On this day in history, the Maryland House of Delegates joined the Maryland Senate in approving Senate Joint Resolution 6, a resolution in which “the State of Maryland expresses profound regret for the role that Maryland played in instituting and maintaining slavery and for the discrimination that was slavery’s legacy.” With this vote the state of Maryland became the second U.S. state (after Virginia, on February 24, 2007) to approve a resolution apologizing for slavery.
The Maryland legislature had much for which to apologize; it spent literally hundreds of years making sure Blacks, both slave and free, were denied rights.
In 1638, the Maryland General Assembly enacted two bills referring to slaves and excepting them from rights shared by Christian freemen and indentured servants: An Act for the Liberties of the People and An Act Limiting the Times of Servants. The Africans’ legal status initially remained undefined, and colonial courts tended to rule that any person who accepted Christian baptism should be freed. But wealth via “property” was at stake, and the wealthy filled the ranks of those who governed.
In 1661 the Maryland Assembly passed a law explicitly forbidding “miscegenation,” or marriage between different races. [Sex was not outlawed; it was just the “Christian” rite of marriage that merited legal protection.]
As the demand for labor in tobacco fields increased, Maryland became the third colony to legalize slavery. In September, 1664, under the governorship of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, the Assembly ruled that all enslaved people should be held in slavery for life, and that children of enslaved mothers should also be held in slavery for life. The 1664 Act included the following language:
Be it enacted by the Right Honorable, the Lord Proprietary, by the advice and consent of the Upper and Lower House of this present General Assembly, that all negroes or other slaves already within the Province, and all negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the Province shall serve durante vita. And all children born of any negro or other slave shall be slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives.”
Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore
In this way the institution of slavery in Maryland was made self-perpetuating, as the slaves reproduced. By making slave status dependent on the mother, according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, (you are what your mother was), Maryland, like Virginia, abandoned the common-law approach of England, in which the social status of children depended on their father. This change from British law ensured that white masters could retain the value of “increase” when these female slaves gave birth, because as long as the child’s mother was a slave, it wouldn’t matter who the father was. Masters could therefore continue to exploit the popular option of using female slaves for sex without having to worry that this would cause them to lose their “property.”
But that wasn’t the only issue dealt with by the 1664 law. It also stated:
And forasmuch as divers freeborne English women forgettful of their free Condition and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves by which also divers suites may arise touching the Issue of such woemen and a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negros for prevention whereof for deterring such freeborne women from such shamefull Matches Bee it further enacted by the Authority advice and Consent aforesaid That whatsoever free borne woman shall inter marry with any slave from and after the Last day of this present Assembly shall serve the master of such slave dureing the life of her husband And that all the Issue of such freeborne woemen soe marryed shall be slaves as their fathers were And Bee it further Enacted that all the Issues of English or other freeborne woemen that have already marryed Negroes shall serve the Masters of their Parents till they be Thirty years of age and noe longer.” (“An Act Concerning Negroes & Other Slaves,” 1 Md. Archives 533-34. See , Kevin Mumford, “After Hugh: Statutory Race Segregation in Colonial America, 1630-1725,” The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 280-305. “Hugh” refers to Hugh Davis, a man who, according to the Virginia Assembly, was to be “soundly whipped, before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his boy in lying with a Negress….” )
This was important because, as one learns elsewhere, at least 256 white women were prosecuted in Maryland for marrying Black men during the colonial period. See for example, Kevin Mumford, op. cit.]
An important exception was the case of Molly Walsh, a young girl born in England in 1656 who was sentenced to seven years of bondage in the American colonies after knocking over a pail of milk – twice! When she completed her service at the age of 24, she went out into the “wilderness” and bought a farm ten miles from Baltimore. Her new neighbors helped her build a cabin, but she couldn’t manage a tobacco farm on her own.
In 1692 she bought two slaves from a newly arrived ship. One of them was named Bannaky (later changed to Banneker), and was the son of an African chieftan. He and Molly fell in love and got married. Though Molly had broken the law by marrying a slave, her neighbors reputedly came to accept this marriage and to respect Bannaky. The two had four daughters, and one of them was the mother of Benjamin Banneker, who went on to become a famous surveyor and scientist.
Further legislation would follow, entrenching and deepening the institution of slavery. In 1671 the Assembly passed an Act stating expressly that baptism of a slave would not lead to freedom. Prior to this some slaves had sued for freedom based on having been baptized. The Act was apparently intended to save the souls of the enslaved, such that no slaveholder should be discouraged from baptizing his human property for fear of losing it.
Jonathan L. Alpert writes in “The Origin of Slavery in the United States-The Maryland Precedent,” in The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Jul., 1970), pp. 189-221:
The legal dehumanization of the Negro began with a 1678 statute stipulating the recording of all births, marriages, and deaths in each county. The exceptions were for “Negros Indians & Molottos.” (7 Md. Archives 76)
Miscegenation statutes were first passed in 1681 and 1692. Legislative attempts to prevent slaves from running away began to be passed as early as 1641. Numerous provisions were added over the years to close “loopholes” in the legislation. (See Alpert, op. cit.) Other legislation was enacted to control slaves related to conducting trade, traveling with permission, and meeting in great numbers on holy days (thereby having “the opportunity of Imbezelling & bartering away sundry Goods belonging to their Masters or Owners . . . “and of course “conspireing & proposeing waies & means for the gaining of their liberty & freedom…” (1695).
