How Did Anyone Get Out of Slavery Legally? Somebody Had to Sign

The procedure transferred a person from the legal category of property to the legal category of person, by the deliberate act of whoever owned them. It required an owner's decision, so it was not a right the enslaved person held, and the conditions attached varied enormously. Roman law developed detailed forms, including a ceremony before a magistrate, a clause in a will taking effect at the owner's death, and a simple declaration before witnesses, each with different consequences for the status the freed person received. Other systems developed their own procedures, and Islamic law treated the act as meritorious and provided several routes to it.

The motives were rarely purely benevolent and the mixture is informative:

• •Payment, with enslaved people buying themselves from savings
• •Reward for long service, frequently promised years in advance
• •Avoiding the cost of supporting somebody too old to work
• •Religious merit, in several traditions
• •Freeing a child fathered by the owner, or that child's mother
• •Creating a client bound by continuing obligations to the former owner

What the freed person received was frequently a qualified status rather than the position of somebody born free, and the conditions attached are the clearest evidence about the system's purposes. Roman freed people owed their former owner specified days of labour each year, could not sue them without permission, and left part of their estate to them at death, and the relationship was inherited as a tie of obligation. Restrictions on holding office and on marriage applied to the first generation. In the American South, laws in several states required a freed person to leave the state within a fixed period or be re-enslaved, which made the grant close to a banishment.

Buying one's own freedom was a recognised route in several systems and it reveals how the arrangements actually worked. Enslaved people in Rome could hold a fund of their own in practice, accumulated from small trading, tips and permitted work, and could use it to purchase themselves, although the fund legally belonged to the owner throughout. Similar arrangements in Spanish American law allowed an enslaved person to demand a price be set and to pay it in instalments, which was a genuine legal right rather than a favour. The system created an incentive for owners to permit earning, and it meant those who achieved it had frequently worked years beyond their labour to fund it.

Societies dependent on slavery repeatedly acted to limit the practice, which shows what they thought was at stake. Augustus imposed caps on how many people could be freed by will and set minimum ages, apparently concerned about the composition of the citizen body. Colonial and American legislatures progressively required court approval, imposed bonds, or banned the practice outright as the nineteenth century advanced, and several states prohibited it entirely by the 1850s. The concern stated in the debates was that a growing free population of the same ancestry as the enslaved one undermined the racial justification the system had come to rest on.

Release depended entirely on an owner's decision rather than on any right, and motives ran from payment and reward to avoiding the cost of supporting somebody too old to work. What followed was frequently a qualified status carrying labour obligations, inheritance claims and legal restrictions. Societies dependent on slavery restricted the practice as it grew, which is evidence about what they thought the system rested on.