manumit

present singular third person manumits · participle present manumitting · participle past manumitted · past manumitted

1. transitiveTo release (someone) from slavery; to free.

   Ruth wept much but Sara set her beauty to a fierce grimness which, even when, as you shall hear later, she was manumitted, she never entirely lost.

   1985, Anthony Burgess, Kingdom of the Wicked, Arbor House Publishing

   3 more examples

   […]Lungs, I will manumit thee from the Fornace; / I will reſtore thee thy complexion, Puffe, / Lost in the embers; and repayre this brayne, / Hurt with the fume o'the Mettalls.

   1610 (first performance), Ben[jamin] Jonson, The Alchemist, London: […] Thomas Snodham, for Walter Burre, and are to be sold by Iohn Stepneth, […], published 1612, →OCLC, Act II, scene ii

   Turn now to the temperance revolution. In it we shall find a stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed; in it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged.

   1842 February 22, Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society”, in Arthur Brooks Lapsley, editor, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

   Persons taken in war were considered at the absolute control of their captors, and were therefore, de facto, slaves; and the children of a female slave followed the condition of their mother, and belonged to her master. But masters could manumit their slaves, who thus became Roman citizens, with some restrictions.

   1867, John Lord, The Old Roman World: the Grandeur and Failure of Its Civilization

   Synonyms: emancipate, enfranchise, liberate