“If They Meant to Be Free”: Emotion, Black Assembly, and White Fear at St. Inigoe’s in 1817
- J.D. Barnes
- 4 minutes ago
- 9 min read
On Easter Monday, April 7, 1817, a gathering of free and enslaved Black people at St. Inigoe’s in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, became the subject of a small but revealing chain of newspaper reports. White editors and correspondents called it a riot, an insurrection, a drunken disturbance, and a symptom of the evils of dram shops. One account insisted there was “no rational or practical scheme, nothing but stupid violence.” Yet the same reports preserved something more troubling to the society that produced them: Black people gathered in large numbers, celebrated a holiday, responded collectively to violence, pursued a constable, damaged property, spoke of forming ranks, and, according to one report, declared that “then was their time if they meant to be free.”¹
The central historical insight is this: the St. Inigoe’s incident reveals that slavery in Southern Maryland was not only a system of labor, law, and coercion. It was also an emotional regime. It claimed for white people the right to fear, indignation, honor, and public order, while casting Black joy as disorder, Black anger as irrationality, Black gathering as conspiracy, and Black political speech as criminal threat. In that sense, the 1817 event was not simply a local disturbance. It was a moment when the emotional architecture of slavery became visible.
A Riot, an Insurrection, or a Struggle Over Emotional Legitimacy?
The surviving newspaper accounts do not give us transparent access to Black interior life. They are hostile, mediated, and politically interested documents. That is precisely why they matter. Their language shows how white observers tried to organize the emotional meaning of the event.
The National Intelligencer account, reprinted elsewhere, described a “daring riot” at a dram shop, where Black participants allegedly turned on whites, drove them from the lot, beat them with sticks, stoned them with brickbats, pursued a constable, and threatened further violence. The writer’s conclusion was stark: although “a rising was contemplated,” there was “no rational or practical scheme.”² This formulation is internally unstable. To call the event an insurrection was to attribute danger and intention to the crowd. To call it stupid violence was to deny the crowd rationality and political standing. The account needed Black agency in order to justify white panic, but it needed Black irrationality in order to preserve white supremacy.
That contradiction is the historian’s opening. The adjectives do ideological work. The verbs tell another story. The crowd “pursued,” “followed,” “sacked,” “called,” “formed,” and “threatened.” These are not the actions of a shapeless emotional mob. They are forms of collective conduct, however improvised, that reveal purpose. The white accounts tried to reduce Black action to intoxication and disorder, but their own narrative evidence records coordination, target selection, and political language.
Emotion as Practice: Easter, Drinking, Gathering, Pursuit
A history of emotions lens helps clarify what was at stake. Emotions were not simply feelings hidden inside individuals. They were practiced through bodies, spaces, rituals, substances, words, and repeated social forms.³ The Easter holiday mattered because it created time. The dram shop mattered because it created space. Alcohol mattered because it was not only a commodity but a medium of sociability. The crowd mattered because gathering itself could generate a collective emotional field.
One Vermont account, written with condescension but unusual detail, reported that it was customary for enslaved people after church fasts and festivals to have “two or three holidays for their recreation.” It described roughly 300 people, “bond and free,” who spent the day in “festive amusements peculiar to themselves.” Before the event became a riot in white narration, it was a holiday. Before it became insurrection, it was recreation. Before it became a legal emergency, it was a scene of Black sociability.⁴
This matters because white sources often allow Black joy to appear only at the moment it is condemned. In the St. Inigoe’s accounts, joy survives in phrases meant to belittle it. The crowd was “happy in themselves,” the Vermont writer admitted, even as he mocked their drinking with classical language about libations to “the purple god.”⁵ Those phrases are not neutral. They are condescending. But read against the grain, they preserve the existence of a collective emotional practice: Black people using a religious holiday to gather, drink, celebrate, and inhabit, however briefly, a world not entirely organized by white command.
