Thomas C. Cox

Bio: Thomas C. Cox is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social history & Frontier. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 46 citations.

The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland

Abstract: Paradoxically, in the decades following the Revolution, slavery in Baltimore gained strength even as slaves were being freed in record numbers. The vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves with craft skills. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years of hard work. This was a practical, not a philanthropic arrangement; following the release of one group of slaves, owners would simply purchase additional ones. This practice of "term slavery" created a labor force affordable to small craftsmen and manufacturers and directly contributed to the urban development of the country's third largest city. Newly freed slaves, driven by debts contracted in purchasing freedom, remained dependent upon their former masters for employment. The freeing of blacks in rural Maryland and their migrations to Baltimore to work and save in order to aid still-enslaved kin supplied the city with even more free black workers.

Sectionalism, Nationalism, And The Agrarian Revolt, 1877-1892

Abstract: ...................................................................................................ii DEDICATION................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: UNIFYING FOR THE CAUSE: THE ALLIANCE HONEYMOON PERIOD, 1877-1889.....................................................................................................14 CHAPTER TWO: “UNION IT IS”: THE SOUTHERN FARMERS’ ALLIANCE GOES NATIONAL...................................................................................................46 CHAPTER THREE: THE SOUTHERN ALLIANCE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY............81 CHAPTER FOUR: “PATRIOTIC DEVOTION” OR “SECTIONAL BITTERNESS”: RECONCILIATION, PRODUCERISM, AND POLITICS..........................................128 CHAPTER FIVE: OCALA, POLITICS, AND SECTIONALISM..................................174 CHAPTER SIX: SECTIONAL POLITICS AND THE SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION...........212 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................269 VITA.........................................................................................................281

Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War

Abstract: In reconstructing the early business history of black America, Professor Walker emphasizes the diversity and complexity of antebellum black entrepreneurship, both slave and free. With few exceptions, prevailing historical assessments have confined their analyses of pre-Civil War black business participation to marginal enterprises, concentrated primarily in craft and service industries. In America's preindustrial mercantile business community, however, blacks established a wide variety of enterprises, some of them remarkably successful. The business activities of antebellum blacks not only offer insights into the multiplicity of responses to the constraints of racism and slavery, but also highlight relatively unexplored areas in the historical development of the free enterprise system in the United States.