Capacity for Freedom: Disability and Manumission in Early National Maryland

In the American colonies and then new United States, legislatures restricted manumission to enslaved people whom courts deemed to be “sound in mind and body” and “capable of gaining a livelihood by labor.” After years of enduring extraordinary labor and brutality that marred bodies and impaired minds, then, many enslaved people found that their corporeal incapacities impeded their emancipation and justified their continued bondage.

This paper examines thirteen enslaved and newly-freed men and women in early-nineteenth-century Maryland who challenged capacity-based restrictions on manumission in lawsuits for their liberty. In some cases, litigants directly opposed judges and officials’ evaluations of their physical and intellectual abilities, claiming that they did meet the corporeal standards for freedom despite findings otherwise. In other cases, litigants questioned the assumptions that slaveowners, judges, and officials made about physical and intellectual ability, arguing that even though they did not meet the corporeal standards required by law, they still should be freed because they had the personal and financial resources available for their support. This argument in particular forced slaveowners and judges to recognize the social and familial contexts that created capacity as well as the family and community ties between enslaved and newly freed people. While both legal strategies could be effective in county courts throughout the period, the Maryland Court of Appeals increasingly narrowed the meaning of capacity in ways that worked against the aims of many black petitioners. As the nineteenth century progressed, Supreme Court justices began to argue that legal freedom depended on an individual’s sole ability to perform economically productive labor.