"Whites reasoned that even if Africans had once had
entitlement to themselves as free people, such entitlement did not extend to
slaves born and raised in white families-persons never free, raised at the
"expense" of their owners. But
this reasoning implied that emancipating one's slaves conferred freedom upon
them as a gift to which they were at best theoretically but never actually
entitled. And in the view of most
whites, since even the act of being freed represented the exercise of the owner's
power over the slave, an emancipated slave could never become a
"free" person but only a "freed" one- a person acted upon,
not acting."
~Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860, Joanne Pope Melish
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