Manumissions on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1775-1785

The “Manumissions on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1775-1785” dataset identifies 618 people manumitted as the result of 83 private land deeds recorded between the years 1775 and 1785 in five Maryland counties: Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford, Montgomery and Prince George's. An ongoing project, this dataset is the first effort to compile and make public extant eighteenth-century slave manumission data for Maryland in a single location. Each record includes (a) the name, age, sex and deed type (immediate or delayed) for the enslaved individual manumitted; (b) the name, location and religion (if known) of the slave owner; and (c) the year the deed was recorded by the county court. Two-thirds of the enslaved people manumitted during the period under study were freed by Quakers or Methodists. Of the total 618 enslaved people, slightly more than two-fifths were manumitted immediately; others were required to serve further terms of service ranging in length from a few months to several years. Overall, this project departs from economic explanations of Maryland's relatively large free Black population, suggesting that during the Revolutionary Era private manumissions undertaken for moral and religious reasons were at least as important, and possibly more, as those undertaken for other motives.