The city government often appears to take that advice. But the local population of free blacks, estimated now to be more than seventy-five thousand, is concerning to slavers in other parts of the state. Even Davis, who opposes slavery, feels that blacks and whites cannot live together. He himself inherited several human beings and freed them all, but only on condition that they move to Liberia. At this time, Abraham Lincoln also sees Liberia as the answer to the slavery question.

This is not the solution the Maryland slaveholders want. They want the free blacks re-enslaved.

In 1860, a bill proposed by Representative Colonel Curtis Jacob outlines a number of mechanisms through which this might be accomplished. He delivers a lengthy speech on the subject. In it, he castigates the Northern abolitionists as “frenzied vampires,” “literally crazed and mad . . . with the lust for Southern blood.” How long, he asks, must they wait to see someone, anyone, punished for Edward Gorsuch, who went to Christiana to recover his slaves and died there?

He goes on to decry free-Negroism as “an excrescence, a blight,” and then, just to be clear, “a mildew, a fungus.” The free Negroes have no actual rights of citizenship, he says, pointing out that they cannot vote or carry a gun or testify in court or own a dog or attend a church with a black minister or buy alcohol or sell corn or gather publicly or gather privately. Their condition is a freedom in name only. And yet, by their very existence, they destroy the contentment of those in bondage.

Jacob mourns those happy slaves of the past, now infected with the desire for liberty. Universal re-enslavement is the only path back to black contentment. His bill proposes that every Negro emancipated in the last thirty years be returned to their rightful owners without the cost of litigation or any other vexatious delay.

Jacob’s bill is thankfully defeated. But a number of city representatives, including the theatrical manager John T. Ford, spend their own money to publish and disseminate Jacob’s speech. They will not accept this defeat. They will get their message out and try again.

—

The Booths are neither oblivious to nor personally affected by these events. Edwin is scarcely home before he leaves again on tour. John’s starting his theatrical career in earnest. June is still in San Francisco with his family. Joe remains at school. The time of the Maryland Booths is coming to an end.

Rosalie

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