Our third additional category was made up of blacks who in one way
or another had become free. Achieving freedom was less common in the
seventeenth or eighteenth century than in the nineteenth, but it occasion-
ally happened. Manumission was first recorded in New Amsterdam in
1643, when the Dutch West India Company freed some slaves in return for
a sort of quitrent to be paid to the company for the rest of the person’s life.
The newly freed men and women could not, of course, pay quitrent unless
they had some way to earn money, so the company gave them land to farm.
When the English took over the colony in 1664, they did not interfere with
the already established black farmers; but the earlier custom does not seem
to have been continued by the English.
Some blacks, particularly at the end of the eighteenth century and dur-
ing the nineteenth century, were able to buy their freedom by saving what
they earned from handicrafts or from selling produce from their kitchen
gardens.
Manumission by owners, whether by purchase or by gift, was illegal in
many areas and was not common anywhere until after the Revolution.
Nowhere was it automatic. Often, the owner was required to post a bond to
ensure that the manumitted person would not become a burden on the
community, since some owners used this manumission to get rid of slaves
who were sick or too old to work.
Fugitive slaves, like the man Sandy for whom Thomas Jefferson adver-
tised as a “run-away,” might manage to become and even to stay free, but
escape was always difficult. In Virginia, the legislature provided in an act of
1691 “for suppressing outlying Slaves” that:
in case any negroes, mulattoes or other slave or slaves lying out as fore-
said shall resist, runaway, or refuse to deliver and surrender him or
themselves.... It shall and may be lawfull for [deputies] to kill and dis-
troy such negroes, mulattoes, and other slave or slaves by gunn or any
otherwaise whatsoever.The slaves who were most likely to succeed in getting away were arti-
sans who had a skill by which they could support themselves, were more
likely to know enough English to pass as free in a town or city, and were
Blacks in America 177