-Were there cases of masters “freeing” slaves? I don’t mean because they had to because of laws, but some other altruistic motive?
-If a slave owner knew that a certain black man did not have an owner, could he take ownership of him?
-Were there cases of slaves “buying” their own freedom? I don’t mean that the slave had the $$$ to purchase their own worth but maybe they agreed to do something extraordinary to buy their freedom.
-On that note, were there cases of slaves being bought just so they could be freed?
-I know about Liberia but were ANY slaves able to go back home? I mean, their real home, to meet with their families and such (even if more than one or two generations apart)
-Were there cases where the owner fell in love with a slave and married her? (was it legal?)
Yes, several people are known to have freed their slaves in their wills, and others have purchased slaves with the intent to free them.
No. Freemen were free.
There were cases of slaves buying their own freedom, but as far as I know it was always for money.
Yes. (See #1).
Seems unlikely, but maybe.
In slave states, it was illegal for whites to marry colored people of any variety. That said, there was plenty of master/slave hanky-panky going on all over the place.
There were cases of masters freeing slaves. It was possibly most common to free slaves in your will. A lot of slave states didn’t want large populations of free blacks around, though, so a lot of them passed laws making freeing slaves more difficult.
Legally, if the aforesaid black man didn’t have an owner, he was free, and you couldn’t legally enslave a free man. De facto, though, it did sometimes happen, but not legally. It’s just, as a rule, judges and magistrates were more likely to believe white slaveholders than black nonslaveholders.
There were cases of blacks buying their own freedom, often times with actual money.
I think that there were some abolitionist groups that bought slaves to free them, and, of course, a lot of times, freed blacks would buy their wives/children/parents/so on.
Remember, most slaves in the US were born in the US, so their homes would have been the US. However, I know that Cinque, who was the leader of the rioting slaves on the Amistad, did manage to get back to his home village, only to discover it destroyed and his family gone.
There were undoubtedly cases where owners fell in love with their slaves. Most famously, Thomas Jefferson was in love with one of his slaves, a woman named Sally Hemmings, and probably had several children with her. But in terms of actual legal marriage, since almost all slaves were black, and almost all slaveholders were white, and most states had laws prohibiting marriage between blacks and whites, it wasn’t really legal.
sounds you are under impression that slaves had no money, right? Well, the ones who were agricultural laborers or domestics probably didn’t. The ones who worked for wages in the city or as self-employed artisans could get whatever share of earned money that the owner allowed them. Think of it as modern income tax - you make money, then you keep as much of it as the master allows you to keep. A smart master would keep the tax level at a rate that does not discourage the slave from working hard and earning a good income. Naturally, if he were to save his earnings, he could eventually buy his freedom.
Another reputed mechanism for freeing slaves was getting rid of old people who were no longer able to do work commensurate with the expense of feeding them. This was very much frowned upon socially (i.e. there was an expectation that the master would provide for an elderly slave as charity), but it did happen.
It wasn’t really like income tax. The slave didn’t make any money at all. His work-product belonged to his master, and whatever money was earned by the sale of his work-product also belonged to his master. This was true even if the master hired out the labour of his slave; the payments for the slave’s labour belonged to the master, not the slave. The default position was that the slave had, and was entitled to, nothing.
It might be in the master’s self-interest to make payments to the slave to incentivise him, or the master might make payments out of affection or altruism. But there isn;t really a parallel with income tax, in which the default position is that the income is yours, and you make payments out of your income to the state.
And, when you say that if a slave could save, he could eventually buy his freedom, it would be more correct to say that he could offer to buy his freedom and, if he offered enough, his master was likely to accept. But he had no right to buy; his master could reject his offer, however large, for any reason or for no reason at all.
It is possible that some owners married slaves or presumably former slaves at that point. There were never any miscegenation laws passed in several states. In particular, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Vermont never had any such laws. New York abolished Slavery in 1799 and New Jersey did so in 1804. The other states mentioned did so earlier. So it is possible.
Slaves working for wages paid directly to them, or as “self-employed artisans”?
Is there any cite that this practice was widespread? I mean, not just an example or two. I’d always been under the impression that the vast vast vast vast vast majority of slaves were agricultural (incl. domestics for plantation owners).
Also free Blacks were allowed to own slaves of there own. Usually this involved a freedman (or freedwoman) buying familymembers if hopes of one day freeing them. Manumission was restricted by state laws. Often it was illegal to free old or crippled slaves. Court fees or special taxes were a factor. In some jurisdictions manumission was completely prohibitied. Free blacks weren’t even allowed to live in some states.
New Orleans hand a large population of relatively wealth population of mixed-race gens de couleur, some of whom even owned slaves for economic reasons (ie as domestics or agricultural labor) just like whites.
I would refer to those sorts as “indentured servants” instead of slaves, but yes, it was very wide spread. It was so common that the United States Constitution even specifically mentions them with respect to how they are counted for the determination of representatives in Congress:
They were considered “free persons” by the constitution, but for the duration of their service they were very much treated like slaves. They could be physically punished (whipping, etc), they could not marry without the permission of their master, and if a woman got pregnant and was unable to work, extra time was added to her service period to make up for it. Basically, they were slaves with a time limit.
Re #1, yes, George Washington for instance manumitted his slaves (the euphemism was “servants”) in his will.
Re #2, I’ve read of a number of instances of free blacks being arrested, unable to prove their freedom, and of course with no owner responding to advertisements for a runaway slave - the jailkeeper could then sell them for their expenses.
Re #6, actual marriage was either rare or unrecognized, but sure, humans being what they are, there were romances. Look into the story of Thomas Jeffoerson and Sally Hemings, for instance.
True, but many black slaves were fully allowed to do extra work for pay, and some of them were able to buy their freedom. Master had no real reason to forbid it.
I highly, highly, highly recommend Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs if you are looking for a picture of how slavery worked in the late antebellum South. It’s a fascinating picture of how social pressures worked to, in some cases, constrain the atrocities committed on slaves, at least in the towns. The book makes it pretty clear that there were no such constraints on the plantations.
But yes, a complicated slave “middle class” existed in the towns–a network of freedmen and slaves with trade skills who were allowed to live fairly independently as long as the paid their owners a set fee. These arrangements were negotiated individually. It was a pretty natural outgrowth of the widespread practice of “hiring out” slaves: lots of people owned many slaves, but little land, and rented the slaves out each year from New Year’s to Christmas, and other people owned land but few slaves, and rented them from various slaveholders.
Other slaves made money on the side, a practice the owners would encourage as long as they got a generous cut: for example, Harriet Jacob’s grandmother did “fancy” baking at night after her duties were over and sold the proceeds in the town. This was allowed as long as she purchased all the ingredients and clothed herself and her children out of the proceeds. It was a win-win for her owners, as it didn’t cost them anything and they were spared the clothing expense (even rags were expensive!).
Anyway, if you are curious about slavery, read Harriet Jacobs. It’s available on line.
I just want to point out that slavery in what would become the United States predated any anti-miscegenation laws passed in the colonies, and not all colonies had such laws. That was true of the States, too, after 1776.