Quaker Manumissions in the American Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, 1759-1805

This document collection, sourced from the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College and Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections, contains manumissions from Quaker meetings (congregations) in the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States during the 18th and early 19th centuries. When the Religious Society of Friends forbade slaveholding amongst its members, some Quaker meetings kept copies of these legal documents, granting enslaved people their freedom, as evidence that members complied with this requirement. The manumissions included in this project are from Quaker meetings that have deposited their records with the Friends Historical Library or the Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections. The Haverford College Libraries project "Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers" established a structure and set of fields for the datasets published here.