Manumission of Slaves - 1835
These documents came to light because of an E-Mail inquiry from David Diamond
in Arizona. Mr. Diamond was interested in locating records of the manumission
of slaves brought to Wayne County from North Carolina. After a couple of
exchanges, we learned that the records were very likely to be in the Recorder's
Office in the "Miscellaneous Records". Debbie Tieman, the chief deputy,
remembered that Arnold Dean, a local historian, had come across those records
in the middle of a book titled "Apprentices Indentures I". The record almost
appears to be intentionally hidden. The record of manumissions was only
found because Mr. Dean was creating his own index to the indentures book
and stumbled across the five pages of manumissions. Fortunately, Mr. Dean
was kind enough to leave a copy of his index with the Recorder, and this
provided the trail we needed.
The documents are presented below in two forms- for fast access we have
included Mr. Diamond's typescript of the documents. For those who are willing
to wait through a lengthy download, actual scans of the documents are included
as well. The average file size for the scans is roughly 500K. Also of great
interest are Mr. Diamond's comments on the historical context surrounding
this episode in history.
Note that the manumission on page 4 was witnessed by Levi Coffin.
A typescript of the documents
Comments on the documents
Scan of Page One
Scan of Page Two
Scan of Page Three
Scan of Page Four
Scan of Page Five
Of related interest:
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