TERM SLAVES

"For a variety of reasons --loyalty, intelligence, special skills , industry, meritorious service , sexual relationships, bearing an owner's child --slaves were often promised their freedom at some future date. Gaining the status bar of 'term slave,' which limited servitude to a specified number of years or until a designated age , was rare in the lower South but fairly common in Delaware , Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and towns and cities across the upper South. Both slave and master profited from such an arrangement: slaves, by securing the promise of liberty for themselves and possibly for their children; masters, by commanding a more substantial measure of loyalty on the basis of that promise. Most often these arrangements were put on paper --in deeds, wills, marital contracts, bills of sale, indentures, or mortgages--which stipulated that the person so named would gain his or her freedom after an owner's death or that of his widow, or when the bond servant attained a certain age . In some instances, owners expressed their desire that their slaves be freed at some future time both in deeds and in their last will and testaments.... Rather than surrender valuable property in accord with an owner's grant of terms of servitude , heirs and other family members often strove to keep slaves permanently enslaved. Administrators of estates, executors of wills, widows, heirs, white children, creditors, business partners--they all employed ethically questionable if not outright illegal means to subvert the original intent of the owner. White family members sometimes 'lost ', hid, destroyed the legal documents--last will and testaments, bills of sale, deeds, indentures--that supported any emancipation claims their slaves, usually fully aware of a deceased owner's wishes in their regard , might make. In some instances, years beyond the date of manumission prescribed by the deceased, owners in the same family refused to surrender the slaves. " P.93-94, "Term Slaves," APPEALING FOR LIBERTY : FREEDOM SUITS IN THE SOUTH, by Loren Schweninger (2018)