The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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and war conducted from its own ports, Burlington and Perth Amboy, and the nearby commercial hubs of New York and Philadelphia. New Jerseyans had a front row seat for imperial discussions over taxation, war, and abolition as the Delaware and Hudson Rivers became vehicles for the exchange of information, goods, culture, ideas, and people.5
New Jersey, therefore, is one of the best laboratories in which to test the meaning and influence of abolition in the United States because its prime location exposed it to issues and ideas of freedom from around the globe. The state was significant during the American Revolution, as British and Patriot armies engaged in more battles within its borders than in any other state, and its revolutionary experience made the call for liberty and freedom integral to the state’s birth. Yet for all the patriotic fervor of the revolutionary generation, New Jersey delayed enactment of gradual abolition until 1804, later than any other northern state. This book explores why that delay occurred and how Jersey slaves experienced, or frequently did not experience, freedom after 1804.6
In the last twenty-five years, the memory of northern slavery has been revived as many northern states have created Amistad Commissions and mandated that the local history of slavery be taught in their classrooms. The 1991 discovery of the African Burial Ground in New York City likewise spurred debate over slavery’s presence in the North.7 Journalists shocked northern readers with stories of slaves living and working in the North, asserting that the North “helped create, strengthen, and prolong slavery in America.”8 Likewise, New Jersey’s 2008 official legislative apology for its role in slavery forced residents to begin to integrate slavery into their local history and identity as northerners.9 Of course, historians have understood that slavery existed in the North long before the discovery of the African Burial Ground. In the past forty years, they have explored the ways that slavery operated in almost every imaginable locale and time. Recently, the focus on transnational and Atlantic history has encouraged historians to reimagine how slavery in the United States compared to the experience of enslaved Indians in the Americas and the many forms of bondage operating in Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and Asia.10
Similarly, scholars in related fields have challenged the very definition of slavery. Sociologist Orlando Patterson’s influential Slavery and Social Death, among other works, challenged the binary between slavery and freedom that formed the basis of American scholarship for decades. Patterson proposed that the foundational meaning of slavery differed based on individual societal definitions. Abraham Lincoln’s clear dichotomy between slavery and freedom in his 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, that all slaves “shall be forever free,” stood in sharp contrast to the experiences of slaves around the globe. Most slaves never experienced a clear division between freedom and slavery. Instead, as Patterson argues, each society had a very different understanding of what freedom meant and how that meaning shaped slavery. This nuanced understanding of slavery compelled historian Peter Kolchin to argue that people of African heritage across the Atlantic World experienced many different “slaveries” instead of one monolithic “slavery.” Unpacking the meaning of slavery and freedom in this way has allowed historians to recast everything from indentured servitude in colonial Virginia to concubinage in twentieth-century Northern Nigeria as a form of slavery, mirroring chattel bondage in some ways but differing from it in others.11
This new scholarship has largely skirted the northern states, however, as the image of southern slavery has routinely colored understandings of what slavery should look like north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Northern slavery, especially in the Mid-Atlantic, was a flexible and varied institution that differed from the more regimented cash crop agriculture of the South. This flexibility has encouraged historians to argue that abolition was inevitable and easily accomplished in New Jersey. With the exception of a few notable works, the African American experience in the revolutionary and early national North continues to be one dominated not by the narrative of slavery but by the growth of freedom. Interposing New England for the North as a whole, using one state as fully representative of the region, or only teasing out minimal differences between the states has clouded understandings of the slow death of slavery and the incredibly convoluted legal and social relationships that it created for those who lived it and struggled to understand it on a daily basis.12
Indeed, the various ways that slavery ended in the North have confused historians for decades as few have really come to grips with the long-term impact of post-Revolutionary abolitionism. Slavery’s end in Vermont used to be the easiest to understand since a constitutional amendment erased slavery before it really had a chance to develop. However, new work has shown that the 1777 constitution “did not end slavery or establish meaningful freedom for African Americans.” Instead, abolition was “contested, contingent, complicated, and messy.” Likewise, historians for decades used the Quok Walker decision in Massachusetts—in which the enslaved Walker sued for and won his freedom in 1781—to show how slavery quickly ended there by 1790, while New Hampshire’s emancipation through brutal attrition over several decades continues to raise scholarly eyebrows. As with the Vermont case, new scholarship has called the Walker case into question, showing that contemporary accounts never claimed it had eliminated slavery—those developed only later in the nineteenth century. If Walker’s legacy can be challenged, slavery’s demise in the rest of the North certainly deserves greater scrutiny.13
From 1783 to 1804, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey all agreed to the “gradual abolition of slavery,” while New York approved “gradual manumission.” In each case, these laws freed only the children born to slaves after a certain date and only after a period of service to their mother’s master. Slaves in these states therefore never participated in a true emancipation or the decisive release from a system of control. Emancipation was the process by which an actual slave moved from a state of slavery to one of freedom. Instead, most of these states utilized the term abolition, meaning an end to slavery’s existence by eliminating its perpetuation. It is no coincidence then that New Jersey’s early abolitionists fully embraced the term abolition by supporting a program that mediated black freedom with white supervision, in this case by slaveholders. Throughout this volume, I therefore use the term abolitionist to describe the myriad types of men and women who pushed for a gradual end to slavery. Many of these New Jerseyans, like their contemporaries in New York and Pennsylvania, were routinely racist, believed that blacks could not live free without white tutelage, and, in some cases, still owned slaves or joined the American Colonization Society (ACS) to advance their own negrophobic agendas. However, they all fundamentally disagreed with the institution of slavery, though for different reasons, and hoped to see it end at some future point. Their practices and choices of wording were also motivated by realities on the ground—few slaveholders voluntarily wanted to free their slaves—thus, most Jersey abolitionists preferred that slavery’s demise come through a prolonged ending rather than a quick transformation. Only in the late 1830s did a new breed of abolitionist come forward, one that believed in the immediate end to slavery and actively worked for emancipation both in their own organizations and with free blacks. They appropriated the term “abolitionist” for themselves and claimed the gradualists were actually not abolitionists. I believe both supported abolition, so I use the term to describe both groups. However, since almost all gradualists still operating in New Jersey after 1830 were colonizationists, references to abolitionists after that date refer exclusively to the second generation unless otherwise noted.14
The Ragged Road to Abolition examines this gradual end to slavery and highlights the integral role that black and white New Jerseyans played in defining slavery’s place in their own state and within the larger nation in everything from the Revolution, to colonization, to the internal slave trade, to the sectional crisis. New Jersey was neither peripheral to slavery nor to gradual abolition—it was central. As Daniel Richter has challenged historians to face east from the Indian perspective to better understand the colonial encounter, The Ragged Road to Abolition challenges scholars to stand on the Mason-Dixon Line and look north to better understand the history of abolition. By doing so, New Jersey appears far more dedicated to slavery than if we look south. Reorienting our approach to slavery in this way helps us to see that slaves like Catherine lived in a violent society with slaves. Slaveholding remained at the heart of the white social imagination, determining how New Jerseyans interacted with African