Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Illustrations Introduction: Sharpsburg, Maryland, 1803 1. "The Land Flows with Milk and Honey": Agriculture and Labor in the Early Republic 2. "A Strange Reverse of Fortune": Panic, Depression, and the Transformation of Labor 3. "There Are Objections to Black and White, but One Must Be Chosen": Managing Farms and Farmhands 4. ". . . How Much of Oursels We Owned": Finding Freedom along the Mason-Dixon Line 5. "Chased Out on the Slippery Ice": Rural Wage Laborers in Antebellum Maryland Conclusion: Sharpsburg, Maryland, 1862 Notes Index Back Cover | "Grivno's carefully documented interpretation of rural life and labor challenges readers to think hard about the meanings of slavery, freedom, and borders in antebellum America."—The Journal of American History
"A thickly descriptive and nuanced account of the 'evolution of race, class, and labor regimes' in Maryland from just after the American Revolution up to the Civil War."—Civil War Book Review
"Max Grivno's engaging and often harrowing narrative of agricultural workers along the northern Maryland border, investigates a place where 'slavery's roots ran shallow,' yet where free landless laborers face severe constraints in a changing market. . . . Grivno's book brilliantly succeeds in analyzing local and regional changes in terms of broader developments, portraying the distinctiveness of an understudied corner of the South."—The Journal of Southern History
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Max Grivno is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi.