Southern States Systematically Restrict and Ban Manumission

Beginning in the 1820s and accelerating after Nat Turner's rebellion, Southern states progressively restricted and then banned the voluntary freeing of enslaved people. Virginia (1782 law) had allowed manumission; by 1820 freed people had to leave the state within a year. After 1831, Virginia required legislative approval for each manumission. Mississippi (1842), Arkansas (1859), and Maryland (1860) effectively banned all manumission. Georgia required freed people to leave immediately. The tightening laws stranded hundreds of people whose enslavers intended to free them and made the legal path from slavery to freedom nearly impossible in the Deep South by the 1850s.