Manumission
Manumission is the act of an enslaver freeing the people they held as slaves, and for as long as slavery existed, so did this practice, taking radically different forms across centuries and continents. Was it an act of generosity, a calculated incentive, a legal transaction, or something more complicated? Historian Verene Shepherd describes the most widely used form as gratuitous manumission: the conferment of freedom on the enslaved by enslavers before the formal end of the slave system. That phrase, "conferment of freedom," carries the full weight of the paradox. Freedom granted is still freedom controlled. The questions this story will turn over are the same ones that haunted every freed person who received a carta de libertad, wore a felt pileus, or was promised freedom in a will: what did freedom actually mean, who decided its terms, and what obligations did it leave behind?
Athens took a striking collective step at the Battle of Arginusae in 406 BC, liberating every enslaved person present on the battlefield. That city-level act was exceptional. In the broader world of ancient Greece, a master freeing a slave would most likely do so only at his death, specifying his wish in a will. Slaves who could accumulate earnings from their labour were sometimes able to buy their own freedom, and these people were known as choris oikointes. Two bankers from the 4th century, Pasion and Phormion, had been slaves before they bought their way out. There was also a ritual fiction: a slave could be sold to a sanctuary, where a god was said to grant the freedom, giving the transaction a sacred cover. Once freed, a former slave did not become a citizen but a metic, a resident foreigner, and the former master became his prostatès, a legal guardian. The freed person was often required to live near that master, a condition called paramone. Their children, however, were born fully free.
Roman law treated a slave as property with no legal personhood, protected mainly as an asset of the owner. Manumission under Roman law transformed a slave into a libertus, and that person became a citizen. The act was subject to a state tax. A formal ceremony called manumissio vindicta, meaning freedom by the rod, involved the master bringing the slave before a magistrate, where a lictor laid a rod called a festuca on the slave's head and declared the person free under the Jus Quiritium. The master then spoke the words "hunc hominem liberum volo" and physically released the slave from his grip. The freed slave customarily took the former owner's family name, the nomen of the master's gens, and the owner became his patron. The client retained obligations to the patron, who in turn owed certain duties back.
The soft felt pileus hat was the public symbol of this transition. Slaves were forbidden to wear it; on gaining freedom, a slave's head was shaved and the pileus placed there in its stead. The phrase servos ad pileum vocare, a summons to liberty, was used when slaves were called to take up arms with a promise of freedom. Legislation from 2 BC, the lex Fufia Caninia, capped the number of slaves a Roman could free in a will, which signals how common the practice had grown. Freed male slaves could enter the civil service, but were barred from higher magistracies. There were no limits, however, on the wealth a sharp freedman could accumulate. The satirist Petronius captured the social texture of this world through Trimalchio, the ostentatiously rich freedman at the center of the Satyricon. And two famous Romans were born sons of freedmen: the Augustan poet Horace, and the emperor Pertinax, who ruled in the 2nd century.
Colonial Peru's manumission laws drew from the Siete Partidas, the Castilian legal code, which held that masters who freed their slaves deserved honor and obedience in return. The most common path to freedom in Peru, as elsewhere in Latin America, was through coartación: an enslaved person negotiating with the owner for a purchase price, then paying it off over time. Manumission also occurred at baptism and through an owner's last will and testament.
Baptismal manumission freed enslaved children at the moment of their baptism, but these freedoms often came with conditions, including years of servitude lasting until the owner's death. Many of the children freed at baptism were still living in households where their parents remained enslaved, and a child in that position was far more likely to be re-enslaved. Women who owned slaves were more likely than men to use baptism as the occasion for manumission. Their written records also used markedly different language from men's: phrases such as "for the love I have for her" appeared in baptismal records and cartas de libertad alongside other expressions of intimacy. Male owners almost never described their reasoning in those terms. Many children freed at baptism were likely the illegitimate children of their male owners, though this is difficult to confirm from baptismal records alone. Records survive showing that parents and godparents sometimes paid to secure a child's freedom. Mothers were almost never freed alongside their children, even when a mother had given birth to her master's child.
