In this talk, Cornelia Bewersdorf will explain how Connecticut approached abolition through legislative regulation and how manumission laws discouraged masters from freeing their enslaved servants. Her research encompassed three centuries of laws and statutes, and her findings are organized into six categories: Fugitive Laws, Manumission Laws, Slave Codes, Gradual Abolition Laws, Slave Trade Limitation, and the Final Abolition in 1848. 

Cornelia Bewersdorf is a trained German lawyer, a Guilford resident and a member of the society Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford. During a Master class in American Legal History at UCONN law school she studied the laws of slavery in Connecticut.