manumission

Cascading from the table’s edge is a manumission document releasing a family named Moore from chattel slavery as burning incense and a nearby plate of water quietly consecrate the sober scene.

But it further tightened protections for enslavers, limiting taxes on enslaved people and prohibiting manumission.

So for the last 20 years, Haley has been scouring newspaper articles, census records, newspaper ads for runaway slaves, manumission deeds, coroner reports and other documents hoping to come across that missing piece.

The question has lingered around the edges of the pop-culture ascendancy of Alexander Hamilton: Did the 10-dollar founding father, celebrated in the musical “Hamilton” as a “revolutionary manumission abolitionist,” actually own slaves?

“It was a copy of, I think, her great great grandfather’s manumission papers.”