both inflicted extensive damage to the British while enriching American seamen, ship owners, and government officials who regulated these sales. As historian Charles Foy contends, the prize system “extended the reach of American slavery beyond the shores of the Americas” and in turn reinforced slavery in the United States. Privateers, motivated more by profit than ideology, saw blacks as a profitable revenue source. These vulnerable individuals could be taken easily and sold as commodities in other ports, which led ship captains to actively seek out blacks on the high seas. Congressional laws on prizes allowed for considerable leeway in local admiralty court decisions about the status of blacks found on British ships. In New Jersey, especially along the Delaware River, courts operated from “the assumption that a black mariner was a slave” and could be sold as a prize along with any other goods found on the ships.112 For instance, on June 26, 1782, James Esdall of Burlington adjudicated the sale of Obadiah Gale and Edward Cater, both of whom had served aboard a British privateer but who had not been slaves.113 In the same year, John Bray, the captain and owner of the gunboat Revenge, attacked the British cutter Alert and forced the ship to run aground. Salvaging “a quantity of power, arms, a valuable chest of medicine,” Bray reported to Governor Livingston that he sent the ship’s crew to Elizabethtown for exchange but kept the eleven blacks he found on board because the admiralty court declared them captured goods instead of crew members. Bray, in June 1782, sold nine of these Prize Negroes in Trenton at auction.114 The process played out the same way in October 1779 when American privateers captured the British ship Triton and six black mariners went to auction in Burlington.115
The state’s experience in selling Prize Negroes informed its sales of loyalist-owned slaves. However, surviving records on these sales remain in short supply. Records of individual estate sales that contain inventories listing slaves exist for only a few counties and record only twenty-nine slaves sold by the state.116 Records filed at the end of the Revolution with the Loyalist Claims Commission include evidence of at least 112 more.117 Of course, the total of 141 slaves likely represents only part of the real total as extraneous sources refer to slaves not included in these records.118
A majority of the slaves confiscated from loyalists came from masters who had rejected the American cause very early on. For instance, Absalom Bainbridge, Prime’s owner who began this chapter, joined the king’s forces in 1776 and left Princeton with the British after their defeat in January 1777.119 Like Bainbridge, fellow Princeton resident Richard Cochran joined the British as soon as General Howe entered the city in 1776. Cochran helped procure provisions for the army, served as a deputy commissary, and administered oaths to local civilians. He claimed that because of his loyalty, patriots had seized his property, sold it at auction, and, in his own words, threatened to “hang me up were I ever to return to that country.” Due to poor health, he left military service and moved to London with his two sons in January 1778, leaving his wife and daughter in British-occupied New York. Cochran claimed an estate valued at just over 6,100 pounds, which included eight slaves (four men, two women, and two children), one of whom, his “Negro man named Mingo, was esteemed the most valuable Negro in New Jersey.” The commission approved his claim but paid only 1912 pounds because they believed his new position as a clerk provided him a stable salary.120
While many loyalists fled the state with their families, others left their property in New Jersey to be protected by their wives. In July 1777, the state Council of Safety argued that these wives “obstruct(ed) the commissioners for seizing and disposing of the personal estate” by secretly and gradually moving property into New York. The council banished eighteen women to New York, “after their husbands,” so that the commissioners could more easily confiscate their property.121 Likewise, certain slave owners attempted to remove their slaves to New York so as not to let them fall into the hands of the patriots. Prime’s owner Bainbridge attempted this, but because Prime ran away, he lost him to Patriot confiscation. However, some slaves did the opposite of Prime and resisted confiscation by running toward their loyalist masters. For example, the slave of loyalist John Ackerman escaped from the man who had bought him at auction, Andrew Hopper, in 1778. The slave, whose name remains unrecorded, fled to Ackerman’s protection in New York.122
Like New Jersey, other states confiscated and sold slaves from loyalist estates and reinforced slavery within their borders. In Connecticut, Jeremiah Leaming joined the British along with his slave Pomp after loyalists burned Norwalk in 1779. Pomp ran away from his master but, as part of a traitor’s estate, he belonged to the people of Connecticut. However, due to his perceived loyalty to the American cause, the legislature granted Pomp freedom.123 Similarly, southern states like Georgia and South Carolina used confiscated slaves as teamsters, servants, and military laborers to build defensive fortifications. As discussed earlier, South Carolina offered a slave to every white man who joined the army and a slave to any soldier who could recruit twenty-five men, while Georgia awarded slaves to soldiers and sold them to finance the state government.124
The most important part of New Jersey’s slave sales, however, rested in how the state dealt with its confiscated slaves at the end of the Revolution. In neighboring New York, the New York Manumission Society successfully lobbied that state’s legislature to free all remaining confiscated slaves in 1786 instead of selling them, though most of the confiscated able-bodied slaves had already been sold. The society even obtained a guarantee of taxpayer support to care for the slaves in their old age.125 In New Jersey, however, the legislature only agreed to free three confiscated slaves who had actively supported the Patriot cause. In 1784, the legislature freed Peter Williams, a slave of John Heard from Woodbridge who, in 1780, had joined the Continental Army after his master had enlisted in the British military.126 Likewise, two years later, the legislature read the petition of Bainbridge’s slave Prime, who had, like Williams, absconded from his loyalist master and joined the New Jersey militia. They granted Prime freedom in 1786. In 1789, Cato became the final slave to earn freedom due to military service, as he too had joined the Patriots after his master fled to the British.127 With only three emancipation bills, the legislature made clear that it fully supported the sale of confiscated slaves and the continued bondage of those not under state control. That only three slaves gained freedom after the Revolution reinforced the unfree status of African Americans in New Jersey. These confiscated slaves would, in the mid-1780s, play a major role in convincing the legislature to delay gradual abolition.128
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Prime’s ability to negotiate for freedom due to his service in the Continental Army at one level places him among an incredibly small group of slaves who accessed a free life through service with the Americans. However, in a larger sense Prime is representative of the Revolution’s impact on slaves. Some, like Prime, used the war to their advantage and seized freedom themselves but most understood that slavery remained an entrenched system in New Jersey.
The emergence of a strong post-revolutionary slave system owed much to New Jersey’s position as a borderland between Patriot and Loyalist America. Abolitionists had championed the idea of black freedom but, with no organized state-level abolition society and the reality that British forces slept close by, legislative abolition stalled. The ravages of total war combined with the fears created by the actions of Colonel Tye and other ex-slaves who joined the British army convinced many whites that wartime abolition would result in further dislocation and lack of control. Of course, Jersey blacks used the Revolution to seek freedom on their own terms, yet these methods proved largely ineffective in overturning entrenched proslavery thought and practice for more than a small minority of slaves. Their exploits actually reinforced the state’s racial boundaries, strengthened anti-abolition sentiment, and limited abolition’s reach because absconding slaves helped exacerbate white anxieties of revolt.
In the end, the state’s confiscation and sale of loyalist owned slaves represented the true meaning of the Revolution for African Americans in New Jersey: Revolutionary freedom would not extend to them. The Revolution reinforced the colonial slave system in the short run instead of convincing New Jerseyans to support gradual abolition laws, as
