Half-free

Many half-free slaves were forced to continue to work for the Dutch West India Company even after they were set free, and the company even required half-free blacks to pay a yearly tax consisting of crops that they had raised on their farms.

“Half-free” meant that the slaves themselves were now free, but their children would return to slavery. The Dutch gave a half-free slave named Gratia d'Angola a 10acre farm in the 1640s, centered around what is today one block of Greene Street between Prince Street and Houston Street, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.

Yet first, the anonymous rabbis and students begin the sequence of explorations in legality of marriage between half-free people by using more general rules of betrothal.