Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Blacks in the New World)

Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Blacks in the New World) by Phillips, Christopher. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780252066184.

Baltimores African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillipss Freedoms 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, Baltimores 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 citys black people had achieved.