sharp Street and Bethel A.M.E Churches, and to open schools for Black children who were excluded from the segregated public schools the city opened in 1826. The city was a place where Black people organized and worked to seek freedom from slavery and self-determination. By the early nineteenth century, free and enslaved Black people turned the city into a precious refuge in a Chesapeake region dominated by oppressive white supremacy. Baltimore City incorporated between 17, uniting these three settlements. Only a few directly confronted the role of white supremacy and racial discrimination in dividing working people and undermining their ability to challenge the political and economic interests of large property owners and established white political authorities in the decades before and after the Civil War.Įuropean colonists in the Maryland Colony established the Town of Baltimore, Jonestown, and Fells Point in the early 1700s. Moreover, these racist ideas shaped the work of white abolitionists along with Black educators, religious leaders, and activists-many of whom adopted an assimilationist approach that sought to “uplift” Black Baltimoreans to the assumed superior state of white Baltimoreans. At the same time, the development and spread of racist ideas before and after the Civil War laid the cultural and political foundation for segregation and disenfranchisement in the late nineteenth century. Varied social movements sought to secure freedom, provide mutual support, and encourage self-determination for Black Baltimoreans. The 50-year period between the early 1830s and mid-1880s set the foundation for Baltimore’s long civil rights movement. Opening Schools for Black Baltimoreans: 1860s–1880s.Emancipation and the Civil War: 1861–1865.Abolition and the Underground Railroad after the Fugitive Slave Act: 1850–1861.Abolition and Manumission in Early-Nineteenth-Century Baltimore: 1800s–1830s.
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Resistance to the Colonization Movement in Maryland: 1830s–1863.Building Independent Black Congregations and Institutions: 1830s–1850s.Repression in Baltimore after Nat Turner’s Rebellion: 1830s–1850s.Black Life in Baltimore Before the Civil War.