Keywords
Manumission
Manumission is the act of freeing and being freed from slavery “while the institution of slavery continues,” as described by Randy J. Sparks and Rosemary Brana-Shte. Manumission was a critical act and strategy enslaved people engaged in as they struggled for control over the lives, selves, and kinship networks. Differentiated from emancipation, which were legislative acts and actions (i.e. U.S. Civil War) wholesale or conditionally (i.e. with apprenticeship) freeing all enslaved people across a given slaveholding society, manumission was executed by individual enslavers on behalf of their respective property (enslaved people) through formal (i.e. legal) action. Manumission was regulated by imperial and national officials in all slaveholding societies, but the rules of manumission varied across empire, region, even towns or colonial outposts. In French Louisiana, manumission was regulated by a succession of Code Noirs (1685, 1724) which determined the guidelines enslavers needed to follow to complete an act of manumission. In Spanish Louisiana, the French ordinances were replaced by Spanish manumission law guided by the Siete Partidas, eighteenth-century Spanish imperial Code Noirs and bandos de buen gobierno. The differences were stark between the two imperial eras. For example, during the French period, enslavers were required to secure ratification of the Superior Council for any manumissions. In the Spanish period, not could enslavers directly manumit their enslaved property, but enslaved people could also appeal to the Spanish Cabildo (Louisiana’s governing body during the Spanish period) for their freedom. Coartación, the process of appealing for your freedom, allowed a critical mass of Africans and people of African descent to secure their freedom. The audacity, creativity and resistance practice of enslaved people demanding their legal freedom from their owners through coartación, laid the foundation for the free population of color that would emerge in the later years of the eighteenth-century.