Laws were passed throughout the states, not just in Maryland, adding to legal distinctions about and restrictions upon Blacks. The legal degradation of Blacks played a “useful” role in uniting the new country as well as ensuring the continued ability of “masters” to exploit labor and sex. The sore point of inequalities of class, initially the cause of greatest tensions in the colonies, was superseded as the prime dividing line for status within the colony when race entered the picture:
Instead, poor whites, encouraged by the policies of the elites, took refuge in their whiteness and the dream that one day they, too, could become slave owners, though only a relative handful could ever hope to amass the land, wealth, and social position of the most prominent member of [society].” (Annette Gordon-Reed, “The Hemingses of Monticello,” W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, p. 53)
As historian Keri Leigh Merritt observes:
Throughout American history, the economic elite have used vile forms of racism to perpetuate the current hierarchy — politically, socially and economically. White supremacy is most commonly conceptualized as a way for lower-class whites to feel socially superior to people from other ethnic backgrounds.”
Thus, before long, “whiteness” came to signify the superiority of one socially and legally defined population over others, while simultaneously inculcating notions that character, intelligence, and other traits were associated with whiteness or non-whiteness. Thomas Jefferson himself contributed to that idea with his Notes on the State of Virginia, a book written by him in 1781, and updated and enlarged in 1782 and 1783.
While the book also discussed Virginia’s natural resources and economy, it is remembered today primarily for Jefferson’s observations about slavery, miscegenation, and his beliefs that whites and Blacks could not live together in a free society. Jefferson said he thought Blacks were inferior to whites in terms of beauty (he cites such “superior” traits in whites as “flowing hair”) and reasoning intelligence. (He observes, for example, “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.”). But as biographer Annette Gordon-Reed often has cause to point out, the “public” and “rhetorical” Jefferson was quite a different man than the private Jefferson. The author sardonically observes: “White supremacy does not demand deep conviction. Ruthless self interest, not sincere belief, is the signature feature…”
During the eighteenth century the numbers of slaves imported into Maryland greatly increased, as the labor-intensive tobacco economy became dominant, and the colony developed into a slave society. In 1700 there were about 25,000 people in Maryland and by 1750 that had grown more than five times to 130,000. By 1755, about 40% of Maryland’s population was Black.
The Maryland legislature was not idle. In 1753 the Maryland assembly took further harsh steps to institutionalize slavery, passing a law which prohibited any slaveholder from voluntarily manumitting his slaves. A slaveholder seeking manumission had to gain legislative approval for each act, meaning that few did so.
At this stage there were few voices of dissent in Maryland. Although only the wealthy could afford slaves, poor whites who did not own slaves may have aspired to own them someday. The identity of many whites in Maryland, and the South in general, was tied up in the idea of white supremacy. As the French political philosopher Montesquieu noted in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” (Paraphrasing article by historian James Loewen in “The Washington Post,” “Five Myths About Why the South Seceded.”)
Maryland Slave Auction Broadside from 1845
Maryland also repeatedly passed legislation to punish any free people, Black or white, from assisting escapees in their quest for freedom. (See Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, “Resistance to Slavery in Maryland: Strategies for Freedom: Special History Study” Prepared for Organization of American Historians Under Cooperative Agreement with Northeast Region National Park Service U.S. Department of Interior March 2007). They had reason to worry; the proximity of Maryland to Pennsylvania and other places in the free North meant that the “Underground Railroad” was very active in Maryland.
In fact, two of the nation’s most famous escapees and “railroad conductors,” Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were enslaved in, and fled from, the state. As LaRoche observes:
Escape routes spanned each region of the state. The major feature of the Eastern Shore, the Chesapeake Bay, offered numerous opportunities, through escape by boats, skiffs, and canoes, to travel northward to Pennsylvania. Proximity of the Eastern Shore to Delaware also impacted the patterns of escape.”
Twenty-eight Fugitives Escaping from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (Library of Congress)
The Marylanders were for “States Rights” on every issue but slavery. They demanded federal action such as better enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law to help them keep their slaves.
Slavery was officially abolished in Maryland on November 1, 1864, with the ratification of the 1864 Maryland Constitution. Ironically, as LaRoche observes, toward the end of slavery and after the Civil War:
. . . the problem of migrating free Blacks was perceived as acute by northern as well as southern states. The Pennsylvania state legislature, for example, considered several proposals in early 1863 designed to prevent Blacks from settling in the state.”
Unfortunately, the problem of racism has not gone away, and was exacerbated after Trump took office in 2016. The Baltimore Sun reported on racism in Maryland in an article from November 3, 2018, “Hate in Maryland: From Racist Taunts to Swastikas to a Campus Stabbing, Bias Reports Up Sharply in State.” They noted that there are many more reports of racism and hate crimes, although only a small percentage led to arrests. Blacks are still the most targeted group, with Jews and those identifying as LGBT the next biggest victims of incidents that ranged from vandalism and intimidation to threats and attacks.
Legal Legacy 
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