Slavery in Romania - Laws On Abolition

Laws On Abolition

The earliest law which freed a category of slaves was in March 1843 in Wallachia, which transferred the control of the state slaves owned by the prison authority to the local authorities, leading to their sedentarizing and becoming peasants. A year later, in 1844, Moldavian Prince Mihail Sturdza proposed a law on the freeing of slaves owned by the church and state. In 1847, in Wallachia, a law of Prince Gheorghe Bibescu adopted by the Divan freed the slaves owned by the church and the rest of the slaves owned by the state institutions.

During the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, the agenda of the short-lived Provisional Government included the emancipation (dezrobire) of the Roma as one of the main social demands. The Government decreed the complete emancipation of the Roma by compensating the owners and it made a commission (made out of three members: Bolliac, Ioasaf Znagoveanu, and Petrache Poenaru), which was intended to implement the decree. Some boyars freed their slaves without asking for compensation, while others strongly fought against the idea of abolition. Nevertheless, after the revolution was quelled by Ottoman and Imperial Russian troops, the slaves returned to their previous status.

By the 1850s, after its tenets were intensely popularized, the movement gained support from almost the whole of Romanian society, the issues of contention being the exact date of Roma freedom, and whether their owners would receive any form of compensation (a measure which the abolitionists considered "immoral").

In Moldavia, in December 1855, following a proposal by Prince Grigore Alexandru Ghica, a bill drafted by Mihail Kogălniceanu and Petre Mavrogheni was adopted by the Divan; the law emancipated all slaves to the status of taxpayers (that is, citizens). The measure was brought about by a personal tragedy: Ghica and the public opinion at large were scandalized when Dincă, the slave and illegitimate child of a Cantacuzino boyar, was not allowed to marry his French mistress and go free, which had led him to murder his lover and kill himself. The owners would receive a compensation of 8 galbeni for lingurari and vătraşi and 4 galbeni for lăieşi, the money being provided by the taxes paid by previously freed slaves.

In Wallachia, only two months later, in February 1856, a similar law was adopted by the National Assembly, paying a compensation of 10 galbeni for each slave, in stages over a number of years. The freed slaves had to settle to a town or village and stay there for at least two censuses and they would pay their taxes to the compensation fund.