Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground

This book answers a lot of questions I had about Maryland before, during, and after the Civil War. I went into it knowing some things about how it wasn't really allowed to join the Confederacy by force. The military occupied parts of the state and Lincoln put people in jail, like the mayor of Baltimore, until the secessionists gave up (also, many of them went south and joined the confederate army, which adds one person to the army there but takes away a person clamoring for secession back home). Geographically if you have the president and the congress in Washington, you can't have them surrounded on all sides by enemy territory, and with the Potomac in the way, Virginia is less important than Maryland (although troops very quickly occupied Arlington, including Robert E. Lee's house, so that nobody could fire on Washington from there, and that's why eventually you have a national cemetery built there).

A bunch of questions remain though. Why did Maryland have the largest free black population in the country from 1810-1860? In what ways was Maryland a slave society comparable to the deeper south, or what made it unique? How did slavery come to an end in Maryland?

I had taken a tour a few years ago of the Hampton site outside of Towson and had imagined that Baltimore County was a place where large-scale slave operations like Hampton were common, but according to Fields that was a strong exception. Northern Maryland was much more commonly free black labor, white labor (including immigrants), and slavery where it existed was on average one slave per owner, not large plantations. This book goes into heavy detail about what types of crops were being made where. That's important to help understand why conditions were the way they were in different parts of the state, dividing it into thirds: north, south, and the eastern shore, with different crops and industries and therefore different types of labor.

I have long been interested in Reconstruction, and Maryland only got a half assed sort of Reconstruction, even as a former slave state, because it was a Union state, thus not subject to the military post-war occupation of the confederacy as directed at first by Congress over the objections of Andrew Johnson, then through the Grant presidency. Fields tells that story. I look forward to using this to the extent I'm able, in history classes I teach in the state.