“To Forever Set Free”: The Manumission of Robert Green

During the Ulysses S. Grant Bicentennial in 2022, a New York resident contacted Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site about a document in her family's papers that she said concerned slavery at the White Haven estate. Research showed it was a copy of a historic record rather than the original, but she donated it to the park for safekeeping while the search for the original goes on. Park staff had not known of it, and it raises more questions than it answers about how slavery worked at White Haven.

Colonel Frederick F. Dent's manumission paper freeing Robert Green, December 28, 1838. NPS.

The document

On December 28, 1838, "Colonel" Frederick F. Dent — later Ulysses S. Grant's father-in-law — went to the St. Louis County Courthouse and wrote a paper freeing an enslaved man named Robert Green, aged twenty-eight, who was to be "forever set free."

As with other manumissions of the time, it gives no clear reason. The only clue is Dent's statement that Green was entitled to his freedom, for reasons not explained, "upon arriving at the age of twenty-eight." Dent also went a step further to protect it: on the back he wrote that if Green were ever "so unfortunate as to be placed in any situation" where his freedom was questioned, Dent would "gratefully oblige" by confirming it to anyone who asked.

On the back, Dent offered to vouch for Green's freedom to anyone who challenged it. NPS.

Why enslavers freed people

Reasons varied. Some enslavers freed people for good work, or because they believed a person deserved freedom; some did it through their wills. Others had less generous motives: elderly or sick enslaved people were sometimes freed because the enslaver could not or would not keep caring for them. States discouraged that, because, as the historian Benjamin Joseph Klebaner put it, "taxpayers [who] were responsible for the needy among the free population" would then bear the cost of people considered the enslaver's responsibility.

Enslaved people could not count on manumission:

• In the whole of 1850, only one-twentieth of one percent of the nation's enslaved people were freed this way.
• Ten Southern slave states required a freed person to leave the state, and many free Northern states barred free Black Americans from settling there.
• Promoting colonisation in Africa, Louisiana in 1852 required anyone freed to leave the United States altogether.
• Between 1857 and 1860, five states banned manumission outright and four more allowed it only by act of the legislature — measures meant to strengthen slavery and fix Black Americans' status as property under state law.

Missouri was more permissive: it did not outlaw manumission or require freed people to leave, though they had to buy a freedom license and carry it at all times. Slavery kept growing anyway — Missouri's enslaved population doubled between 1840 and 1860, from 57,000 to 114,000 — and only three percent of the state's Black population was free when the Civil War began in 1861.

Dent kept enslaving others

Freeing Robert Green did not stop Dent relying on enslaved labour for his family's wealth and comfort. Two years after the manumission, the census recorded him enslaving eighteen people; by 1850 the number was thirty.

Open questions

• Charles Ellet, from whom Dent received Green, appears in no St. Louis census record.
• Thomas A. Stanton, a witness, may have been born in Ireland in 1784, according to a separate census record. He did not enslave people himself, but lived in St. Louis's political Ward 1, where Dent had a city house, and may have known him that way.
• Lewis Dent, the other witness, may have been Dent's youngest son — who would have been only fifteen when the paper was signed.

The park will update its page if more comes to light about the people connected to the document.

The text

F. Dent
To R. Green
Deed of Emancipation
>
Know all men by their presence that I Frederick Dent of the County of St. Louis State of Missouri, for diverse good causes me hereto moving do hereby emancipate and forever set free a certain negro man named Robert Green aged about twenty eight years & upwards, who was entitled to his freedom his arriving at the age of twenty-eight years: he, having heretofore belonged to me by transfer from Charles Ellet.
>
In testimony whereof I have hereto set by my hand and seal this twenty eighth day of December in the year of our Lord one thousand and eight hundred and thirty eight.
>
Signed, sealed, and delivered in the presence of
F. Dent (seal)
Thos. A Stanton
Lewis Dent
>
Should the bearer Robert Green be so unfortunate as to be placed in any situation that may require aid or friends and cannot procure any gentleman that will write any word of his situation will gratefully oblige.
F. Dent
of St. Louis Missouri

Sources

• National Park Service, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, "To Forever Set Free": The Manumission of Robert Green.