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In the period following the pestilences of the fourteenth century the difficulty in recruiting the ranks of the priesthood made the practice more frequent The charters of manumission issued by the king to the insurgents of 1381 would have granted freedom on a large scale had they not been disowned and subsequently withdrawn.
These schools grew so rapidly that it was soon necessary to rent additional quarters to accommodate the department of sewing. This work had been made popular by the efforts of Misses Turpen, Eliza J. Cox, Ann Cox, and Caroline Roe. The subsequent growth of the classes was such that in 1820 the Manumission Society had to erect a building large enough to accommodate five hundred pupils.
It is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours. He that feels oppression from the presence of those to whom he knows himself superior will desire to set loose his powers of conversation; and who that ever asked succours from Bacchus was able to preserve himself from being enslaved by his auxiliary?
The slave is entirely unprotected in his domestic relations. The laws greatly obstruct the manumission of slaves, even where the master is willing to enfranchise them. The operation of the laws tends to deprive slaves of religious instruction and consolation. The whole power of the laws is exerted to keep slaves in a state of the lowest ignorance.
But in most cases, as far as can be judged now, the lord was methodical in releasing services due to him. Thus, by one of the many paradoxes of history, the freest of all tenants were the last to achieve freedom. When the serfs had been set at liberty by manumission, the socage-tenants or free-tenants, as they were called, were still bound by their fixed agreements of tenure.
The mention of the freedmen in this letter may serve to remind us of the political results of manumission, the second fact in the legal aspect of Roman slavery. Had manumission been held in check or in some way superintended by the State, there would have been more good than harm in it.
When at last Virginia enacted a law permitting the arming of her slaves, no provision was made for their manumission. Long before the passage of this act in Virginia, Congress had become the center of the controversy. Davis had come to the point where no tradition however cherished would stand, in his mind, against the needs of the moment.
That of New York, formed in 1785 with John Jay as president, took the name of the Manumission Society, limiting its aims at first to promoting manumission and protecting those Negroes who had already been set free. All of the societies had very clear ideas as to their mission.
The liberty offered them is hitherto anomalous, and uncertain enough in its conditions; they probably trust it as little as they know it: but slavery they do know and when once they find themselves again delivered over to that experience, there will not be ONE insurrection in the South; there will be an insurrection in every State, in every county, on every plantation a struggle as fierce as it will be futile a hopeless effort of hopeless men, which will baptise in blood the new American nation, and inaugurate its birth among the civilised societies of the earth, not by the manumission but the massacre of every slave within its borders.
The work done by the various workers in North Carolina did not affect the general improvement of the slaves, but thanks to the humanitarian movement, they were not entirely neglected. In 1830 the General Association of the Manumission Societies of that commonwealth complained that the laws made no provision for the moral improvement of the slaves.
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