A newly digitized set of records reveal the plight and bravery of enslaved people in the North

Carolyn EastmanSeptember/October 2024

In 1796, when slavery remained both legal and common in New York, a white man named Aquila Giles set out to free Hannah, a 30-year-old woman he enslaved, and her daughter, Abigail, who was about 5. The manumission deed he signed declared his commitment “to serve the cause of humanity by promoting the liberation of such slaves as manifest a disposition to become useful members of society.” But he also put severe limits on Hannah’s and Abigail’s liberty. Hannah, he explained, would receive her freedom six years later—if she continued “to behave with fidelity and zeal in my service.” Abigail would not gain her freedom until 1820, when she would arrive at the age of about 29. 

Manumitted in the name of humanity and yet still unfree: Enslaved people like Hannah and Abigail lived for years in this limbo, as did thousands of other Black people in several Northern states during the early Republic. Their extraordinary stories and those of 300 other Black New Yorkers are accessible online for the first time, now that the Museum of the City of New York has digitized a collection of manumission records dating between 1785 and 1809. These legal documents reveal that the horrors of slavery were not confined to the South. In fact, while some enslaved people in the so-called free states of the North were manumitted—freed individually by their enslavers—without restrictions, others like Hannah and Abigail had to wait decades to enjoy freedom. Yet as much as these documents illustrate white New Yorkers’ reluctance to end the institution of slavery, they also underline the bold efforts by African Americans to free themselves, one person at a time.

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These legal documents were methodically transcribed by the New-York Manumission Society (NYMS) based on city and county filings. While the society, founded in 1785, provided legal and financial aid to advance individual manumission cases, its members sought to persuade individual enslavers to manumit the enslaved and fought for changes in state law, ultimately succeeding with a gradual emancipation law in 1799, which slowly led to the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827. 

The society also sought to protect free Black people who faced a range of threats, most notably kidnapping and re-enslavement. Indeed, the society’s copies of manumission deeds helped to protect Black women and men against those crimes and other deceptions. Some free Black New Yorkers even requested that the society document them in its records, as when a new arrival from Pennsylvania named Anthony Butler provided a copy of his freedom papers, and when a Black woman named Catherine asked “to have her name registered in our society book, as she is a free-born woman.” Long before the radical abolition movement of the 1830s, enslaved people had little choice but to place their trust in this more halting, conservative movement.

Indeed, many NYMS members, including Alexander Hamilton and the society’s president, John Jay, themselves held people in bondage—behavior that activists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison would denounce a generation later. “The members of the Manumission Society had come to acknowledge that slavery was wrong, but they couldn’t imagine abrupt change,” explains Leslie Harris, a historian at Northwestern University. “Slavery was the source of so much of their wealth and power—and it had been for a generation or more. Rather than free everyone all at once, they wanted to mitigate the disruptions to their own comfort. There was a sharp difference between their words and their actions.”

Although there were far fewer enslaved people in the state of New York than in the largest Southern states, slavery in Northern states like New York and New Jersey remained a cornerstone of the economy. New York City itself housed one of the largest urban slave populations in North America: Around four in ten households in the city held people in bondage as domestic servants, carriage drivers, laundresses and dock workers. “Every respectable family had slaves … who did the drudgery,” one English traveler to the city in the 1780s recalled. 

Inscribed into a single 8-by-13-inch volume with mottled board covers and a handwritten label reading “Register of Manumissions of Slaves,” these 250-odd records show a wide range of views of slavery and different arrangements for freedom. Successive volumes of the society’s manumission records are now held by the New-York Historical Society. 

“Many people are unaware that slavery existed in New York or believe that it wasn’t so bad. This volume helps to dispel that myth,” says Marcia Kirk, an archivist and expert in the city’s African American history. Using various public records, she has traced her own family’s roots to the turn of the 19th century, an extraordinary achievement for a Black genealogist given the fragmentary evidence during and after slavery. It was Kirk’s advocacy that ultimately led the museum to digitize this source. “We’ve had the manumission log on display as an object that showed the movement to end slavery in New York,” says Sarah Seidman, historian and curator of the ongoing “Activist New York” exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, who worked with colleagues to facilitate the digitization effort. “But whereas we were only able to display a page or two at a time, digitizing it allows us to read all of its entries together and to understand the broader story of abolition.”

These deeds vary in length from about half a page to more than twice that length; each of the specific arrangements was unique. Some enslavers expressly rejected slavery as an immoral institution. When Caleb Bundy granted freedom outright to a 28-year-old man named Isaac in 1782, he stated that he was “persuaded that freedom is the natural right of all mankind, and that no law moral or divine has given me a right to or property in the persons of any of my fellow creatures.” 

