The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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Prime’s transformation from free patriot veteran to confiscated property hits at the very heart of historical understandings of the Revolution. In contrast to arguments put forward by historians that the Revolution laid the groundwork for African American freedom, Prime’s case represents the perpetuation of slavery because of the Revolution, not an extension of freedom supported by revolutionary ideology. Of course, Prime himself did not surrender his freedom and this ideology easily; he authored a petition to the legislature demanding his freedom based on his service to the nation. By 1786, the legislature had freed him and two other slaves caught in his same situation, illustrating that though this ideology had power in New Jersey, it helped only a limited number of slaves.4
Slavery survived the Revolution because of New Jersey’s status as a hotly contested revolutionary battleground. British and American troops slogged through the mud of the well-worn road between New York and Philadelphia, trampled through the snow at Morristown, and fought on the plains of Monmouth, which caused state residents to feel the negative effects of war more than most. With almost three hundred separate military engagements and thousands of foraging expeditions by British and Americans, revolutionary New Jersey easily earned the name given to it by historian Leonard Lundin in the 1940s—“The Cockpit of the Revolution.”5
The Revolution’s destructive power and disruptive influence on the state’s economy, coupled with the constant threat of British invasion, encouraged lawmakers and white citizens to decline to advance abolition even as it moved forward in Pennsylvania and New England. Opposition to black freedom had already been substantial as abolitionists failed to overcome fears of race war and social dislocation in the state’s ongoing rhetorical battle over slavery. The fallout from the actual battles solidified this opposition to abolitionism and effectively ended the first moves toward abolition begun in the 1770s. Even as the war allowed thousands of blacks to escape to British lines and gain freedom, combat operations in this borderland at the crossroads of the Revolution inflicted a devastating economic toll as both armies routinely ravaged the state. The destructive reality of war overpowered abolitionism in New Jersey and suppressed any desire to free a valuable labor source from those grappling with wartime destruction and an uncertain future.
In addition to exacerbating economic losses, the absconding of hundreds of slaves to British lines and their return as loyalist soldiers created an even more powerful socially produced hysteria and anxiety over a potential statewide slave revolt. Reports of ex-slaves murdering, raping, and pillaging their former hometowns delayed serious discussions of abolition as many Jersey whites believed themselves under attack by a ruthless and uncontrollable enemy. The institution of slavery provided security and control over blacks in the insecurity of war, which encouraged lawmakers at the end of the Revolution to not free the vast majority of confiscated loyalist slaves like Prime. The state’s role as a slave trader both during and after the Revolution reinforced its commitment to a slave system that would successfully defend itself for the next twenty years against a growing abolition movement in the North and the larger Atlantic World.
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Anti-abolition activists responded forcefully in words and actions against the abolitionists’ use of revolutionary rhetoric in support of slave freedom. The petitions that Quaker abolitionists had sent to the legislature and the newspaper debates they provoked helped anti-abolitionists drum up significant support in the state, motivated violence against abolitionists— Jacob Green’s church was sacked in protest—and allowed anti-abolitionists to clearly set out their reasons for opposing black freedom. This group primarily argued that slavery could not be abolished because the Revolution had devastated the state economically and a constant fear of future destruction remained. For instance, one abolitionist critic claimed that New Jersey could not follow its neighbors toward abolition because it had been “laid to waste and rendered desolate by the ravages” of the British army.6
Legislators repeatedly used this economic argument to halt abolitionism, believing it too radical a step to take in the midst of war. To the abolitionists, the moral stakes were high as Quaker activist Samuel Allinson wrote in 1778, the “eyes of the world have been and are upon America” in the matter of slavery.7 Although Allinson thought the eyes looked specifically toward Pennsylvania and its battle to enact gradual abolition, he also lobbied Governor William Livingston to consider abolition in New Jersey. Livingston, a slaveholder himself, readily adopted Allinson’s abolitionist ideology and freed his slaves. Through frequent exchanges with Allinson, Livingston not only embraced abolitionism but became more accepting of Quakerism, leading him to become Allinson’s principal ally. At the same time, however, Livingston believed the legislature “thinking us rather in too critical a situation to enter on the consideration of it at that time, desired me in a private way to withdraw the message.” Livingston thought that this “critical situation,” the economic losses and fear of British attack, derailed the wartime abolitionist agenda.8
The reality of war in New Jersey hit the state’s citizens from almost the very beginning when the British invasion of New York in 1776 forced Washington’s army into a headlong retreat across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. New Jersey became “a ragged borderline between the two Americas, Loyalist and Patriot,” of which the “neutral zone of eastern and northern New Jersey, especially Monmouth and Bergen counties” was where “the violence was most brutal.”9 War in New Jersey became a longstanding foraging battle in which both armies scavenged for supplies, with major battles occasionally highlighting the daily struggle for food and influence. As Livingston had alluded, defending the state against British attack preoccupied the minds of most New Jerseyans and therefore limited the abolitionist influence.10
The relative brutality and cruelty that plagued New Jersey was made abundantly clear by legislators, soldiers, and citizens. In August 1776, Abraham Clark, a member of the Continental Congress, wrote that residents of his native Elizabethtown “are daily alarmed with news of an attack.”11 By the end of September, after British forces had actually invaded, patriots routinely discussed reports of British “savagery.” American General Jedidiah Huntington recorded that with almost one-third of New York City in flames, “unheard of barbarities were committed by the Kings Troops . . . some, it’s said, were thrown into the flames, others tied up by the legs and their throats cut,” all done to “deter” further insurrection.12
Figure 1. William Livingston, governor of New Jersey, 1776–1790.
Courtesy of the New York Public Library.
After the British invasion of New Jersey in late 1776, dozens of state leaders and soldiers saw the devastation inflicted by the British, its devastating impact on state residents, and how it pervaded residents’ focus throughout the war. For instance, Samuel Adams wrote to his wife Elizabeth about the “savage tragedies . . . without respect to age or sex” perpetrated by Hessian soldiers, which “have equaled the most barbarous” of all the “nations of the world.” Adams reiterated his belief in the barbarity of the Hessian and British forces the following week to his cousin John, when he again claimed that they had “been most inhumanely used in their persons, without regard to sex or age, and plundered of all they had.”13 Echoing Adams, William Whipple wrote to his fellow New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett of the “brutal vengeance of an abandoned soldiery . . . exercised on all without distinction.” The “ravages committed by the enemy” in New Jersey were “really shocking to humanity.” Whipple feared that if the British shifted their operations to New England, his constituents would suffer “greater cruelties than New Jersey has experienced.”14 These letters echoed reports from field commanders, such as Nathanael Greene, who wrote to his wife in early December 1776 that American soldiers from Maryland and Virginia had been dispatched to New Jersey to “stop the ravages of the enemy.” Unlike other accounts of the campaign, Greene claimed both sides “take the clothes off of the peoples back. The distress they spread wherever they go exceeds all description.”15
In early 1777, after a congressional committee began investigating British and Hessian conduct in New Jersey, delegates heard reports of numerous