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Manumission, or enfranchisement, is the act of freeing enslaved people by their enslavers. Different approaches to manumission were developed, each specific to the time and place of a particular society. Historian Verene Shepherd states that the most widely used term is gratuitous manumission, "the conferment of freedom on the enslaved by enslavers before the end of the slave system".
The StonoRebellion was a slave revolt that began on 9 September 1739, in the colony of South Carolina. It was the largest slave rebellion in the Southern Colonies, with 25 colonists and 35 to 50 Africans killed. The uprising was led by native Africans who were likely from the Central African Kingdom of Kongo, as the rebels were Catholic and some spoke Portuguese.
The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and many Northern states had them, it was the Southern U.S. states that codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of them were passed in 1865 and 1866 by Southern states, after the American Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and to compel them to work for low or no wages.
Chatham Manor is a Georgian-style mansion home completed in 1771 by farmer and statesman William Fitzhugh, after about three years of construction, on the Rappahannock River in Stafford County, Virginia, opposite Fredericksburg. It was for more than a century the center of a large, thriving plantation, and the only private residence in the United States to be visited by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Edward Coles was an American planter and politician, elected as the second Governor of Illinois. From an old Virginia family, Coles as a young man was a neighbor and associate of presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, as well as, secretary to President James Madison from 1810 to 1815.
John Roy Lynch was an American writer, attorney, military officer, author, and Republican politician who served as Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and represented Mississippi in the United States House of Representatives.
Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, an 1892 novel by Frances E. W. Harper, is one of the first novels published by an African-American woman. While following what has been termed the "sentimental" conventions of late nineteenth-century writing about women, it also deals with serious social issues of education for women, passing, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, temperance, and social responsibility.
Robert "Councillor" Carter III was a lawyer and planter from the Northern Neck of Virginia, in what became the United States. For two decades he sat on the Colonial Virginia Governor's Council. After the American Revolutionary War, and influenced by his Baptist faith, Carter began what became the largest manumission and release of enslaved African Americans in North America in the 74 years prior to the American Civil War. By a deed of gift filed with Northumberland County on September 5, 1791, and related documents filed in Westmoreland County in subsequent years, Carter began manumitting 500 slaves from his plantations in his lifetime. He also settled many of them on land he gave them.
In Islamic law, a mukataba is a contract of manumission between a master and a slave according to which the slave is required to pay a certain sum of money during a specific time period in exchange for freedom. In the legal literature, slaves who enter this contract are known as mukatab. The Ẓāhirī school of Islamic jurisprudence view it to be compulsory, while the Shafa'is, Malikis and Hanafis perceive it to be merely recommended, and mustahabb (praiseworthy) to do so. Mukataba is one of the four procedures provided in Islam for manumission of slaves.
The New-York Manumission Society was an American organization founded in 1785 by U.S. Founding Father John Jay, among others, to promote the gradual abolition of slavery and manumission of slaves of African descent within the state of New York. The organization was made up entirely of white men, most of whom were wealthy and held influential positions in society. Throughout its history, which ended in 1849 after the abolition of slavery in New York, the society battled against the slave trade, and for the eventual emancipation of all the slaves in the state. It founded the African Free School for the poor and orphaned children of slaves and free people of color.
In common with most Caribbean countries, slavery in the British Virgin Islands forms a major part of the history of the Territory. One commentator has gone so far as to say: "One of the most important aspects of the History of the British Virgin Islands is slavery."
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery throughout the entire United States. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. Kentucky was classified as the Upper South or a border state, and enslaved African Americans represented 24% by 1830, but declined to 19.5% by 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. The majority of enslaved people in Kentucky were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington, in the fertile Bluegrass Region as well the Jackson Purchase, both the largest hemp- and tobacco-producing areas in the state. In addition, many enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Few people lived in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky. Those that did that were held in eastern and southeastern Kentucky served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
Elizabeth Key Grinstead (Greenstead) was one of the first black people of the Thirteen Colonies to sue for freedom from slavery and win. Key won her freedom and that of her infant son John Grinstead on July 21, 1656, in the colony of Virginia. Key based her suit on the fact that her father was an Englishman who had acknowledged her and arranged her baptism as a Christian in the American branch of the Church of England. He was a wealthy planter who had tried to protect her by establishing a guardianship for her when she was young, before his death. Based on these factors, her attorney and common-law husband, William Grinstead, argued successfully that she should be freed. The lawsuit was one of the earliest "freedom suits" by an African-descended person in the English colonies.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 enslaved African Americans during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. The rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts after his death. Privately, one of Jefferson's reasons for not freeing more slaves was his considerable debt, while his more public justification, expressed in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was his fear that freeing enslaved people into American society would cause civil unrest between white people and formerly enslaved people.
Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined here as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as their economy improved at home, fewer made passage to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.
William Ellison Jr., born April Ellison, was a U.S. cotton gin maker and blacksmith in South Carolina, and former African-American slave who achieved considerable success as a slaveowner before the American Civil War. He eventually became a major planter and one of the medium property owners, and one of the wealthiest property owners in the state. According to the 1860 census, he owned up to 68 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina. He held 63 slaves at his death and more than 900 acres (360 ha) of land. From 1830 to 1865 he and his sons were the only free blacks in Sumter County, South Carolina to own slaves. The county was largely devoted to cotton plantations, and the majority population were slaves.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom, often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor, or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
For the rugby player from New Zealand, see Isaac Ross.
Daniel Bell was a formerly enslaved man who gained his freedom and then sought the freedom of his wife, Mary, and their children. Due to a series of unfortunate events, it took decades for the Bell family to obtain their freedom. Daniel and his wife had both been enslaved again after they had obtained their freedom. Two of their children who were born free were enslaved.
References
- ↑ Struggles for Freedom; or The Life of James Watkins, Formerly a Slave in Maryland, U. S. docsouth.unc.edu. p. 45. Retrieved 19 September 2019.
Sources
- Finkelman, Paul (2000). An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.