The Constable and the Moment Indignation Changed Sides
The most important difference among the accounts concerns causation. Some versions present the whites as peacekeepers and the Black crowd as suddenly violent. The Vermont account supplies the missing trigger: the constable, “more zealous than wise,” allegedly “fell upon them and began to belabour them most unmercifully with a ponderous shillala.”⁶ That detail transforms the event.
If the crowd was attacked while enjoying a customary holiday, then its anger cannot be reduced to drunken irrationality. It becomes intelligible as indignation: a response to a blameworthy violation. The Vermont writer even uses the word, though he does not grant its full moral force. “Indignation seized the sable throng,” he wrote, “and in the transport of their rage the relation of master and servant was forgotten.”⁷
That sentence deserves to be placed at the center of any interpretation of the event. Its racism is obvious. But its historical value is equally obvious. It records a moment when the emotional grammar of slavery failed. The “relation of master and servant” was not debated, reformed, or petitioned. It was “forgotten.” Not permanently, not safely, not without consequence, but in the heat of collective anger. For a moment, emotional practice suspended hierarchy.
White society could not tolerate that meaning. If Black indignation were legitimate, then Black people possessed a moral self that could be injured. If Black anger could be rational, then slavery itself was open to judgment. The newspaper accounts therefore worked to recast indignation as rage, rage as drunkenness, drunkenness as insurrection, and insurrection as justification for punishment.
Southern Maryland’s Middle Ground of Slavery and Freedom
The event unfolded in a region where slavery and freedom were not separate worlds. Maryland had one of the largest free Black populations in the United States, and Southern Maryland was marked by constant interaction among enslaved people, free Black people, white Catholics, Protestant neighbors, merchants, tenants, and slaveholders. Barbara Fields famously characterized Maryland as a “middle ground,” not because it was moderate in any humane sense, but because slavery and freedom existed in close, unstable proximity.⁸
The St. Inigoe’s crowd embodied this instability. It included people described as “bond and free.” That mixture was dangerous to white observers because it blurred the boundary on which slavery depended. Free Black people could move, work, worship, buy, sell, and communicate in ways enslaved people were not supposed to do. Enslaved people could see in free Black neighbors both possibility and limitation. The gathering of both groups in one place made visible the social fact that Maryland law struggled constantly to contain: Black community did not map neatly onto the legal categories of slave and free.
The local setting sharpened the irony. St. Inigoe’s was not merely a rural neighborhood. It was a Jesuit plantation landscape, part of the Catholic geography of Southern Maryland. Jesuit estates in the region depended on enslaved labor, and St. Inigoe’s would later be remembered as part of the broader history that culminated in the 1838 sale of enslaved people by the Maryland Jesuits to Louisiana.⁹ The 1817 event therefore occurred within a landscape where sacramental time, forced labor, Black Catholic and Protestant experience, and plantation discipline overlapped. Easter was not incidental. It was the temporal condition that made the gathering possible.
Dram Shops, Temperance, and the Fear of Black Joy
White commentators repeatedly blamed spirituous liquors. One account moved quickly from the St. Inigoe’s event to a broad attack on dram shops, lazy magistrates, licensing practices, and the demoralization of the countryside. It claimed that liquor retailing corrupted whites and produced “insubordination and insurrection among the negroes.”¹⁰
At first glance, this seems like temperance rhetoric. But in context, it was more than moral reform. The dram shop represented a place where Black people might gather outside direct household surveillance. It joined alcohol, leisure, exchange, mobility, and sociability. For white Marylanders, that combination was intolerable. Black drinking was dangerous not merely because it produced intoxication, but because it produced association. Association produced confidence. Confidence could produce action.
