release
Under release ( lat. Manumissio ) refers to the legal act, which by a slave from the state of slavery is released. A distinction must be made between the release of a slave initiated by the slave owner and the special forms of buying a slave or buying a slave by his (free) relatives.
Greek antiquity
→ Main article: Slavery in ancient Greece: release
Roman antiquity
→ Main article: Freedman
In Rome releases by declaration of will by the slave owner ( manumissio ) or self-purchase were very common. Officially freed people accepted Roman citizenship and, according to their form, enjoyed almost all civil rights; they were simply not allowed to hold any political or military offices and were also not allowed to marry persons belonging to the senatorial class. However, they were still committed to loyalty and certain services to their former master, otherwise the release could be reversed ( revocatio in servitutem ). Children of former slaves who were born after their release were full Roman citizens.
United States
In the 13 North American colonies that made up the United States in 1776 , releases of slaves - as release by the slave owner and as self-purchase - were not the rule, but were frequent. Many slaves were initially able to carry out economic activities for their own account and finally buy themselves free with the proceeds. Many slave owners released their African-American sexual partners - possibly to marry them - or children resulting from such partnerships. One of the consequences of this practice was that the free African American population was soon distinguished by a comparatively light skin color compared to the unfree population.
Releases became rare in the colonies, however, to the extent that plantation economies emerged in which tobacco , sugar cane , indigo , rice and cotton were grown by the growers from the late 17th century onwards. In order to keep the production costs for these profitable export products low, many planters not only switched the management of their plantations to the work of slaves, but also organized their work according to the column system , under which slaves hardly had any free space, such as their own gardens or agricultural land cultivate or produce artisanal products with which they could then trade on their own account. This meant that most slaves no longer had the option of buying them themselves. In the mid-18th century, the proportion of free African Americans in the total black population was less than 5 percent.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves , Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2