Manumission

Manumission is the act of a slave owner freeing their slaves. Ancient Greece and Rome had their own systems. The colonies of North America and the slave societies of the individual states in the United States developed differing approaches.

North American colonies had rules for manumission passed by their legislatures, and African slaves were freed in the colonies as early as the seventeenth century. In the United States after the American Revolutionary War, individual states established laws governing this transaction and tended to make it easier to accomplish. In the first two decades after the American Revolutionary War, many of the new states passed laws allowing slaveholders to declare slaves free by filing papers, and numerous manumissions were made in the idealism of the war. The percentage of free blacks as a proportion of the total black population increased in the Upper South from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent in this period. Together with several northern states abolishing slavery during this period, the percentage of free blacks nationally increased to 13.5 percent of the total black population.

After invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which enabled the development of extensive new areas for new types of cotton cultivation, manumissions decreased due to increased demand for slave labor. In the nineteenth century, slave revolts such as the Haitian Revolution and especially the 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner increased slaveholder fears, and most southern states passed laws making manumission nearly impossible until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery after the American Civil War in 1866.