Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

contact with their white masters does much to save their souls.”

“I couldn’t understand Shakespeare,” Mark said honestly. “Nor could I … the first two times. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”

Lafayette in helping the United States maintain its independence: Rochambeau, Bougainville and, above all, De Grasse.

At the Quarterly Meeting in December 1777 the Quakers of the Choptank became the first important religious group in the south to outlaw slavery among its members.

It had required more than a hundred years for this most liberal of the southern Christian sects to decide that human slavery was inconsistent with Christian principles; the more conservative sects would require an additional century.

(Of course, this encouragement of creativity never applied to blacks. They were seldom allowed to read, or pursue mathematics, or discharge their inventive skills. The social loss incurred by our nation because of this arbitrary deprivation would be incalculable.)

By all standards, and in the opinion of all, the one island which represented human slavery at its absolute nadir was Haiti.

American slavery covered such a vast area that no generalizations could be easily made. In the northern tobacco states with temperate climates, like Virginia, it duplicated the best aspects of the English pattern; in the more remote lower states, like Mississippi and Louisiana with their steaming sugar and indigo fields, the worst features of the Dutch and Haitian systems flourished. And the cotton states, like Georgia and Alabama, offered some of the best, some of the worst.

Maryland was in a category by itself. Indeed, it encompassed two categories: the western shore, whose plantations were much modified by anti-slavery pressures from Pennsylvania; and the Eastern Shore, which remained insulated from outside pressures and resembled a fiefdom of the Carolinas.

From Africa about eleven million slaves were exported, and more than half found cruel masters; the reasons for their submission are complex and terrifying. Primarily, they could be kept under control because they never functioned as a unit of eleven million human beings; they were parceled out, a few at a time, a hundred here, threescore there. And after they had been hidden away, all agencies of society conspired to keep them in bondage.

Each minister in slave territory intoned the ancient lessons from the Bible: “ ‘And that servant which knew his master’s will and did not do it shall be beaten with many stripes.’ Those are the words of Jesus Himself.”

From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called State of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America.

“The religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, a justifier of the most appalling brutality, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.”

In the 1850s, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act under the sponsorship of Senators Clay and Webster—Calhoun felt it was not stringent enough—a subtle, undeclared war erupted between the slaveowners and the enemies of the peculiar institution.

In the decade from 1851 to the end of 1860, some two thousand made their way up the Eastern Shore, fighting against incalculable odds, trying to beat their way to freedom.

Delmarva Peninsula, as it had been aptly named from the first syllables of the three states which shared it.

Chief Justice Taney and his associates found an easy, if evasive, escape; they announced that since Dred Scott was black, he was not a citizen of the United States and had no right to defend himself in a federal court. His status reverted to what it had been three decades earlier. He was born a slave and must remain so through life.

no arm of government anywhere within the United States could deprive an owner of his lawful property; the Missouri Compromise was void; Congress could not prevent slavery in the territories; and individual states were powerless to set black men free.

Proverbs 29:19,

First Peter 2:18,

Legislation was passed making it a crime to circulate either Helper or Uncle Tom’s Cabin,

On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln publicly proclaimed a course of action he had decided upon earlier: all slaves within the states at war against the Union were to be free on January 1, 1863.

The proclamation, which had no force and did not free one slave, did have the power to depress slave prices in border states.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE EASTERN SHORE CAME IN that four-decade span from 1880 to 1920 when the rest of the nation allowed the marshy counties to sleep undisturbed.

In these decades when the Eastern Shore flourished, the city of Baltimore also flourished. Some discriminating critics considered it the best city in America, combining the new wealth of the North with the old gentility of the South. The city offered additional rewards: a host of German settlers who gave it intellectual distinction; numerous Italians who gave it warmth. But for most observers, its true excellence derived from the manner in which its hotels and restaurants maintained a tradition of savory cooking: southern dishes, northern meats, Italian spices and German beer.

In the Quaker faith the minister had no legitimacy other than his or her own behavior, and no fixed income other than what he or she could earn by hard work. A Quaker acted like a minister, then became one.

Like locusts they destroyed a graciousness of life they could not comprehend, introducing abominations like labor agitation, income taxes, women’s suffrage, Communism, Bolshevism and the New Deal!!!

Langston Hughes and the life of Frederick Douglass, who had grown up nearby.

World War II had come and gone, scarcely touching the Shore;

Maryland did not want the Eastern Shore, did not understand it or care to pay for its upkeep, but it was determined that it not become part of any other state. So a bridge was authorized that nobody on the Eastern Shore desired in order to destroy a way of life that everyone wished to preserve; and rich northerners who had bought estates along the rivers bewailed its arrival the way rich southerners had once lamented the departure of slavery.

“Ain’t gonna be no more harmony,”

“There is no reason why any sane person should read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. It is one of the worst books ever written by an American, shoddy, meretricious and without any redeeming social value.”

It had not yet occurred to them that it was the system that was wrong, not Luta Mae,

“We ought to burn the damned thing down!”

WHENEVER A NEWCOMER SETTLED ON THE EASTERN Shore he was obligated to declare himself on three vital points: Are you Protestant or Catholic? Republican or Democrat? And do you favor Chesapeake retrievers or Labradors?