Slavery, Indenture, and Freedom in New York
The archival item at hand is titled "Evert Jansen Wendell collection of contracts for the selling of slaves," but the content is more complex. Archival collection titles are designed to give you an idea of the provenance, or how the collection came to be formed, but to discover the details of the context, you have to dig deeper.
While we often think about the nature of plantation slavery in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, labor extracted from enslaved Africans and African Americans was foundational to the growth and success of the American project. At the same time, from its earliest days there were people of European descent who recognized the inherent cruelty of slavery and fought towards its abolition. The process of abolition, however, was certainly not a straight line.
Only one of the three contracts featured here is a legal contract selling an African descended human being as property. The other two are fixed term contracts selling African descended people's labor for a period of years. Even the one that is an actual "slave contract" includes text that provides for manumission after a period of years. The complicated nuances of human bondage in the Early National Period require definitions of four key terms.
Key Terms
Enslavement - Chattel slavery is what we tend to talk about when we talk about slavery in the United States. In this form of bondage, human beings were legally classified as the personal property of those holding them captive, no different than any other property.Indenture - Indentured servitude is often talked about when we talk about how working class people from Western Europe were able to come over to colonial American. In many cases, a person would sign a contract indenturing their labor to another person for a period of years, in exchange for transportation across the Atlantic
Emancipation - Emancipation is the freeing of someone from social, legal, or political strictures. When we talk about emancipating the slaves, we often think of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, where Abraham Lincoln declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
Manumission - Manumission is the legal freeing of an enslaved person by their enslaver. Enslavers would sometimes offer manumission to an enslaved person who had managed to gather the funds to "buy their freedom," or would sometimes write manumission of enslaved people into their will.
Contracts and the Law
As you may have noticed, the words "legally" and "the law" are a big part of understanding these contracts. Trying to think about how people in the Early National Period related enslaving African descended people and property law is key to beginning to understand the complicated nature of these three contracts. A great deal of early debate around abolition, the complete ending of slavery, had to do with a general consensus that the Constitution recognized slavery as a state institution, and that the Constitution affirmed individual property rights.Respect for the property rights of enslavers meant that abolition was gradual in many states before the Civil War. Historian James Oakes describes this process in the state of New York in his book Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1801-1865
[New York's] legislature prohibited the sale of any slave out of state a full decade before it passed the general emancipation statute in 1799. Then, too, the 1799 statue immediately propelled far more emancipation than it formally required: it prompted many New York masters to enter into indenture agreements with their adult slaves, promising freedom in return for several more years of loyal service. But that was only the beginning. Within a few years the legislature began altering the terms of the master-slave relationship in significant ways. It legalized slave marriages, thereby prohibiting masters from break up slave families. It gave slaves the right to own property, allowing them to accumulate wealth on their own, independently of their owners...By 1810 thousand of New York slaves had always been emancipated, but just as important those still in bondage had been shifted from the legal category of personal property into an intermediate servile status (11-12)
