After watching the Amazon pilot episode called Point of Honor, I was wondering if Virginia slaveowners could free their slaves in 1861?

by maeggycakes

I watched the new Amazon series called Point of Honor and it's about a Virginian family who fights for the South yet frees their slaves at the beginning of the war in 1861. As a history major I recalled in my Civil War class that manumission became illegal after the Nat Turner rebellion. Is this show accurate or are the creators running with a untrue plot line? Btw the show was awful.

sowser

Manumission was possible in Virginia on an individual basis after 1782, when Virginia's state legislature introduced legislation permitting owners to free slaves between the age of 18 (21 for men) and 45. Before this, it had only been possible to free a slave by an act of the legislature. In 1806, Virginia's lawmakers narrowly rejected proposals to effectively outlaw manumission altogether; instead, they opted in favour of an amendment to the law that required any freed slave to leave the State, in order to avoid the creation of a substantial free black population. Virginia never reformed its manumission laws in the aftermath of the Nat Turner rebellion - infact, the debate in Virginia focused more on the possibility of gradually abolishing slavery.

However, the 1806 act had already effectively wiped out the practice of freeing slaves in Virginia. Numerous studies have suggested that the impact of the 1806 law was to dramatically reduce the rate of slave manumission in the state; in some counties that had substantial rates of emancipation in the early period, we see only a handful of slaves being liberated post-1806 and especially after Nat Turner's revolt.

So it certainly wasn't impossible for a family like the one you describe from the show to liberate their slaves, but it was extremely unlikely to happen - sufficiently so that I'd say the incident is almost certainly constructed for dramatic effect and not inspired by any particular family's story. A study of Brunswick county, for example, found 256 slaves emancipated by 45 owners from 1782 - 1862; but just 5 owners freed 9 slaves between them from 1830 - 1862 More than 87% of all manumissions in the county appear to have taken place before the 1806 reform of the manumission laws.

Sources

  • Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia From the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion (2006).
  • Art Budros, "Social Shocks and Slave Social Mobility: Manumission in Brunswick County, Virginia, 1782 - 1862", American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 3 (2004): 539 - 579.