The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II
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and headaches of colonial administration proved too much for the now bankrupt Berkeley. In 1674, he sold his share in the colony to a group of Quaker investors, including William Penn, who formed the West Society of Proprietors and established a separate colony called West Jersey. Carteret, left with East Jersey, sold to Quaker investors, who would eventually sell to Scottish businessmen, in 1682.29
Even though East and West Jersey operated as separate proprietary colonies for only twenty-eight years (1674–1702), the division had massive repercussions for the growth and eventual decline of slavery in New Jersey. West Jersey quickly became linked to Quaker dominated Pennsylvania and colonists swarmed into the region, picking up where the failed New Sweden colony had left off. Likewise, as the Caribbean embraced sugar, planters pushed out because of the sugar boom from Barbados in the 1660s and 1670s sought new homes in both Carolina and East Jersey. Barbadian planters, turned off by the harsher climate and disease around Charleston, saw New Jersey as a fertile and relatively untapped land ripe for settlement. They and their slaves came in droves to both East Jersey and New York so that by 1700 Barbadian immigrants owned the largest concentrations of slaves. They used them to work large estates granted by the proprietors since each settler received 150 acres and an additional 150 acres for each male slave and 75 for each female slave. These Barbadians quickly established towns such as New Barbados in northeastern New Jersey and made East Jersey a colony strongly attached to a slavery informed by years in the Caribbean. This experience also influenced non-Barbadians and led East Jersey to quickly outlaw the harboring of fugitive slaves, trading with slaves, and prohibiting slaves from carrying guns. This East Jersey identity sharply contrasted to the Quaker dominated West. While colonial-era Quakers certainly utilized and relied on slave labor just as their East Jersey neighbors did, they never fully embraced it to the extent of their Caribbean neighbors. More important, though, the establishment of a separate Quaker colony in West Jersey ensured that almost all Jersey Friends gravitated there instead of to East Jersey for the remainder of the colonial period. Therefore, when the Society of Friends banned slaveholding immediately before the American Revolution, the colony and later state became bifurcated again, this time not by a political boundary but by slavery. West Jersey’s Quaker majority freed its slaves and led that area to become mostly free by 1790, while a non-Quaker influenced East Jersey retained its slaves far longer.30
New Jersey’s slaves during the proprietary period provided white settlers (Dutch, Puritan, Quaker, or Barbadian) with a labor supply to fulfill the growing demand for foodstuffs from New York, Philadelphia, and the Caribbean. Although no single crop came to dominate Jersey agriculture, the rotation of crops (grains, fruits, vegetables, and grasses) ensured that slaves could be used throughout the year on various agricultural projects. Additionally, if demand for slaves’ services decreased, masters hired them out to artisans, shipbuilders, and tradesmen to produce additional revenue streams. Jersey slaves therefore continued to work alongside whites and became incredibly important to both the rural and urban economies in the Mid-Atlantic. Most slaveholders, however, owned few slaves—normally no more than two. Thus, those slaves’ freedom of movement became incredibly important in sustaining their identity and community connections.31
The relative flexibility of the colony’s charter generation began to wane in the early eighteenth century as the slave population grew and Barbadian planters from East Jersey increasingly influenced the colonial legal system. In 1702, East and West Jersey reunited as a Royal Colony and in 1704 passed its first omnibus slave code using the 1694 and 1695 East Jersey statutes as a model. This law began the transition from charter to plantation generation in New Jersey as it included provisions likely influenced by the Barbadians who had prompted similar legislation in South Carolina. The 1704 law mandated castration for slaves who fornicated with or raped a white woman or child, though this was later disallowed by the Privy Council in London. It also imposed restrictions against harboring fugitives, prohibited slaves and free blacks from owning property, disallowed baptism as grounds for freedom, and instituted harsher punishments for slaves convicted of theft. Since Pennsylvania passed a similar law in 1700 and New York in 1702, Mid-Atlantic whites likely had a “common awareness” that slavery was becoming an increasingly important part of their society and needed these restrictions to ensure order. In 1712, New Yorkers and New Jerseyans saw the true dangers that their reliance on slavery could cause when a slave revolt rocked New York City on the night of April 1. Eight whites were killed and twelve more wounded, likely a reaction by slaves to the new restrictions on black liberties.32
