"Rising Generations of That Depressed Race": The Legal and Ideological Origins of Gradual Emancipation Law

This paper will focus on the role of children and conceptions of childhood in schemes for gradual emancipation in the Revolutionary Era North. While historians have paid increasing attention to slavery and emancipation the North, the ideological and legal origins of gradual emancipation laws remain considerably unexplored. In particular, we lack thorough explanations of why these laws focused on freeing children and not adults.

Between 1780 and 1804, six Northern states passed emancipation laws that freed no living slave but rather promised freedom to the future children of slaves. Once born, these children would be required to work as servants until early adulthood.  To be sure, such statutes were attractive to masters and legislators because they minimized property loss and guaranteed masters continued control over the labor of black children. By where did antislavery proponents and legislators get the idea to enact emancipation in this way? What made these schemes legally and philosophically attractive?

Gradual emancipation laws manifested both traditional and novel ideas about children. On the one hand, they reflected the established assumption that poor children and their labor did not necessarily belong to their dependent parents; local overseers of the poor had a longstanding mandate to remove poor children from their parents and bind them to strangers. When legislators "freed" black children, they simply placed them under an umbrella of poor laws and local institutions already in place for regulating poor white children. On the other hand, gradual emancipation law also reflected more novel Enlightenment-era beliefs about the malleability of children's minds—better to free black children who could be trained as virtuous citizens rather than free their already-degraded parents. In short, this paper argues that by focusing on childhood, we garner potent insights into the evolving relationship among freedom, citizenship, labor, and race in the early republic.