Many manumission laws discouraged masters from freeing slaves who couldn’t take care of themselves. The aim was not to be benevolent, but to protect communities from the burden of caring for them.

The efforts by Black and white manumission activists during the 1780s and 1790s ultimately shifted New York legislators’ views of slavery: After a long battle, lawmakers enacted an act for the ...

Today we’ll explore this phenomenon of private manumission—the most common legal pathway from slavery to freedom—from the colonial era to the government interventions of the early ...

MANUMISSION OF A REBEL'S SLAVES. Share full article. Sept. 14, 1861. Credit... The New York Times Archives. See the article in its original context from September 14, 1861, Page 1 Buy Reprints.

Willis' manumission document, on display at the museum, is written in a slanted cursive style by Willis' owner, Singleton Vaughn, who once served as Solano County assessor.

The manumission paper may have been written entirely in longhand or Gué might have used one of the printed manumission forms available and filled in the blanks. In the clerk's office, the ...

Historians have deciphered a 1,900-year-old papyrus discovered in the Judean desert that details an elaborate tax evasion scheme, forgery and fraudulent sale and manumission of slaves by two men.

Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D-Va.) in his office with the copy of his ancestor's manumission document that his father gave him shortly before he was sworn in earlier this month.

Scholars aren't entirely clear on what fee was evaded. They theorize it could have been a 4% tax on direct slave sales, a 5% tax on manumission by Roman citizens, a poll tax that slave owners were ...

“Because manumission was just an exercise of the giver’s rights,” he notes, “it changed almost nothing.” The Best Books of 2023 Read our reviews of the year’s notable new fiction and ...