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Baltimore was the second-most important port in the eighteenth-century South, after Charleston, South Carolina. Planters relied on the extensive system of rivers to transport their produce from inland plantations to the Atlantic coast for export. By 1755, about 40% of Maryland's population was black, with African Americans concentrated in the Tidewater counties where tobacco was grown. In 1700, the province had a population of about 25,000, and by 1750 that number had grown more than five times to 130,000. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.īy the 18th century, Maryland had developed into a plantation colony and slave society, requiring extensive numbers of field hands for the labor-intensive commodity crop of tobacco. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as their economy improved at home, fewer made passage to the colonies. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market for cash crops was strong in Europe. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay.

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While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined here as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state.

Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Piper Farm Slave Quarters, Sharpsburg (photographed 1933)