Postwar Southern Manumissions
Although Virginia, Maryland and Delaware were slave states, their legislatures made manumission easier following the Revolution. Quaker and Methodist ministers particularly urged slaveholders to free their slaves. The number and proportion of free blacks in the states rose dramatically until 1810. More than half of the number of free blacks in the United States were concentrated in the Upper South. The proportion of free blacks among the black population in the Upper South rose from less than one percent in 1792 to more than 10 percent by 1810. In Delaware, nearly 75 percent of blacks were free by 1810.
In the US as a whole, by 1810 the number of free blacks reached 186,446, or 13.5 percent of all blacks. After that period, few were freed, as the development of cotton plantations featuring short-staple cotton in the Deep South drove up the internal demand for slaves in the domestic slave trade.
Read more about this topic: History Of Slavery In The United States, 1790 To 1850
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