The Crime of Freedom

Slavery in Maryland died during the 1860s, but for all of their promise the changes also brought heartbreak. As Chapter 7 shows, black men’s acquisition of a fuller bundle of property rights and legal protections brought them into conflict with the very criminal justice system built to guard those rights and ensure those protections. White commentators scoffed at black men’s supposed indolence and bristled at their households’ apparent disorder; police officers arrested black Baltimoreans for an expanding list of crimes; and black people, black men in particular, were incarcerated at growing rates. During the years immediately following the Civil War, Baltimore’s policemen and prisons perpetrated a form of racial violence that was different from yet indicative of the violence inflicted by the old order’s vigilantes. Castigated as criminals, freedmen’s legal victories provoked a form of policing reserved for the truly free.

Introduction

The opening chapter introduces the broader story that the next seven chapters will tell, and makes clear that this is a study of policing which culminates in the mass black incarceration of late 1860s Baltimore. The book has two primary arguments: first, that Baltimore’s police institutions were from the onset shaped by a liberal order that assumed criminality as the essence of black freedom; and second, that the criminalization of black freedom in turn encouraged white police power. The introduction also defines three concepts central to these arguments – police, property, and manhood – while situating the book in existing historiography, especially that of 19th century criminal justice and American liberalism. Finally, it suggests that this history of the nineteenth-century is an antecedent to today’s stories of racialized police brutality and mass black incarceration.

Epilogue

The epilogue argues that the black carceral state was not simply a recreated slave state. Rather, as shown throughout the book, the black carceral state arose in liberal freedom’s name. Had the old order simply survived in modified form, then all that would have remained to do was expunge its remnants. But slavery in Baltimore did perish during the 1860s, and the legal system that lawmakers put in its place guaranteed the wage-earning and house-holding rights of all men, white or black alike. It is thus vitally important for modern Americans to understand not only why mass black policing and incarceration occurred after this happened but also how such policing and incarceration constituted one of emancipation’s most original creations. For that truth still holds today. The lesson from the historical Baltimore example is this: the fight against white supremacy cannot and will never end with a color-blind legal code alone.

Protecting the Household

Antebellum racial policing also extended to the household, as Chapter 4 demonstrates. Police reform was implemented in the name of property, and in a patriarchal world, households often counted as male property. Thus the new policemen were supposed to protect good householders. And they often did. But free black households fit into this system uncomfortably. Beliefs in black household disorder, and subsequent police regulations targeted at black families, combined with the prohibition of black testimony against white people both to undermine black men’s household autonomy and heighten white male power over black households. When a white person entered a black home, there was not much a policeman could do, even if he wanted to. As a result, free black Baltimoreans’ home lives were uniquely susceptible to white violence. Once again, policemen confirmed the disparity.

Policing the Black Criminal

This chapter argues that white Baltimoreans acted on their fears of free black crime all the time, often violently and usually with the municipality’s approval. In the process, it shows that the compatibility between professional and popular policing manifested not only in job-busting attacks and home invasions but also in more prosaic moments, such as when an ordinary citizen arrested a black man or protected him from harm. The public authorities were nominally engaged in a broader project of seizing legitimate force for the state alone, but the policing of free black Baltimoreans relied upon informal white power no less than it did upon formal state power. Police officers did not always protect them. Prisons did not always house them. In the age of slavery, Baltimore’s officials preferred to leave the fates of free people of color to ordinary white men. When it came to policing black people, white vigilantes were the police.

Rioters and Vigilantes

This chapter presents an overview of the system of policing that existed in Baltimore during the early decades of the nineteenth century – before the city’s organization of a professional police force and the state’s introduction of a reformative penal system. It argues that Baltimore’s municipal government initially depended upon mobs of ordinary white men to police the city. Occasionally these men earned money for their policing, blurring the line between formal policing and vigilantism; occasionally these men ran amok, leading to riots. Whatever the case, by attempting to maintain order and combating crime, “good citizens” enacted their freedom in an otherwise unfree world. In early Baltimore, policing was above all a practice by which white men affirmed their political inclusion.

The Rights of Men

This chapter moves the argument into the post-emancipation period. In particular, it chronicles the story of the legal code’s deracialization during the years following the state’s 1864 emancipation decree. Many different groups, friends and foes of the freedmen alike, defined freedom as self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and it would be these liberal ideals that shaped the legal terms of emancipation. As federal agents worked to enforce black men’s wage contracts and ratify their marriage contracts, as formerly enslaved black men eagerly asserted their rights to possess both, and as an interracial coalition of activists confronted stubborn employers and an apprentice system still indebted to slavery, a fully realized property rights regime emerged. Through real work – through hard work – slavery died during the 1860s, and a seemingly color-blind legal order predicated upon male rights to wages and household autonomy arose in its place. In liberal terms, emancipation looked like a success.

Policemen and Prisons

This chapter chronicles the development of police reform in Baltimore during the middle decades of the nineteenth century – the development, that is, of both a professional municipal police force and a reformative state-run penal system. Police reform grew state power in the name of liberal freedom. Reformers established the police force to protect the rights of individuals, particularly their property rights, and built prisons to remake inmates into individuals capable of possessing such rights in the first place. But this liberalism had far-reaching implications for a wide range of free Baltimoreans, particularly the white workingmen who made up the rank and file of the city’s political order. As “property holders” of wages and dependents, white workingmen deployed real power under the new system.

Securing the Workplace

This chapter, along with the next two, interrogates the ways that police reform amplified ordinary white men’s power to police free black Baltimoreans. One site of such racial policing was the workplace. By the late 1850s, Chapter 3 shows, white workingmen were commonly engaging in job busting – i.e. chasing skilled black workingmen from the docks and rail yards with the police’s complicity. This was because the law did not treat all workers equally, even in an industrializing city where employers held much of the leverage and the vast majority of the people of color were free. Black workers were prolific in Baltimore, and the wages black Baltimoreans earned were meaningful evidence of their freedom, but the legal and institutional discrimination they confronted put them at a severe disadvantage when facing white violence in the workplace. More times than not, professional policemen confirmed the disparity.