Freedom's Port
The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860
Examining a mostly free urban Black population in the Upper South
Paper – $27
978-0-252-06618-4
Publication Date
Paperback: 07/01/1997
About the Book
Baltimore's Black population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than ninety percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community.He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly free community less wracked by class and intraracial divisions than were other cities. Almost from the start, Phillips states, Baltimore's African Americans forged their own freedom and actively defended it--in a state that maintained slavery and whose white leadership came to resent the liberties the city's black people had achieved.
About the Author
Christopher Phillips is the John and Dorothy Hermanies Professor of American History and the University Distinguished Professor in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Cincinnati. His books include The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border.Reviews
"A deeply researched, comprehensive account of Baltimore's African American community, the community that helped shape the young Frederick Douglass and that became the nation's largest by the eve of the Civil War. An illuminating contribution to historical knowledge of the urban context of slavery and freedom."--Michael P. Johnson, coeditor of No Chariot Let Down: Charleston's Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil WarAwards
• Winner, Maryland Historical Society Book Prize, 1997Related Titles
