6.5 Conclusion

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch freedom tradition could be found in the writings of a great many scholars, and it continued to be reiterated in tracts during the eighteenth century.

However, when the Dutch came into contact with slaves on their soil, such confirmations of clear soil were clearly more difficult to find. Before the second half of the eighteenth century, the evidence is patchy, and the black presence must have been minimal. The cases we traced showed that some black people had clearly heard of the freedom precedent, but there was no clear legal affirmation. Quite the contrary, as elsewhere, Dutch courts did not seem inclined to afford much compassion to stowaways arriving in the Republic.

The record only becomes clearer when the freedom principle was perceived as a legal problem in the early 1770s. This was clearly a problem of the Republic’s own making, as its lawyers seemed to confirm the legality of the freedom principle in two particular cases. Clearly, this went against the vested colonial interests of the province of Holland and the colonial interests behind it. Thus, Holland was pivotal in partially restricting the freedom principle through the 1776 statute. On the short term, the instrument seems to have been enforced well, with the Dutch trying to tie the loose ends that had been left by the resolutions of 1771 and 1773. After a few years however, the attitude of casual neglect towards the legal anomaly seems to have come back.

It took until 1838 before the freedom principle was clearly restored in The Netherlands, at a time when the black presence had once more become minimal to non-existent. Even then, late cases such as the 1852 example of Virginie show that there was still opposition against the possibilities of the freedom principle to disrupt ties of colonial ownership.