Testamentary manumission, freedom granted through a will, was frequently accompanied by expressions of affection from the slave owner. Owners also cited the desire to die with a clear conscience. These documents could be disputed by heirs claiming fraud or arguing that an enslaved person had exploited a relative's mental or physical weakness. Courts generally upheld the manumissions, treating enslaved people as property the owner could dispose of as they wished. An enslaved person could be sold to cover estate debts, but not if they had already paid part of their purchase price toward freedom, since this was considered a legally binding agreement.
Barbados maintained some of the strictest manumission laws in the Caribbean, requiring owners to pay £200 for a male slave and £300 for a female slave, and to show cause to the authorities. Other colonies imposed no fees at all. Freed people in Barbados sometimes purchased family members or friends in order to free them. One recorded example is Susannah Ostrehan, a formerly enslaved woman who became a successful businesswoman in Barbados and purchased many of her acquaintances in order to secure their freedom.
Jamaica's system went largely unregulated until the 1770s, when owners who freed slaves were required to post a bond to ensure that freed people did not become wards of the parish. One quantitative study of Jamaican manumission deeds put the number of slaves freed through manumission at roughly 165 around 1770, a figure that underlines how rare the practice was. Manumission had little statistical impact on the size of the enslaved population as a whole, but it played a measurable role in the growth of Jamaica's free population of colour during the second half of the 18th century.
In Haiti before the Haitian Revolution, the legal footing of freed people was precarious. Rosalie of the Poulard Nation had been freed by her owner in 1795, but still faced the struggle of proving that freedom in official terms years later. In 1803 her white husband claimed her as a slave and then declared both her and her children free, a legal maneuver designed to establish the documentary record that her original manumission had not secured.
On the 3rd of July 1315, King Louis X of France, known as Louis the Quarrelsome, issued an edict affirming that "according to the law of nature, everyone must be born free" and that "throughout our kingdom, servants will be brought to freedom." From this came the maxim that no one is a slave in France and that the soil of France frees the slave who touches it. The edict abolished serfdom in the royal domain, drawing on the Latin word servus, meaning slave, as the root of the word.
Almost five centuries later, the Law of February 1794 went much further, issuing a decree through the French First Republic's National Convention that abolished slavery across the entire French colonial empire.
African slaves were freed in the North American colonies as early as the 17th century. Some, such as Anthony Johnson, went on to become both landowners and slaveholders themselves. One path to freedom was self-purchase: an enslaved person negotiating with the master for an agreed amount, which some owners set at market rate and others reduced in recognition of service. In 1661, Reytory Angola, herself a freed slave, became the first Black person to individually petition a legislature when she sought the manumission of her enslaved adopted son in New Amsterdam.
Virginia was the first to formally regulate the practice, establishing in 1692 that anyone freeing a slave must pay the cost of transporting that person out of the colony. A 1723 law tightened the rules further, barring any manumission except for "some meritorious services" judged by the governor and council. The Revolutionary War shifted the landscape. Virginia repealed its restrictive laws in 1782, granted freedom to enslaved people who had fought for the colonies during the 1775-1783 war, and the same year passed a law allowing masters to free slaves of their own accord. Previously this had required a vote of the state legislature, a process that rarely succeeded.
The result was a striking demographic shift. In Virginia, the proportion of free Black people rose from 1% in 1782 to 7% by 1800. Across the Upper South, that proportion climbed from below 1% to 10% within two decades after the Revolution. Nationally, free Black people reached roughly 14% of the total Black population as Northern states also began abolishing slavery. New York and New Jersey used gradual abolition laws that required the free-born children of enslaved women to serve as indentured servants into their twenties.
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 reversed that trend. It opened vast new areas to cotton cultivation and drove up demand for enslaved labour. Manumissions declined sharply. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 and the 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner deepened slaveholders' fears. Most Southern states made manumission legally near-impossible. South Carolina required a legislative vote; Florida prohibited it outright. Virginia's Robert Carter III, who had begun emancipating his enslaved people from 1791 onward, ultimately freed almost 500 people by 1804. That scale of voluntary manumission became impossible elsewhere as the 19th century wore on. The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 ended slavery in the United States, except as punishment for crime, after the Civil War.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was legally valid under Ottoman law from the empire's founding, and throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries it gradually lost its central role in Ottoman society, driven in part by European pressure. The empire introduced a series of reforms: a firman in 1830, another in 1854, and the Kanunname of 1889. The Ottoman Empire and 16 other countries signed the 1890 Brussels Conference Act for the suppression of the slave trade.