Other enslavers, however—like Aquila Giles, in 1796—made more complex plans to retain a person in bondage for a period of time. DeWitt Clinton, then a member of the New York State Assembly, soon to be mayor of New York City and eventually governor of the state, manumitted a 20-year-old man named Jack in 1799 by declaring that “the injustice of holding men in slavery” had inspired him. Clinton nevertheless put off Jack’s release by six years. Others asked for payment and still delayed a person’s freedom. In 1794, James Hazzard paid £100—an extraordinary amount greater than a laboring man’s annual income—to free his 7-year-old mixed-race daughter, Patience, albeit with the understanding that she would not receive that freedom until she was 30. “Holding someone in bondage until their mid- to late 20s took away their most profitable working years,” considering that many laboring people like Jack died by their 40s, Harris notes. “It delayed their ability to form families, obtain educations and live full lives. Black people in New York had to serve an apprenticeship to freedom.”

Promising freedom to Black men and women only after a period of time also permitted enslavers to sneak in stipulations that led to further delays. Fitch Hall signed an agreement in 1794 to free a woman named Mary and her young daughter after ten years, provided Mary served him “with honesty and industry” in the meantime. In another case, a Black man named John Richard had to promise that he would serve an extra two days for every day he was absent or unable to work. Perhaps most stunning of all, a Londoner with no immediate plans to return to the United States freed a man named David Byass in 1792, but he inserted into the agreement an “express condition that if any of my children or part of my family should hereafter reside in America they are to have the option of commanding” Byass’ service—a condition that does not sound like freedom at all. Indeed, those detailed and sometimes vague stipulations made it easy for enslavers to extend terms of service beyond the agreed-upon span. Sojourner Truth, the pioneering activist for Black freedom and women’s rights, who grew up enslaved in brutal conditions in rural Ulster County, New York, reported that her enslaver had once reneged on his promise to free her by claiming that a hand injury had rendered her less productive. 

Freeing enslaved people could also prove convenient for New Yorkers disinclined to provide for them as they aged. Accordingly, the state passed a 1788 law prohibiting emancipations of people over the age of 50 or incapable of providing for themselves, viewing such manumissions as cynical attempts to avoid supporting the elderly or infirm. Thus, when a white woman named Ida Striker in Jamaica, Queens, sought to free two enslaved women named Sarah and Dinah, local officials sought to forbid the move. The Overseers of the Poor and a justice of the peace argued that the women did not meet the standard for self-reliance established by law, and that they would have to rely on public aid to survive. These manumission records show that Striker appealed her case to the Court of General Sessions in 1795, which reversed the earlier court’s decision and allowed Sarah’s and Dinah’s freedom to proceed. “How much freedom could these women enjoy if they were penniless?” Kirk asks.

The society’s records also show Black New Yorkers’ extraordinary determination and resourcefulness in finding freedom for their families and themselves. A 48-year-old woman named Eve paid $100 in 1801 for her own freedom—an amount that likely represented six to nine months’ labor at the time, and which could have paid Eve’s rent for a modest room in New York City for five years. Detailed financial records for another manumission show that a Black man named Alexander Alexander ultimately paid 50 percent more than the agreed-upon price for his wife and son when he took six months longer than expected to pay the total. “In cases like this, Black people paid double for their freedom—they served more time and they paid more money,” Kirk notes.

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 gradual abolition of slavery in the state, which took effect on July 4, 1799. But passage of the law required compromises. All born into slavery before that July would remain enslaved; children born afterward to enslaved women would be “free”—but only after enduring indentured servitude until the age of 25 for girls and 28 for boys. Five years later, New Jersey passed a nearly identical law, similarly constrained after compromises with that state’s influential population of enslavers. 

Even more striking, in order to get these laws passed, both states paid enslavers: Legislators promised funds to cover the bed and board of these indentured children in the years before they could start working—payments that both states ultimately ceased when the costs ballooned, threatening to overwhelm state budgets. New York did not free all enslaved people until July 4, 1827, and even as late as 1850, deep into the national crisis over slavery, New Jersey still had 236 people living in bondage, a number that dropped to 18 by 1860. 

“Gradual emancipation was precisely that: excruciatingly gradual,” Kirk says. Black New Yorkers bore the cost, either by waiting years for their enslavement to end or, like a Black man named Robert Gunner, saving wages for months to purchase the freedom of their loved ones. In 1806 he handed over the full proceeds of at least six months’ labor to come up with $200 for a 21-year-old woman named Jennet Gunner, likely his wife. “I render her as free as if she had been born free,” Jennet’s enslaver wrote in the manumission document. “Enslavers put a price tag on freedom,” Kirk says, “and Blacks paid the price.” 

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remarkable-documents-lay-bare-new-york-history-slavery-manumission-180984912/