 Complete the following phrase:  From the late 18th century into the 1820s Baltimore was a city of transients, a fast-growing boom town attracting thousands of ex-slaves from the surrounding countryside. Slavery in Maryland declined steadily after the 1810s as the states economy shifted away from plantation agriculture, as evangelicalism and a liberal manumission law encouraged slaveholders to free enslaved people held in bondage, and as other slaveholders practiced term slavery, registering deeds of manumission but postponing the actual date of freedom for a decade or more. Baltimores shrinking population of enslaved people often lived and worked alongside the citys growing free black population as quasi-freedmen. With unskilled and semiskilled employment readily available in the shipyards and related industries, little friction with white workers occurred. Despite the overall poverty of the citys free blacks, compared with the condition of those living in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, Baltimore was a city of refuge, where enslaved and free blacks alike found an unusual amount of freedom. Churches, schools, and fraternal and benevolent associations provided a cushion against hardening white attitudes toward free people of color in the wake of 