Ottoman policy favored manumission of male slaves, but not female ones. The evidence for this is stark in the gender ratio of the slave trade: across Islamic empires over the centuries, there were roughly two female slaves to every male. Sexual slavery was a central feature of the Ottoman system, governed by Islamic law on concubinage, and it proved the most resistant to reform. Outside of explicit sexual slavery, most female slaves held domestic occupations, which also commonly included sexual relations with their masters; this was both a lawful reason to purchase a female slave and the most common one cited for retaining her.
Despite public commitments, clandestine slavery persisted well into the 20th century. Gangs organized the illegal import of slaves. Slave raids and the seizure of women and children as war spoils continued despite official denials. Armenian girls were sold as slaves during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Turkey did not ratify the 1926 League of Nations convention on the suppression of slavery until 1933, and illegal sales of girls were still being reported in the 1930s. Legislation explicitly prohibiting slavery did not arrive in Turkey until 1964.
Common questions
What does manumission mean and how was it defined historically?
Manumission, also called enfranchisement, is the act of freeing enslaved people by their owners. Historian Verene Shepherd defines the most widely used form as gratuitous manumission: the conferment of freedom on the enslaved by enslavers before the formal end of the slave system.
How did manumission work in ancient Rome?
In ancient Rome, a freed slave became a libertus and a citizen, taking the former owner's family name. The formal ceremony called manumissio vindicta involved a magistrate's lictor laying a rod on the slave's head while declaring the person free. Manumissions were subject to a state tax, and the lex Fufia Caninia of 2 BC capped how many slaves could be freed in a will.
Who was Reytory Angola and why is she significant in American manumission history?
Reytory Angola was a freed slave who in 1661 became the first Black person to individually petition a legislature in North America. She petitioned for the manumission of her enslaved adopted son in New Amsterdam.
What happened to manumission rates in the United States after the invention of the cotton gin?
After the cotton gin was invented in 1793, manumissions declined sharply because the new machine enabled vast new areas of cotton cultivation, driving up demand for enslaved labour. Most Southern states eventually made manumission legally near-impossible, with Florida prohibiting it outright.
How did baptismal manumission work in colonial Peru?
In colonial Peru, enslaved children could be freed at the moment of baptism, but these freedoms often came with conditions requiring years of continued servitude. Female slave owners were more likely than male owners to use baptism for manumission, and often used language of personal affection in the written records. Children freed at baptism while their parents remained enslaved were far more likely to be re-enslaved.
When did France legally abolish slavery in its colonies?
The Law of February 1794, passed by the French First Republic's National Convention, abolished slavery throughout the French colonial empire. An earlier edict of the 3rd of July 1315 by King Louis X had abolished serfdom in the French royal domain and established the principle that the soil of France frees the slave who touches it.
All sources
25 references cited across the entry
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- 2BookA History of Ancient GreeceClaude Orrieux et al. — Wiley — 1999
- 3BookOxford Classical DictionaryM.I. Finley et al. — Oxford University Press — 1996
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- 7BookThe Oxford Classical DictionaryHornblower & Spawforth — Oxford University Press — 1996
- 8Roman Slavery and the Rate of ManumissionMary Harrsch — 2016-03-16
- 9BookTaxing Freedom in Thessalian Manumission InscriptionsRachel Zelnick-Abramovitz — Brill — 2013-09-05
- 10BookSacred Places of Goddess: 108 DestinationsKaren Tate et al. — CCC Publishing — 2005
- 12BookEnterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary AtlanticKit Candlin et al. — University of Georgia Press — 2015
- 13JournalManumission in Late Eighteenth-Century JamaicaDavid Beck Ryden — 2018-12-07
- 14JournalRosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian RevolutionRebecca Scott et al. — 2010-01-01
- 15Life Story: Dorothy AngolaLee Boomer
- 17BookThe First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His SlavesAndrew Levy — Random House Publishing Group — 26 April 2005
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- 20BookWomen and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of DifferenceMadeline Zilfi — Cambridge University Press — 2010
- 24BookRemembering GenocideNigel Eltringham et al. — Routledge — 27 June 2014