Slaveholders in Maryland used slaves to cultivate wheat and tobacco,
or to perform domestic work and skilled labor. Slave owners saw
their slaves as property, sources of revenue, status symbols and
important investments. They also saw them as dangerous threats who
needed to be controlled and kept at bay. Owners feared runaways
would encourage other slaves to escape-or rebel. When slaves
escaped, masters might punish those who remained.
Case Study Ricksom Webb was a free black man who owned slaves, an
unusual but not unheard of situation. Like his white counterparts,
he enforced the cruelties of slave labor system in Maryland. Owning
slaves possibly elevated Webb's status in society, even among
whites. Webb owned at least six slaves, including Alfred, who tried
to escape from his Caroline County farm in 1844.
Case Study Rev. John Ashton, a Jesuit priest at the White Marsh
Church in Prince George's County, lost many slaves who not only ran
away, but who also challenged him in court. Two groups of slaves
escaped from Ashton at the end of the eighteenth century. The Queen
family, a group of twelve, fled in 1795. Three years later, brother
Charles and Patrick Mahoney also ran away. Both groups
unsuccessfully sued Ashton for their freedom. Ashton manumitted the
Mahoney brothers in 1804, but the Queen family remained in slavery.
Ashton and Webb challenge the traditional portrait of slave owners.
As a clergyman and a free black, respectively, they illustrate that
slavery was an institution which sometimes outweighed moral and
racial conventions.
