Many Paths to Manumission
Throughout this book so far, we have seen examples of slave owners who freed their enslaved property for many reasons. Recall the story of Chica da Silva presented in chapter 10.
In eighteenth-century Brazil, the first owner of Chica da Silva freed her son of whom he was the father and also made him one of his heirs. But later on, Chica was sold to another owner, who was sexually and romantically attracted to her. Given that attraction, weeks after acquiring her, he manumitted her, and together the couple had several children, who were fully recognized by Chica’s former slave owner and became his heirs. In other cases, slave owners manumitted enslaved people, especially in their wills, as a way to express gratitude, even though they sometimes only made this gesture when they were infirm. Some manumissions also involved conditions, such as to continue providing services until their owners’ deaths.Enslaved people in Brazil and Latin American regions such as Peru, Colombia, and Cuba could also obtain manumission through self-purchase, which consisted of paying the owner their own market value. But regardless of specific motives and conditions, as explained earlier, manumissions were widespread in these regions. Based on Roman law, Portuguese legal codes and later the Brazilian legislation did not establish clear regulations either allowing or forbidding slave owners to free their enslaved property. Ultimately, emancipating a bondsperson was a private decision taken by the slave owner in agreement with the enslaved person and regulated by custom, in which the state and the Catholic Church rarely interfered. Slave owners granted manumission to reward good service and to express affection in recognition of family ties. Some owners, however, promised manumission in exchange for sexual favors, only to fail to fulfill their promises. By 1834, RamĂłn SaĂz, a slave owner from Havana, Cuba, promised Florencia, a fourteen-year-old enslaved girl, that he would manumit her if she had sex with him.
But after they had sex, not only did he not free her, but he also put her to work in a blacksmith’s shop and attempted to torture her by inserting “silver rings in the most secret parts of her nature.”4In urban areas, enslaved men and women who had permission to work outside the households of their owners could keep a small part of their income. More autonomous than other enslaved individuals who worked on plantations and farms, they could gradually amass money to purchase their own freedom. The frequency with which self-purchase happened was higher than the occurrence of manumissions and varied according to sex, color, place of birth, region, and period. Manumission by grace and self-purchase existed in other parts of the Americas as well, but the conditions changed over time. In the thirteen British colonies of North America, legal codes imposed restrictions on manumissions several times. For example, in 1691, Virginia prohibited newly freed people from remaining in its territory. Thus, any owner who emancipated an enslaved individual had to transport the newly freed person outside the colony. South Carolina legislature passed a similar restriction in 1735.5 Following the independence of the thirteen colonies, the “Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves” passed in the Virginia General Assembly in 1782, thereby permitting slave owners to manumit their slaves in their wills or any other written document presented before a court. Moreover, the new act also eliminated the previous restriction mandating the transportation of newly freed individuals outside the colony.6 Similar laws allowing manumissions passed in Maryland and Delaware in the years that followed the birth of the independent United States as well.
Brazilian-born and mixed-race enslaved persons, especially women, had greater access to self-purchase, as noted in chapter 8. In Brazil and the Spanish-speaking Americas, enslaved men and women also purchased their own freedom via coartaciĂłn (in Spanish) and coartação (in Portuguese), a system of self-purchase that resulted from an agreement in which the bondsperson paid the owner the amount of their freedom in several installments.
In Brazil, coartação was not regulated by legislation, but mostly both parties involved in the agreement usually respected its conventions. In addition, as explained in chapter 14, becoming a member of a Catholic lay brotherhood or of societies of mutual assistance was a convenient way to acquire the means to purchase freedom, even though amassing funds could take several years. These paths to freedom, in addition to the free womb laws, altered the profile of enslaved populations in the Americas during the nineteenth century.In the Northern states of the United States, when final emancipation occurred, the enslaved population was relatively small in most regions. The end of slavery in Saint-Domingue through a revolution, however, liberated many thousands of enslaved people, but even on the independent portion of the island, there was already a visible freed and free Black population, including African-born men and women. In Cuba, both gradual abolition and manumissions by grace or self-purchase contributed to the decrease of the number of enslaved people by the time slavery was finally abolished in the 1886. When slavery finally ended in Brazil in 1888, the country also had a huge freed and free Black population. On the eve of emancipation, enslaved men and women led massive manumission campaigns. Fearing revolts, slave owners started freeing thousands of slaves as well.