United States
Slaves were freed in this territory as early as the seventeenth century, and some went on to become landowners and slaveholders in the colonies. Slaves could sometimes arrange manumission by agreeing to "purchase themselves"; that is, to pay the master an agreed amount. Some masters demanded market rates; others set a lower amount in consideration of service.
In the Upper South in the late eighteenth century, planters had less need for slaves as they switched from labor-intensive tobacco cultivation to mixed-crop farming. Slave states such as Virginia made it easier for slaveholders to free their slaves. In the two decades following the American Revolutionary War, numerous slaveholders accomplished manumissions by deed or in wills, so that the percentage of free blacks to the total number of blacks rose from less than one percent to 10 percent in the Upper South. Some northern states quickly abolished slavery, adding to the national population of free blacks; New York and New Jersey adopted gradual abolition laws that kept the free children of slaves as indentured servants into their twenties.
Of the Founding Fathers of the United States as defined by the historian Richard B. Morris, the southerners were the major slaveholders, but northerners also held them, in generally fewer number, as domestic servants. John Adams owned none; George Washington freed his slaves in his will (his wife independently held numerous dower slaves); Thomas Jefferson freed five slaves in his will, and the remaining 130 were sold to settle his estate debts; James Madison did not free his slaves but some were sold to pay off estate debts, and his wife and son retained most to work Montpelier plantation; Benjamin Franklin freed his slaves; Alexander Hamilton likely owned slaves and freed them, as he was an officer of the New York Manumission Society; the society was founded by John Jay, who freed his domestic slaves in 1798, the same year as governor he signed a gradual abolition law in New York.
Read more about this topic: Manumission
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us. And if the big shots in Washington don’t do like we vote, we don’t vote for them, by golly, no more.”
—Willis Goldbeck (1900–1979)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“I incline to think that the people will not now sustain the policy of upholding a State Government against a rival government, by the use of the forces of the United States. If this leads to the overthrow of the de jure government in a State, the de facto government must be recognized.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“You are, I am sure, aware that genuine popular support in the United States is required to carry out any Government policy, foreign or domestic. The American people make up their own minds and no governmental action can change it.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)