From the earliest years of the slave trade to the New World, enslaved and free people of color across the Americas sought and shaped liminal spaces in the law to claim freedom for themselves and their loved ones, and to create communities that challenged slaveholders’ efforts to align blackness with enslavement. Although “manumission” should be understood as the prerogative of an enslaver with the power to emancipate those he held in bondage, lawsuits for freedom reveal individuals who were not mere passive recipients of a gift of freedom. Instead, they entered into contracts with their owners, labored, and accumulated property to achieve their ends. Not only did they use the legal tools available to them, but their initiatives shaped the laws of slavery and freedom. Enslaved people staked their claims through self-purchase arrangements and other efforts to bargain for freedom, as well as through lawsuits they brought when arrangements fell through. Enslaved people who found their way to a notary’s office or a courtroom to claim freedom were exceptional in certain ways. The majority of men and women born in bondage remained enslaved their entire lives. Yet those who became free were key to the construction of race in the Americas.
Despite the efforts of white colonists to instantiate the link between blackness and enslavement during the earliest years of colonization in the Americas, many people of African descent began making their way to freedom as soon as they landed in the New World. They drew on customary practices as well as legal mechanisms, and they relied on the resources of the communities of color that were created in part by discriminatory Spanish legislation. Yet the very same legal traditions that made it easier for Spanish colonists to establish racial distinctions in law quickly also made it unthinkable to curtail enslaved people’s manumission or suits for freedom. In both seventeenth-century Virginia and in Cuba, an enterprising man of African descent could purchase his freedom with a tobacco crop or a white servant, in a completely unregulated transaction. But by the early eighteenth century, white Virginians, like the French colonists who settled Louisiana at that time, had already begun to restrict this practice. This change had lasting consequences for the ways communities of free people of color shaped regimes of race.