Maryland law increasingly treated these practices as one problem. Long before the 1830s, statutes regulated Black assembly, trade, weapons, and access to liquor. After Nat Turner’s rebellion, the 1831 Maryland law “relating to Free Negroes and Slaves” prohibited retailers, ordinary keepers, and others from selling ardent spirits, gunpowder, shot, or lead to free Black people without a certificate, or to enslaved people without written authorization from an owner, employer, or overseer. The same statute restricted Black religious meetings unless conducted under white supervision.¹¹ Later codifications continued to empower constables to suppress “tumultuous meetings” and whip enslaved people found there.¹²
The law therefore reveals the deeper structure behind the newspaper rhetoric. White Maryland did not merely fear drunkenness. It feared Black emotional autonomy. It feared the social practices through which Black people became, in public and together, something other than isolated laboring bodies.
Reading Against the Grain Without Inventing the Interior
The archive does not allow us to name the feelings of any individual participant. We do not know who felt fear, who felt exhilaration, who wanted freedom in a revolutionary sense, who wanted only to defend a holiday gathering, or who was swept into danger by the movement of the crowd. A careful history of emotions must respect that limit.
But the sources do allow us to recover the emotional politics of the event. We can see white fear in the language of massacre, patrols, and future plots. We can see white contempt in racialized descriptions of the crowd. We can see white condescension in the Vermont writer’s mock-epic style. We can also see, indirectly but powerfully, Black joy in holiday recreation, Black solidarity in collective response, Black indignation in reaction to assault, and Black political imagination in the reported call to form ranks “if they meant to be free.”
The Buffalo Gazette’s related report of an African camp meeting reinforces the point. There, a gathering of Black worshipers reportedly surrounded officers transporting two convicted Black prisoners and enabled their escape.¹³ The camp meeting and the dram shop were different spaces, one sacred and one secular, but both frightened white observers for the same reason. They were Black gathering places. They made collective emotion possible.
What St. Inigoe’s Adds to the Historiography of the Region
Southern Maryland has too often been narrated through antiquarian romance, Catholic exceptionalism, plantation nostalgia, or the later memory of the Jesuit slave sale. The St. Inigoe’s incident disrupts those frames. It shows the region as a place of emotional contestation, where Black people created spaces of pleasure and solidarity, white authorities read those spaces as danger, and law translated fear into discipline.
The event also contributes to the history of slavery more broadly by insisting that power operated through the distribution of emotional legitimacy. White people could be indignant. Black people could be enraged. White people could defend order. Black people could riot. White people could fear massacre. Black people could not be credited with fear of the lash, sale, prison, or death. This was not merely prejudice in language. It was a governing logic.
The St. Inigoe’s sources matter because they show that the emotional world of slavery was unstable. White writers worked hard to impose meaning on the event, but their own words betray them. They tried to describe irrational violence and recorded political speech. They tried to describe drunken disorder and recorded practiced joy. They tried to describe insurrection and recorded a response to coercive force. They tried to deny Black moral standing and preserved a scene of Black indignation.
That is why this small 1817 episode deserves attention. It reveals slavery not as a settled order but as a fragile emotional regime, always vulnerable to the moments when those it subordinated gathered, celebrated, remembered themselves, and acted as if the relation of master and servant could be forgotten.
Endnotes
“A daring riot,” Mississippi Free Trader, Natchez, Mississippi, May 28, 1817, 2; “Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Maryland,” Vermont Intelligencer, Bellows Falls, Vermont, July 7, 1817, 3.
Mississippi Free Trader, May 28, 1817, 2.
Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice, and Is That What Makes Them Have a History? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220.
Vermont Intelligencer, July 7, 1817, 3.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Julia A. King, Archaeology, Narrative, and the Politics of the Past: The View from Southern Maryland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012); Rachel L. Swarns, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (New York: Random House, 2023).
Evening Post addition to the National Intelligencer account, as reprinted in the St. Inigoe’s newspaper cluster.
“An Act relating to Free Negroes and Slaves,” 1831 Md. Laws, ch. 323, secs. 7, 10.
The Maryland Code: Public General Laws and Public Local Laws, 1860, art. 66, secs. 63–65.
Buffalo Gazette, Buffalo, New York, September 23, 1817, 3.
Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Sasha Turner, “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 232–50.