Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

== Summary ==
-  This
book examines the tense relationship between slave and free labor, black and white
in Maryland leading up to and after the Civil War. The rise of two free
populations in Maryland, one white and one black, “challenged the political,
moral and ideological coherence of slave society.” The rise of a largely free
labor society signaled a political threat to slaveholders. Yet, Fields warns,
the presence of a larger, free black population should not be read as evidence
as an inevitable transition from slavery to freedom. Freed blacks continued to
be embedded within the slave system and had a limited status as freed blacks. She
also shows that slavery was just as harsh and slaveholders defended slavery
just as staunchly as their confederate counterparts, especially during the
Civil War. Moreover, freed blacks cannot just be examined as an emerging
proletariat, but as workers trying to find self-sufficiency through their
independent pursuits. Maryland was thus an ideological and geographical middle
ground that united conflicting economic interests between slaveholders and
commercial elites. Commercial elites in Baltimore were still held politically
subject to the land and slave-owning elite of Southern Maryland. This middle
ground must be understood as an obligation, she contends, not as something
ignoble or an enlightened philosophical outlook. She argues that civil war
marked the end of slavery and thus the political middle ground. As a it result,
it redefined the slaveholder and slave relationship, as well as the
relationships between former free black and former slave, former slaveholder
and former nonslaveholder, between city and country, and between government and
citizen. The politics afterwards proved to be just as a difficult as in the
confederacy. 
Example: The presence of slavery continued to set close boundaries on liberty of the ostensibly
free, and affected the social relations between slaves and free black people. For
example, laws were established that could bound freed black children to
“apprenticeships” and become personal property if they were not being taught in
the “habits of industry”; freed blacks were also unable to own dogs or
firearms, or purchase liquor with a special licenses; they could not sell
bacon, pork, or grains without certification from a justice of peace. As these
laws reflect, the continuity of the slave system defined and limited the status of free blacks (conscript slaves).
See also: Thomas Bender, Walter Johnson, Eric Foner