All of these are true to some degree. Manumission was the
practice of freeing a slave in your will when you died, and was a common practice by
those slaveowners who had developed affections for their slaves and did not wish to see
them endure hardship at the hands of another slaveowner. But due to the growing number
of free blacks in southern states and the concern that created among whites afraid of
uprisings, laws were passed that severely restricted the practice, so that by the early
1800s, it was more rare.
Manumission was promised for many
blacks who fought in the Revolutionary War, and sometimes it was granted and sometimes
not. Your question states that many African-Americans were free, but keep in mind that
emancipation because of war service was also pretty
rare.
The legal end of slavery in the northern states was
probably responsible for the largest number of free blacks resulting from the three
methods you mention, as slavery simply died out in those because the new industrial and
merchant economy there didn't need them.
No comments:
Post a Comment