Baltimore's African-American population--nearly 27,000 strong and more than 90 percent free in 1860--was the largest in the nation at that time. Christopher Phillips's Freedom's Port, the first book-length study of an urban black population in the antebellum Upper South, chronicles the growth and development of that community.
He shows how it grew from a transient aggregate of individuals, many fresh from slavery, to a strong, overwhelmingly...