The firmer restrictions of the plantation generation took hold after the 1712 conspiracy with the passage of a new slave code in 1713–1714, which became the core of New Jersey’s slave system and responded to the fears of many whites who saw the destructiveness of the revolt in New York. The new law reiterated the prohibition against free blacks owning property and, since legislators felt “free Negroes are an Idle Sloathful People and prove very often a charge to the Place where they are,” owners who wanted to free their slaves had to pay a two hundred-pound bond to the colonial government and twenty pounds per year to each former slave. This requirement essentially ended manumissions, already depressed after 1664, and stripped slaves of almost any chance at becoming free in colonial New Jersey. The disappearance of black access to freedom had much to do with the Barbadians as their Caribbean experience influenced the legislative debate. Their most visible impact came in the form of a special court of justice for slaves accused of capital crimes, which replicated South Carolina’s slave court that had been built to mirror Barbados’. The strong Barbadian lobby therefore not only wanted slavery but hoped to ground New Jersey firmly in an Atlantic system that relied on restricting black freedoms for white economic gain.33
The further tightening of legal and social restrictions against blacks came at the same time slavery became the “single most important source of labor in the North’s most fertile agricultural areas.” By the early 1720s, the shift to the plantation generation was complete as slaveholders realized that slaves “were no longer an adjunct to an agricultural economy” but central players. Between 1718 and 1738, the slave population of East Jersey doubled (now at 3,071) and by 1750 male slaves were more numerous than landless white males in most of the region. Hunterdon County, in West Jersey, likewise saw a massive increase in its slave population as it provided most of the wheat, barley, and corn to the Philadelphia market. Slaves therefore became key partners in ensuring that the North’s breadbasket fed both Caribbean and northern markets, yet remained jacks-of-all-trades on small slaveholdings. Neither a gang nor a task system developed. However, the reliance on slave labor changed how slaves came to New Jersey. Originally purchased in small numbers on consignment or traded internally from other mainland colonies or, more likely, from the Caribbean, increased demand dictated that slaves needed to come directly from Africa. By mid-century, 70 percent of slaves arrived from Africa, a reversal from the first half of the century when only 30 percent did so. These new slaves became integral to the continued development of the Anglo-Atlantic World and, though they could be found disproportionally in agriculture, slaves living in New Jersey’s cities worked in artisan shops, as sailors, or as shipbuilders just as in New York or Philadelphia.34
As legislators in the plantation generation increasingly stripped rights away from enslaved and free blacks and racialized slavery became firmly set into New Jersey society, the enslaved in the plantation generation successfully negotiated for some freedoms within the institution. Just as in the charter generation, slaves in the 1730s and 1740s valued their freedom of movement since it was essential in establishing communities among small slaveholdings strewn across rural New Jersey. Slaves routinely congregated with other blacks in the woods or more likely in local taverns that flouted the prohibition against providing liquor to slaves to secure a new customer base. These taverns, however, bred not only community but also dissention and revolt. Two slave revolts rocked New Jersey in the first half of the eighteenth century and tested white resolve in keeping the institution. The first, in 1734, involved a plot to set fire to white homes in Somerset County, kill their masters, rape their wives, and escape to either Indian or French territory. Although the plot was discovered before its execution due to a slave’s liquor lubricated lips, the apprehension of thirty conspirators fueled fears that revolt was a real danger. Likewise, the 1741 New York Conspiracy, also hatched in a tavern, was even more frightening as it involved an alliance between whites, most notably tavern keeper John Hughson, and the