Remarkable Documents Lay Bare New York’s History of Slavery

In 1796, when slavery remained both legal and common in New York, a white man named Aquila Giles set out to free Hannah, a 30-year-old woman he enslaved, and her daughter, Abigail, who was about 5. The manumission deed he signed declared his commitment “to serve the cause of humanity by promoting the liberation of such slaves as manifest a disposition to become useful members of society.” But he also put severe limits on Hannah’s and Abigail’s liberty. Hannah, he explained, would receive her freedom six years later—if she continued “to behave with fidelity and zeal in my service.” Abigail would not gain her freedom until 1820, when she would arrive at the age of about 29. 

Manumitted in the name of humanity and yet still unfree: Enslaved people like Hannah and Abigail lived for years in this limbo, as did thousands of other Black people in several Northern states during the early Republic. Their extraordinary stories and those of 300 other Black New Yorkers are accessible online for the first time, now that the Museum of the City of New York has digitized a collection of manumission records dating between 1785 and 1809. These legal documents reveal that the horrors of slavery were not confined to the South. In fact, while some enslaved people in the so-called free states of the North were manumitted—freed individually by their enslavers—without restrictions, others like Hannah and Abigail had to wait decades to enjoy freedom. Yet as much as these documents illustrate white New Yorkers’ reluctance to end the institution of slavery, they also underline the bold efforts by African Americans to free themselves, one person at a time.

These legal documents were methodically transcribed by the New-York Manumission Society (NYMS) based on city and county filings. While the society, founded in 1785, provided legal and financial aid to advance individual manumission cases, its members sought to persuade individual enslavers to manumit the enslaved and fought for changes in state law, ultimately succeeding with a gradual emancipation law in 1799, which slowly led to the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827. 

The society also sought to protect free Black people who faced a range of threats, most notably kidnapping and re-enslavement. Indeed, the society’s copies of manumission deeds helped to protect Black women and men against those crimes and other deceptions. Some free Black New Yorkers even requested that the society document them in its records, as when a new arrival from Pennsylvania named Anthony Butler provided a copy of his freedom papers, and when a Black woman named Catherine asked “to have her name registered in our society book, as she is a free-born woman.” Long before the radical abolition movement of the 1830s, enslaved people had little choice but to place their trust in this more halting, conservative movement.