Recently, I had the privilege of making a display that is now exhibited in the American Antiquarian Society reading room, as you enter through the main glass doors of Antiquarian Hall. My exhibit focuses on manumissions in 1800s America. Originally, I planned to highlight the freedom suit as a legal means of resistance to slavery. I had a hard time finding enough primary-source materials for display, and I mostly found secondary sources covering the topic in the AAS catalog. So, I decided to broaden my search to look at the different ways that enslaved people could free themselves. Enslaved people had three main ways of obtaining their freedom: escape, manumission, and freedom suits. Since I was having a hard time finding material related to the latter, I decided to look for manumissions and related documents instead. I found that in AAS’s “Slavery in the United States Collection,” AAS has a few manumissions that have quite intriguing stories.
One manumission involves a woman named Amanda Holmes, who was enslaved by William G. Elliot, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri. The document states that she was manumitted for “good and sufficient reasons.” This document, dated 7 July 1845, gave Holmes her freedom one year before Dred Scott first filed his freedom suit in 1846 in the state of Missouri. Scott’s case would not be decided until 1857, in the notorious Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Also of note about Holmes’s story is that five years after she gained freedom, she purchased her husband’s freedom for thirty dollars. The bill of sale for his purchase is dated 29 January 1850 — for the sale of “one negro named William Holmes” — and transfers ownership from Colonel Adam D. Stewart and wife Mary to Amanda Holmes, now a free woman of color.
Another manumission of note in this collection was signed by Nicholas Davies (c. 1708-1794) and witnessed by seven others. The document liberates twenty of his slaves and their children. It was recorded on 23 June 1794, at the Bedford County Court House in Virginia. Nicholas was a successful land dealer in what is sometimes referred to as “middle Virginia.” [1] Through his deeds he ended up freeing approximately fifty-one more of the people whom he had enslaved throughout his life. [2]
I also chose to include in the display William Griffith’s The Scrivener’s Guide (1818), which provided general advice for all sorts of legal matters. One section covers the legal requirements and filing procedures for manumissions and even includes an example of what such a document might look like. Two items in the exhibit are broadsides issued by the city of New York in the early 1800s: a blank form for recording a manumission, and a blank form of registration of proof of a person’s free status. Lastly, I have included two pamphlets from manumission societies in North Carolina and New York. Manumission societies worked to find legal avenues for enslaved people to become free and worked to convince the wider public of the evils of slavery.
While some enslaved people were able to obtain their freedom through manumission by their enslavers, as Andrew Fede argues in his book Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South [3], “an individual master’s decision to free one or several slaves is not necessarily evidence that the master harbored ‘an unspoken (or perhaps unconscious) anti-slavery sentiment.’ Although some masters freed all their slaves during their lifetimes, or after their deaths, as an expression of their opposition to slavery, the acts of others who freed ‘a tiny minority of especially favored slaves might just as accurately be taken as the ultimate bestowal ’” (Fede, 2).
I had a great time finding materials in the collection for this exhibit. I considered many other fascinating primary-source documents to documents to better frame the time period — particularly for the context surrounding the Amanda Holmes manumission, just one year prior to and in the same state as the Dred Scott case. This context could have added a greater level of understanding of the legal climate, but I ultimately chose not to include these documents in order to better maintain cohesiveness in this relatively small exhibit. However, if you are interested in learning more, I recommend consulting some of the excellent secondary sources on the subject; a number are available right here at AAS. (Apologies in advance if any are still checked out to me!) Lastly, if you do come into Antiquarian Hall, for any reason, please be sure to check out my exhibit in person. I hope you’ll like it!
References
[1] “Today in the 1770s: February 18.” Colonial Williamsburg.
[2] “Nicholas Davies.” Virginia Manumission Records Database, Liberty University,
[3] Fede, Andrew. Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South. Quid Pro Quo Books, 2011, p. 2.
Borodine Chery is a rising senior at Clark University, returning to the role of AAS summer page for a second summer. She is majoring in history and political science with a minor in philosophy. She has interned at the Salisbury Mansion as a docent and has served as a collections intern for the Ecotarium. Her honor’s thesis in the fall will be about freedom suits and legal resistance to slavery.
