An Examination of Narratives and History at the Hampton National Historic Site
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This dissertation examines the historical narratives provided by the Hampton National Historic Site (HNHS), a plantation museum located in northern Baltimore County, Maryland, in order to place them into a larger historical context. Built in the 1780s by Captain Charles Ridgely, Hampton would serve as the summer home and main plantation for the Ridgely family until 1947 when it was sold to the National Parks Service. At its height, Hampton encompassed 24,000 acres and over 300 enslaved men, women, and children. The Ridgelys were an early colonial family in central Maryland who earned their wealth in a variety of endeavors including shipping, agriculture, and iron production. The first few generations of the Ridgely family achieved moderate success in local politics eventually holding the governorship of Maryland from 1815-1818. However, abolition hit the family hard and by the turn of the twentieth century the family’s finances were a shadow of what they had been forcing the family to sell off vast tracts of land and eventually the plantation itself. Purchased by the National Parks Service for its architectural brilliance as an example of Georgian architecture, the history of over 150 years of forced and bound labor was largely ignored in the plantation’s new role as a historic site. By the start of the twenty-first century, HNHS had begun the long slow process of telling a more inclusive narrative about the site’s past and the role of the Ridgelys in the institution of slavery. This dissertation provides the first academic history of the Hampton plantation, with special attention to the historical experience of enslaved and free African Americans, while also considering how the site represents this history to visitors. It argues that historical interpretation has often downplayed the centrality of the institution of slavery at plantations and, by extension, in local and national history. The history of places like Hampton and the larger geopolitical space in which they occupy cannot fully be understood without greater attention to the diverse forms of enslavement and emancipation which brought them into existence. At Hampton, the unusual form of enslavement, through ironworks, that existed along with more traditional plantation crops, first tobacco and later grains, has further obscured the experience of enslaved people in early Maryland. In addition, ironically, the very agency of enslaved people that helped to secure a relatively early emancipation at Hampton, in 1829 (though enslavement persisted and returned in different forms), has also worked to hide the significance of slavery at the site. The story of Hampton and, by extension, the Ridgelys has traditionally been used to advance a popular, happy version of the American story. On the surface, the story of the Ridgelys features a middling English family that migrated to the new world and reached the heights of American society. The Ridgelys were soldiers, politicians, diplomats, and landowners. In local popular history, though they were slaveholders, they were good slaveholders who never sold enslaved people south as punishment and who, in 1829, emancipated their enslaved workforce for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. When Confederate monuments came under scrutiny in the summer of 2017, and places named after slaveholders were being renamed, sites named for the Ridgelys and Hampton were left untouched. No large community gatherings were held even to question if those places needed to be renamed. The popular history of the Ridgelys was, by and large, the accepted version of the Ridgely family history, and it was propagated by and large by the Hampton National Historic Site (HNHS). Identity plays a prominent role in how the Ridgelys engaged with their world. Identity is also a key factor in how the docents of HNHS frame their narrative of the Ridgely’s. When done correctly, identity is an effective framing device, though it can be limited. This limitation usually comes from a lack of historical context. Without proper context, the narratives told by the docents of HNHS are left adrift and are not part of a more significant historical analysis. This dissertation widens those limits by bringing an academic approach to the public history of HNHS and by placing these two disciplines in communication. Moreover, by providing larger historical context to the frame of identity, this work aims to more fully humanize the people, especially enslaved and free African Americans, who inhabited Hampton throughout its two-hundred-year history.
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