The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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understanding of what freedom meant in the nineteenth-century United States and the larger Atlantic World. Slavery, as historian Edward Ayers argues, “shaped everything it touched” and even in states like New Jersey, where gradual abolition had begun to limit slavery’s reach, slavery remained slavery to those who participated in it, worthy to be defended even into the 1840s and 1850s.15
This study examines the process of freedom in three parts. Chapters 1–3 look at the period 1770–1804 and ask why abolition became more popular following the American Revolution. Instead of being motivated by ideological strands of the Revolution as other historians have argued, gradual abolition began in 1804 for political purposes born in the partisan battle between Federalists and Democratic Republicans. While it was rooted in the revolutionary belief of individual freedom, the Revolution in New Jersey did not heighten support for black liberty. On the contrary, the war reinforced slavery by highlighting the dangers white New Jerseyans would face if they supported abolition. The economic destruction caused by the Revolution and fears of a black revolt in the aftermath of freedom calmed abolitionist calls. The two decades after the Revolution, therefore, saw the growth of slavery in New Jersey, which helped keep pace with the worldwide demand for New Jersey’s foodstuffs, even as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island took steps to eliminate the institution.16
Chapters 4–7 explore the early abolition period (1804–1830) in four topical chapters and show how slavery became flexible after gradual abolition began. Instead of killing slavery, gradual abolition allowed it to survive until the Civil War in myriad different forms, overturning the idea that northern slavery’s limited numbers sped its destruction. After all, at its core, slavery was an economic institution, one that remained critical for many Jersey whites. The abolition law provided for the freedom of children born to slaves after July 4, 1804, once they served a specified number of years (twenty-one or twenty-five) to their mother’s master. These children, whom I call slaves for a term, were bought, sold, whipped, worked, and separated from their families just like slaves before them. Contemporary New Jersey sources remarked that these children were thought of and treated like slaves, though with the understanding that they would leave that status in the future. The presence of slaves for a term extended bondage in a different form to generations that came of age in the 1820s and 1830s so that in 1830 almost a quarter of the state’s black population remained bound laborers.17
Of course, this extended servitude dramatically affected enslaved and free black life in New Jersey since each lived in a world where the line between slavery and freedom was thin. Thousands of Jersey slaves born before 1804 and therefore ineligible for gradual abolition negotiated intently for freedom; those who managed to break out of slavery argued for greater political and social rights within their newly formed community. This group failed to advance black rights primarily because of their limited numbers and a general apathy among whites for ensuring black freedom. Slaveholders likewise continually resisted abolition in order to profit from their bound laborers. Indeed, white New Jerseyans routinely sold their slaves and slaves for a term out of state to subvert gradual abolition and support slavery’s overall national expansion. However, the most notorious slave trading ring, which operated in the late 1810s, significantly influenced how white New Jerseyans saw their state’s slavery in a national perspective. With the crisis over the extension of slavery into Missouri coming on the heels of public concern over this slave trading ring, white New Jerseyans began to inculcate a proto-free soil ideology that opposed slavery’s westward expansion into Missouri but supported its continuation in the South and New Jersey. This ideology, though antislavery, was not abolitionist and did little to alter the perceived link between the newly freed and the enslaved, which whites used to prevent their inclusion into the body politic. This was most readily apparent in the 1807 abrogation of voting rights for free black men and women, which began a systematic process of stripping legal and political rights from former slaves. The colonization movement sustained this link between “slavery” and “black” in law and custom. This perpetual tie between slavery and race limited opportunities for black independence and forced black families to live not as fully free people but in multiple gradations of freedom: some could be free, some slave, and some slave for a term. It created a hodgepodge of legal, economic, and social relationships that confused even the state’s most learned jurists. These complex and frequently confusing relationships complicated how both whites and blacks functioned within, and sometimes outside, the boundaries of slavery. A stroke of a pen did not make anyone “forever free” but instead drew a blurry line of demarcation between slavery and freedom, one that whites and blacks struggled to constantly define and redefine.18
Chapters 8 and 9 examine the later abolition period (1830–1860) and place familiar nineteenth-century issues—race riots, abolitionism, fugitive slaves, and sectional antagonism—in the context of slavery’s slow death. The 1830s represented a major shift in the freedom process and black life in New Jersey as that decade was a transitional one in which free blacks began to stay in New Jersey in larger numbers. Their numbers grew due to simple reproduction by those freed earlier and were joined by the first generation of slaves for a term who had just gained freedom. This demographic shift allowed blacks to more readily establish independent households, move out of white-controlled churches and schools, and develop their own institutions designed to fight persistent racism and its link to slavery. This decoupling of race and slavery also occurred in law when, in 1836, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that blacks were no longer prima facie slaves; freedom became the default legal category for African Americans. Of course, this development of an identity outside of slavery initiated reprisals from whites as they also felt, for the first time, threatened by the economic and social changes underway. Race riots rocked New Jersey in the 1830s and 1840s, when whites feared economic competition, racial amalgamation, and an increasingly smaller role for themselves in politics and society.19
The Ragged Road to Abolition closes by shifting focus back to the nation at large and examining how the uptick in fugitive slaves and the rise of the immediate abolition movement in the 1830s propelled New Jersey’s slave system back into the spotlight. It shows how slavery’s constant presence in New Jersey shaped the role, status, and history of African Americans in a way that historians have as yet failed to grasp. Slavery’s survival in New Jersey confronted state, regional, and national politicians as the nation moved toward the Civil War since the state’s border position allowed southern fugitive slaves to encounter a still functioning slave system. The constant interaction with fugitive slaves forced white and black New Jerseyans to question how the state’s legal and judicial system would deal with both Jersey-born slaves and southern fugitives. New Jerseyans never left slavery behind either in practice or in how it influenced their ideological identity. Their refusal to pass stronger personal liberty laws after the Supreme Court’s 1842 Prigg decision, which allowed states to restrict their own courts from hearing federal fugitive slave cases, abolition’s weak presence in the state, and the state legislature’s wholesale rejection of black political rights were all influenced by New Jersey’s past and continuing support of slavery. Even by 1846, when the state abolished the legal term “slave” and transformed its remaining slaves into “apprentices for life,” yet another form of slavery, white actors consistently supported a gradual approach to abolition and resisted slavery’s immediate end. Even in a society with slaves where gradual abolition was well underway, slavery proved resilient.
This consistent engagement with and appreciation of the state’s past and current slave system stands in stark contrast to portrayals of New Englanders at the same moment in time. New England’s prominent role in the abolition movement allowed abolitionists there to disown slavery from their own history and reinterpret it as a minor institution that resembled apprenticeship far more than chattel bondage. They used this New England identity to demarcate the entire North and define the two regions as in mortal combat over slavery.20 New Jersey’s embrace of slavery, not its disownment, has significant ramifications for historical understandings of the coming of the Civil War by showing how antebellum northern whites were influenced by their state’s past and continuing relationship with slavery. Although white New Jerseyans repeatedly opposed slavery’s expansion in the West, slavery’s continuation forced a ready acknowledgement of the state’s role in ensuring the return of fugitive slaves and in not interfering with the institution in