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1 results

  • Chapter 6 - Dutch Resistance to Emancipation and the Negotiations to End Slavery in New York

  • Michael J. Douma, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York
    Published online:
    20 December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 174-207

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 is a history of emancipation in New York that stresses the combined importance of economic and legal pressures on slavery in areas of Dutch control. The gradual legal freedoms slaves gained after the Revolution served as a foot in the door towards eventual emancipation. When slaves were routinely given the ability to choose new masters, to seek work on their own, and to make money on their own (with some repayment to the slave owners), they made a crucial first step into a world of freedom. Voluntary slave manumission and self-purchase emancipations were the result of a process of negotiating the terms of slavery’s demise one person at a time. This dispersed, on-the-ground struggle was shaped by statutory law, as others have recognized, but, arguably, it was the common law that demonstrated and determined New Yorkers’ changing attitudes about slaveholding. Courtroom decisions about interpreting the states’ laws on slavery guaranteed that the freedoms won through slaves’ negotiations with their enslavers would be protected by the courts.