manumit

If they were faithful and hardworking, the master would set them free, manumit them, when he died.

From "Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad" by Ann Petry

Friend Hopper cherished some hope that this preaching and praying slaveholder would eventually manumit his bondmen; but I had listened to his conversation, and I thought otherwise.

From Isaac T. Hopper by Lydia Maria Francis Child

By some unaccountable carelessness, he neglected to manumit her.

From A Romance of the Republic by Lydia Maria Francis Child

He could not in Alabama legally manumit his slaves.

From The Abolitionists Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights by John F. (John Ferguson) Hume

In Louisiana, however, it being illegal to manumit a slave, those whom the abolitionists would set free, would not be considered free in the eye of the law.

From Discussion on American Slavery by Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge

A comparable process took place in Cuba after the Spanish-American War, when American sugar companies acquired 60% of rural properties across Cuba, reducing independent farmers—largely manumitted slaves and their descendants—to the level of low-wage labor.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 3, 2026

Instead he’s manumitted by a combo platter of teen love and Paul Williams ballads.

From Salon ● May 29, 2017

But Tubman had plotted with Kessiah’s husband, who had been manumitted, to free his family.

From New York Times ● Feb. 24, 2017

A slave woman and her children were manumitted by her husband, who had probably bought them to set them free.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 17, 2017

In all the colonies were numbers of free coloured persons, who had been manumitted by their fathers, and in many cases sent to Europe for their education.

From The West Indies and the Spanish Main by James Rodway

“The evidence is pretty strong that Johns Hopkins was an abolitionist,” Crenson said, and the possibility exists that he owned enslaved people for the possibility of manumitting them.

From Washington Post ● Jun. 5, 2021

Much as he had blamed Mr. Duncan for negligence in not manumitting her mother, he had fallen into the same snare.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858 by Various

This practice received highly favorable social sanction, and masters often celebrated national holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and other special events by manumitting one or more of their favorite slaves.

From The Black Experience in America by Norman Coombs

There is in existence a document manumitting his slave, which, I am happy to say, is the only existing evidence that any ancestor of mine ever owned one.

From Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 by George Frisbie Hoar

I am not the man who enslaved them; they are indebted to Englishmen for that favor; nevertheless I am devising means for manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of slavery.

From A Social History of the American Negro Being a History of the Negro Problem in the United States. Including A History and Study of the Republic of Liberia by Benjamin Griffith Brawley