The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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them to create independent households and thriving businesses. One such ex-slave, Cyrus Bustill of Burlington, owned a profitable bakery that sold flour, cakes, bread, and biscuits to local residents and those who travelled on the Delaware. Eventually, Bustill and his family moved to Philadelphia, where he attended Quaker meetings, belonged to the Free African Society, and taught in a school for freed slaves before his death in 1806. Like Bustill, Samson Adams, an ex-slave from Trenton, sold soap, which enabled him to buy a house in town and employ a housekeeper. Surviving records indicate that he had made a number of alliances with whites; almost fifty Trenton residents donated labor, supplies, or money to help him complete his home. The records reveal that Adams traded soap, food, and other goods with blacks and whites throughout the region. At his death in 1792, Sampson had accumulated a substantial personal estate that he divided among his family, with two white customers serving as his executors.44
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Jersey Quakers had quickly realized that they needed an organization to coordinate their abolitionist activities and therefore latched onto the PAS, the most prominent abolitionist group in the United States. Sixteen of the original PAS members lived in New Jersey, many of whom prosecuted cases on behalf of the society. For example, Richard Waln, an affluent Monmouth County Quaker, communicated frequently with PAS leadership in Philadelphia and, as one of its founding members, helped free numerous blacks unlawfully held in bondage. In 1788, for instance, Waln intervened in the case of a Jersey child held as a slave even though his mother had been freed before his birth. Waln and the PAS, like most gradualists, believed litigation was the best avenue to defeat slavery. However, by early 1793 even Waln cited the lack of interest in abolition and the need for a more organized response to slavery in New Jersey. After Trenton PAS member Isaac Collins, who had done much legal work for slaves, ended his membership in the society, Waln lamented that a larger state network would be needed to fervently advance abolitionism.45
Years of communicating with members like Waln had convinced the PAS that it needed to create an autonomous society in New Jersey. In January 1793, a committee formed to organize a New Jersey abolition society and by April they reported that they had founded the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, headquartered in Burlington. The collaboration between the New Jersey society and the PAS continued as members from both organizations routinely exchanged information about specific cases.46 The newly formed society used the Declaration of Independence’s doctrine that “all men are created equal” to find fault with the state for withholding the principles of “justice . . . life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from “an unfortunate and degraded class of our fellow citizens.” This rhetoric, of course, had been used by other abolition groups throughout the Mid-Atlantic. For instance, Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller of the New York Manumission Society argued that “any civilized country . . . [should] oppose . . . slavery,” especially in “this free country” where “the plains . . . are still stained with blood shed in the cause of liberty” and “the noble principle that ‘all men are born free and equal’ ” reigns.47
Quakers joined the new society en mass and dominated membership in at least five county-level auxiliaries. In Burlington, for instance, Quakers made up 70 percent of the sixty-five total members, while in Gloucester they represented 40 percent of the membership. In proslavery East Jersey, all but four of the members of the Middlesex/Essex chapter came from the Society of Friends and the Hunterdon County chapter even met at the Friends’ Meeting House. The society therefore became the arm of Quaker abolitionist outreach.48
The society continued to provide legal support for slaves and, led by former state attorney general Joseph Bloomfield, widely distributed previous New Jersey Supreme Court decisions to ensure their use as precedent in freedom cases. In one such case, Frank, a free black Middlesex County resident, had contracted with his wife Cloe’s owner, Issac Anderson, in 1778 to purchase her for the sum of 180 pounds. Now both free, the couple had a child, Benjamin, but then separated. By 1803, medical issues prevented Cloe from supporting herself or her son. The local overseers of the poor followed state law and charged Issac Anderson for Cloe and Benjamin’s care as her former owner. Less than a month later, Cloe died, which left Anderson supporting Benjamin. Because Anderson supported him, he believed Benjamin to be his slave. Applying precedent from previous cases, society lawyers sued Anderson and claimed that Benjamin, now twenty-one, had been born free because Cloe’s owner had manumitted her before his birth. After an intense legal battle, Anderson finally agreed that he did not have the right to hold Benjamin but demanded $150 in payment for his expenses related to Benjamin’s upbringing. After some negotiations, the society agreed to pay Anderson the $150 to ensure Benjamin’s freedom.49
Abolitionist lawyers routinely faced staunch opposition from those who attempted to hold onto their slaves through duplicitous means. In the case that provided the legal precedent for Benjamin’s freedom, Joseph Bloomfield argued in 1790 for the freedom of Silas, a child born after his mother, Betty, had been freed in her master’s will but served that master’s family under a fifteen-year indenture. The owner of the indenture, James Anderson (no relation to Issac Anderson above), claimed that since Betty had not yet been freed, her children should be considered slaves. Bloomfield countered that Betty gained her freedom at the moment of her master’s death but remained under contract for fifteen years. He successfully argued that any child born during an indenture subsequent to manumission would be free from birth.50
Figure 2. This Membership Certificate of the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery illustrates how white society members saw themselves as bestowing liberty to the enslaved.
Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
The increased presence of abolitionists in New Jersey motivated slaves to take action themselves to press their freedom through the courts since they now had allies who could assist them. Cuff, a slave from Somerset County, had been promised freedom by his master, Gilbert Randolph, either at his own death or when his son, James, came of age. However, when James came of age, Randolph reneged on the agreement and demanded ten additional years of service. Cuff, likely hearing of the court cases proceeding across New Jersey, absconded from his master and eventually convinced abolitionist lawyers to take up his case, one that won him his freedom.51
Abolitionist lawyers also filed suit to protect free blacks from being kidnapped and sold south, thereby limiting the illegal slave trade that thrived along the coast from New Hampshire to Georgia. For instance, in May 1803 the society’s lawyers litigated a case involving the sloop Nancy, owned by Ruben Pitcher, which had left Boston with four free blacks shackled in its hold. All had been held for debts, some as small as six dollars, in the Boston jail. Pitcher paid their debts and arranged for them to work off that debt on his farm on Martha’s Vineyard. A few days later, Pitcher loaded the four onto the Nancy and set sail for Savannah to sell them as slaves. Pitcher docked in Egg Harbor, New Jersey, for provisions, where the four blacks seized the opportunity to escape and fled to local abolitionists who arranged for the Nancy’s confiscation and their freedom. In a similar case, William Griffith, the future president of the society, arranged for the purchase and manumission of Charlotte, a Monmouth County slave whose owner had planned to sell her illegally to the West Indies.52
Outside the courtroom, the society lobbied legislators and participated in abolition conventions designed to address black freedom on a national level. In 1794, the society sent Joseph Bloomfield to a Philadelphia abolitionist convention, which elected him president. The convention called on Congress to halt the slave trade, arguing that its end must occur in order to “vindicate the honor of the United States, the rights of man, and the dignity of human nature.”53 Upon returning to New Jersey, Bloomfield and the society used these ideas of universal justice to argue that New Jersey needed to enact an abolition plan to fulfill the nation’s revolutionary promise. Society members told the state legislature that “natural feelings of the human heart . . . acknowledged by Americans in their act of Independence, as among the most undeniable rights of man” demanded that the state assist in freeing enslaved blacks.54
Bloomfield used this