left represented a small percentage of New Jersey’s total slave population, others likely hid their identities as former slaves or possibly escaped via other ports within the colonies. Detailed records remain for at least two of these men, Anthony Smithers and John Baptist, both of whom filed claims for their service with the Loyalist Claims Commission but do not appear in the Book of Negroes. Smithers claimed that he lived as a free black man in Gloucester County, where he owned fourteen acres of land and valued his property at 720 pounds. He reported that he had joined the British army during its occupation of Philadelphia. Likewise, Baptist, also from Gloucester, testified that he joined the British army in Philadelphia as a freeman. He had lived with his sister on three acres of land and held an estate worth 675 pounds.62
The commission ruled both Baptist’s and Smithers’s claims invalid, since they shared some key similarities, especially the certification of the claim by the same two men, John Williams and Thomas Watkins. The commission knew that Williams and Watkins lodged several blacks in London and helped them file claims. Dozens of former American slaves ended their military careers starving in the city’s streets. Both Baptist and Smithers likely had participated in an elaborate fraud led by Williams and Watkins in September 1783. All of the claims submitted by black men that month had been certified by the duo and provided incredibly similar information with little more than the name and some personal information altered. These two claims, like those of other former American slaves, represent the difficulties ex-slaves had even after they had gained freedom. These men became destitute and desperate. Their condition led to an even greater diaspora of former American slaves as they left the difficult streets of London for Sierra Leone or as criminals to the Botany Bay Colony in Australia.63
* * *
For white New Jerseyans, runaway slaves not only threatened wealth and status, but more important, stoked preexisting fears of slave rebellion. After the several slave conspiracies during the colonial period, Jersey whites had highly regulated slave movement, deprived slaves of the ability to own property or sell goods to whites, and prohibited slaves from frequenting taverns, possessing liquor, carrying firearms, or congregating at night. These new regulations, in full effect during the Revolution, resulted in harsher punishments for slaves who committed crimes against whites and further vigilance by whites trying to protect themselves. For example, in 1750 Perth Amboy authorities burned two slaves at the stake for murdering their mistress, which city leaders required that all Perth Amboy slaves attend as a warning against future transgressions.64
The anti-abolition petitions written before the Revolution had repeatedly warned of the death and destruction that would result from black savagery. These beliefs took on some basis in reality for many slave masters when fear of black revolt came alive in 1772 as, in the midst of abolitionist discussions, Somerset County slaveholders learned that their slaves had congregated in mass meetings at night to discuss freedom. Masters in Somerset had feared just such discontent as they had repeatedly observed their slaves disobeying the state’s slave code. In 1771, for instance, Somerset County justice of the peace Jacob Van Noorstrand recorded the convictions of ten slaves for violating the nine o’clock curfew and for theft.65 Similar occurrences of rebellious activity occurred in Middlesex County in 1771 when Isaac, a slave of Joseph Moore, stole from a neighbor’s house, and continued throughout the Revolution, as George Ryerson of Bergen County found out when his slave Bet burned down his barn in 1780.66
Jersey slaves, absorbing the rhetoric of revolution from patriot sources, forced the issue of slave freedom even farther when, in 1774, slaveholders in Shrewsbury and Middletown complained that their slaves increasingly ignored the curfew regulations and, as in Somerset, met at night to create a plan to “cut the throats of their masters” and take over the state. In 1775, the Committee of Safety in Shrewsbury safeguarded against black revolt by banning all slave meetings. Any slave found off his master’s property would be arrested immediately. Shrewsbury leaders ordered the militia to conduct nightly slave patrols and gave it authority to punish slaves with at least fifteen lashes for a variety of offenses.67
The fires that ravaged Baltimore, Philadelphia, Savannah, and New York in December 1776 further inflamed tensions among whites already anxious over the possibility of revolt. In 1797, Alexander Hamilton received a letter from Angelica Church, who still suffered from “terrors of fevers and Negro plots” that she traced back directly to the fires of December 1776. New York City newspaper reports claimed that “the minds of the citizens are in a state of agitation” because many believed rebellious slaves had set the fires.68 The fears that kept Church awake at night had been realized for New Yorkers even before 1776. In 1775, whites in densely slave-populated Ulster and Queens Counties reported foiling two separate slave revolts. Ulster slaves had planned to set fire to their masters’ houses and then attack the whites as they fled from the blazes. In Queens, white leaders reported that slaves for “many miles” had been involved in an abstract plot to “destroy the white people.”69 In 1778, masters discovered another such plot in Albany when an anonymous letter claimed that slaves had been ready to kill their masters and set fire to the town.70 These fears were not confined to the New York area. South Carolina slaveholders were panicked by the “dread of instigated insurrections” when they thought that a sloop carrying the new royal governor, William Campbell, brought with it arms for slaves.71 Likewise, Gervais Werch, writing from Charleston in 1775, believed South Carolinians were “threatened with insurrections from our slaves and invasions from our neighbors.”72 Even the Marquis de Lafayette’s party chose, when sailing to Charleston, to “carry arms rather than clothing to defend . . . against marauding Negroes.”73
As in New York and South Carolina, the danger of black revolt became more prevalent as British forces crisscrossed New Jersey and freedom for slaves became that much more tangible. In August 1776, Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, a Princeton lawyer and member of the Second Continental Congress, wrote to John Adams that New Jersey had to call out its militia “in such numbers for the defense of our country” as the “slaves left at home excite an alarm for the safety of their families.”74 In 1779, Sergeant’s fears became reality as local loyalists and British forces coaxed slaves near Elizabethtown to murder their masters. Even though Elizabethtown authorities discovered the plot in its planning stages and quickly suppressed it, that the plot existed at all highlights the important role that the British played as an outside agitator in stoking fears of rebellion. For these reasons, abolition became a far more problematic endeavor because whites believed slavery allowed them to maintain control over a potentially rebellious black population.75
British efforts at creating an atmosphere conducive to slave revolt caused owners to not only fear mass plots but individual slave action as well. Daniel Hart’s murder by his slave Cuffee in Hopewell Township was representative of this fear among Jersey whites. In 1779, Cuffee stabbed his master with a penknife dozens of times before ultimately killing him with an ax. Local lore recorded that Cuffee fled the scene, pursued by Hart’s neighbors. Cornered near a local stream, Cuffee hanged himself from a tree rather than be captured. A local writer quickly wrote a multiverse ballad about the murder, which claimed how “Hart’s wicked negro did slay him . . . the neighbors then for him did look . . . hung with a rope upon a limb . . . the next day they did then prepare a fire to burn his body there . . . all Negroes who have life and breath, take warning of his wretched death, don’t take an ax or use a knife to destroy your master’s life.” Of course, the ballad served to make Cuffee’s death an example to local blacks in order to prevent similar violence in the tense revolutionary environment.76
Many Jersey masters saw British efforts to recruit blacks as particularly dangerous because the British army provided a ready vehicle for ex-slaves to spread destruction and death in retribution for past wrongs. In their rhetoric about the Revolution, patriot authors frequently claimed that the Crown had brought war upon itself through the agitation of the colonists’ enemies: Indians and slaves. For example, in 1775 Benjamin Franklin wrote that William Draper’s Thoughts of a Traveler upon Our American Disputes had excited “the domestic slaves” and encouraged them to “cut their
