Emancipation without the courts or constitution: the case of Revolutionary Massachusetts

Scholars have long believed that slavery ended in Massachusetts due to a 1783 judicial interpretation of the state's 1780 constitution, but this study mines probate records to reveal that neither the constitution nor the court ruling meaningfully altered the rates at which white people claimed black people as property: slavery petered out around the 1775 outbreak of revolution. Emancipation in Massachusetts seems largely to have resulted from internal negotiations within slaveholding households and changes in attitudes toward slavery. This suggests that the Massachusetts story of freedom was a bottom-up transformation in social relations rather than a legislative or judicial imposition from above.