Self-Purchase and Military Service

This chapter explores self-purchase and military service as strategies used by slaves to obtain their freedom. In contrast to marronage, these were forms not of revolt but rather of individual, familial, and at times community resistance that used existing legislative frameworks to escape a condition of servitude. This chapter discusses self-purchase and manumission in Iberian America and the prohibition of manumission in British and Dutch America, as well as The Code Noir and restrictions on emancipation in French America. In every slave society, armies and navies historically employed enslaved men, some of whom were rewarded with emancipation. Though emancipation did not challenge the system of slavery, it demonstrated long before the era of revolutions and independence movements that enslaved men and women were able to pursue freedom for themselves or their families through supplementary labor, unknowingly foreshadowing modernity.