The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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were a separate race and sensationalized their association with savagery and war. Almanacs picked up on these discussions and continually portrayed Africans as heathens or devilish apes. Depictions of blacks in literature as inferior and associated with evil followed. For instance, the author of a 1797 pamphlet titled The Devil or the New Jersey Dance described six young whites who hired a black fiddler for an evening. Instead of a single night of festivities, he kept the group for more than thirty days, leaving them “dancing on the stumps of their legs . . . their feet being worn off and the floor streaming with blood.”17
Some New Jerseyans, like Dutch Reformed minster John Nelson Abeel, complained of the dangers of blacks and whites living in close proximity on equal footing and suggested how blacks’ presence could destabilize the social order. Abeel offered that “those negroes who are as black as the devil and have noses as flat as baboons with great thick lips and wool on their heads,” along with “the Indians who they say eat human flesh and burn men alive and the Hotentots who love stinking flesh,” could prove dangerous if freed.18 A 1792 newspaper reiterated this sentiment by claiming that blacks bore “the marks of stupidity . . . in the countenances composed of dull heavy eyes, flat noses, and blubber lips.”19 In New York, racist rhetoric derailed that state’s abolition efforts in the 1780s, while in New Jersey it similarly worked to show blacks as unworthy of freedom.20
Slaveholders who embraced the institution in the 1790s convinced legislators that the institution needed continued regulation and in 1798 they passed a revised slave code that reaffirmed slavery’s legality and confirmed the inclusion of any “Indian, Mulatto or Mestee” currently held as a slave in that category. The reaffirmation of Indian slavery resulted from a court case one year earlier in which Rose, “a North Carolina squaw,” argued that her Indian status “furnishes at least prima facie evidence of her being free.” Elisha Boudinot, a future Supreme Court Justice and abolitionist who assisted Rose, argued that Indian slavery had no basis in law or practice. The defense pointed to slave laws passed in 1713, 1768, and 1769 that made “no discrimination . . . between negroes and Indians.” The court agreed and claimed Indian slaves “stand precisely upon the same footing . . . to be governed by the same rules as that of Africans.” The 1797 court decision and the 1798 statutory reaffirmation of Indian slavery strengthened the differentiation between free whites and enslaved nonwhites and reinforced the place of bound labor in New Jersey.21
The 1798 law also regulated slave behavior, levying restrictions to strengthen the institution. It banned slaves from assembling in a “disorderly or tumultuous manner,” prohibited their movement after 10 p.m., and affirmed longstanding prohibitions on slaves’ ability to testify against free persons. The legislature continued to strengthen slavery in 1801 when it revised a law on slave punishment. That law, like those in the South, allowed courts to sentence slaves convicted of arson, burglary, rape, highway robbery, attempted violent assault and battery, or attempted assault and battery with intent to commit murder to sale outside of New Jersey. Sale or transfer to the Deep South, discussed extensively in Chapter 6, further demonstrated the Revolution’s failure to advance abolitionism.22
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As slavery grew in East Jersey, Quakers and slaves worked to dismantle it in West Jersey. The Society of Friends had been advocates for abolition early on and therefore took the lead in advancing statewide abolition. By 1800, 80 percent of Burlington County blacks and 91 percent of Gloucester’s lived free. In comparison, only 11 percent of Essex County blacks and 6 percent of Bergen’s had gained freedom. This Quaker antislavery activity further bifurcated New Jersey, leaving West Jersey to develop into a free society even before the passage of a gradual abolition law while the institution remained entrenched in the East.23
However, even as Friends advanced abolition, few accepted free blacks as members of their meetings with equal status. Race still proved a barrier for Quakers, though they allowed black participation in certain religious activities. For example, John Woolman officiated the marriage of William Boen, a former Mount Holly slave, even as, the “way not opening in Friends’ minds, he was not received” by the meeting as a member. Instead, he remained affiliated with them until 1814, when the meeting finally granted him full membership.24
Like Boen, other Jersey blacks attended Quaker meetings in Burlington, Gloucester, and Salem in what became a way for Friends to collectively repay a debt owed for their participation in slavery. This Quaker “guilt,” usually manifested as paternalistic assistance, helped the Society become the largest (and only) lobbying group for black freedom in the state. The Salem Monthly Meeting felt so passionately about these meetings that they rearranged their regular worship schedule to allow blacks to use their meeting house at more convenient times. These meetings provided West Jersey blacks with an organized structure to create networks of both white and black allies, which they used to develop business ties, free family members, and gain educational opportunities. In sum, many ex-slaves saw these meetings as an opportunity to develop the bonds needed to survive in a state still ensnared in slavery.25
Calls for abolition routinely came directly from Quaker meetings as well as from those activists who had worked with Governor Livingston. In 1786, for instance, the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings, which included New Jersey, wrote to the state legislature to “restore this injured people to their natural right to freedom” and quickly enact gradual abolition. In 1788 they again called for abolition and stronger restrictions on the slave trade. Likewise, in 1792, the Meeting of Sufferings sent a delegation to Trenton to discuss ways to enact gradual abolition. That same year, Jersey Quakers joined those from Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland to petition for the immediate abolition of slavery, citing the “oppressed condition of the African race” and their position as “solicitors on their behalf” following the “precept and injunction of Christ” to mitigate slaves’ pain and suffering.26 New Jersey Quakers again spoke in 1799 through the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to the nation at large for the “spirit of meekness and wisdom in promoting” abolition.27
Quakers, especially abolitionist James Pemberton, also allied with Governor Livingston and worked to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. They sponsored a law that prohibited both the importation of slaves from Africa and of slaves from other states who entered the country after 1776, which tied the measure directly to the Revolution. However, as opposed to New Englanders who organized against the widely unpopular and sinful slave trade at the expense of local slaves, Livingston and his coalition fused the abolition of the slave trade with abolition at home. Despite the renewed push for gradual abolition in New Jersey, Livingston eventually abandoned the combined plan, believing that trying for both ran “the risk of obtaining nothing,” especially since gradual abolition had failed the previous year. Therefore, he claimed it was “then prudence not to insist upon it but to get what we can and which obtained paves the way for procuring the rest.”28
The attack on the slave trade tied Jersey Quakers to a much larger national coalition against the “barbarous custom” of slave trading. By the 1760s, both northerners and southerners, including New Jerseyans, had limited access to the slave trade by levying prohibitive duties. Although the Crown repudiated most of these duties, the Second Continental Congress enacted a ban on slave trading that lasted until 1783. Afterward, activists in individual states who opposed the trade worked to ban it and by 1790, as one newspaper article claimed, “the citizens of the United States [were] so generally united” in the belief of the trade’s barbarity that it made it an easy abolitionist target.29 Even though Georgia imported slaves until 1798 and South Carolina reopened the slave trade in 1803, most Americans opposed it. Closing the slave trade simultaneously helped fulfill the idea of revolutionary freedom, increased the value of those currently enslaved, and, as many thought, limited the potential for future slave rebellions. In New Jersey, Livingston’s coalition found common ground with slaveholders and banned the slave trade in 1786. However, the victory did little to weaken slavery’s hold in New Jersey because few slaves had been imported since the 1760s.30
Although unable to abolish slavery in New Jersey, Quakers and their allies petitioned the legislature relentlessly to make voluntary manumission of slaves easier, arguing that the colonial law requiring slaveholders to post manumission bonds dissuaded owners otherwise