Black Parallel Politics in Maryland

Black pastor Benjman Howard began “prech[ing] In the M E church” in Baltimore sometime before 1855, when it appears that he began working as a travelling minister. He “was travling In Anaplaus Marland In may 1855,” he reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau, when he met Samuel E. Duvall, a wealthy enslaver and planter, who “came and tuck me home to his house 3 miles and A haff from Amaplas.” There, Duvall and his wife “prasuaded me to Leve Baltimore and he wood give me graund to Bild A house on In Anaplas Neck.” 

Howard recalled that “In July 1857 I movd from Baltimore to Anaplas  In my one [own] house I thair Livd comfortable fore 3 yeairs,” but the comfort was short-lived. “In the year 1861,” he explained, “the atharateys starped mee from preching  And in Auguest 1862 I was A Rested and put in Prison fore preching then my house was sarched” by the Duvalls and his papers destroyed. Secession, it appears, had fundamentally altered their relationship to the Black preacher. 

Howard’s work as a Black pastor in Civil War Maryland not only led to suspicion, but incarceration, apprenticeship, and banishment for the 68-year-old minister. “I Lade in prison an till febury the 3th 1863,” he testified,  and “was tackon to the court house and thair sold out fore 15 yeairs fore Biding me not to cross the Lines of marland.”

Howard’s devastating experiences reveal the difficulty in adequately describing Black politics in Maryland, a difficulty intentionally produced by the state itself. Howard encountered a landscape of formal, institutional exclusion in Maryland. The restrictions on Black preaching, for example, were passed in the aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion after enslavers and their allies came to understand the revolutionary potential of these spaces. Despite being formally free, Howard was in fact anything but, and lost his legal freedom because of white surveillance and criminalization of Black religious activities, assemblies, and organizing.

His careful account of the details of his case, including witnesses like Rev. John H. Brice—a free Black carpenter who, by 1870, had been ordained as a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church—appears to have been ignored by the Freedmen’s Bureau, who took no action in his case. Nonetheless, they reveal the importance of what Gabrielle Foreman terms Black parallel politics, which looks beyond and works against the constraints of the state and its institutions. In asserting Black dignity and autonomy, Howard and his network of Black supporters demanded rights to property and self-determination that remained contested under the postemancipation state. Thus, we have chosen to employ the term parallel politics to refer to grassroots organizing because it articulates both the aims and power dynamics at work in Black politics while moving beyond questions of recognition or incorporation as their ultimate goal.

Explore the organizing of Black Marylanders against the constraints of the state.

Black Marylanders understood the repressive nature of the local, state, and federal governments under which they lived, and used a variety of tactics to put pressure on these systems while creating independent resources and opportunities for their communities.

In Baltimore, the Black nuns of the Oblate Sisters of Providence explained that their school grew from exactly this kind of grassroots political activity. “In the year 1829,” they wrote, “a few Ladies of Color, formed themselves into an association for the Education of Children of our race.” This community organizing to found a Black Catholic school, they boasted, “was the first effort of the kind made in the United States.”

The longstanding Black associations, organizing, and petitioning campaigns in and around Baltimore made it a prime location for wartime agitation against the state sponsored repression that Black communities faced. When B. R. Hawley wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 1865, for example, he did so at the “general requeste of the Colord Peple of this City” who had been prevented from hosting a charitable fundraising lecture by Frederick Douglass. “I thik it is [prejudice] against the Colord men,” he asserted, “or [in] other Words a gainst the Colord nattion” that prevented them from arranging the public event. With this “Colord nattion” at his back, Hawley demanded that Stanton “Decide this grate question. of disputee to which a letter from you can decide it at once.” In this way, he helped to create intellectual, political, and financial resources for Black Baltimore while also pushing the state to remove existing constraints on Black thinkers and assemblies.

You can read the petitions of Hawley and the Oblate Sisters of Providence, along with those of other Black organizers, agitators, and communities, in the section that follows.