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 enslaved. The burning of New York’s Fort George and its auxiliary fires in both New Jersey and Long Island reinforced the dangers of slave revolt. New Jersey convicted and burned several slaves at the stake in Hackensack and Newark for arsons thought to be part of the conspiracy.35
In response to the conspiracy, slaveholders cracked down on slave movement and the colonial legislature almost passed a duty on slaves imported from the Caribbean to dissuade bringing more blacks into New Jersey who were thought to be prone to rebellion. By 1751 the legislature prohibited slaves from meeting in groups larger than five but took no decisive steps to halt the colony’s reliance on slavery. The institution had simply become too important to eliminate as it had become the primary labor supply across rural New Jersey. It had also begun to infiltrate other areas of the economy, including mining operations in Bergen County. The Schuyler mine, for instance, employed over two hundred slaves. With a colonial slave population of over 7 percent colony wide, the ratio was between 12 and 15 percent in some areas of East Jersey. On the eve of the American Revolution, despite fears of rebellion and an increasing number of fugitive slaves fighting against the system, New Jersey stood as a society with slaves that had fully embraced the institution and integrated it into their colony’s economy and society.36
CHAPTER ONE
Debating Abolition in an Age of Revolution
In 1688, Germantown, Pennsylvania, Quakers released an antislavery petition that became the first in a series of discussions among Mid-Atlantic Quakers on the morality of owning slaves. For the next hundred years, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, with which most New Jersey Friends associated, debated the paradox of enslaving Africans while believing that all individuals were spiritually equal. The tension created by the paradox grew over time and transformed Philadelphia and Western New Jersey into hotbeds of abolitionist thought, protest, and activism that impacted how both non-Quaker whites and African Americans debated abolition as slavery became increasingly important in the late colonial period.1
The role of Quakerism in the growth of the eighteenth-century abolition movement is critical to the eventual enactment of gradual abolition laws across the North. Quakers, although in most cases far from racial egalitarians, became the first organized group to consistently advocate against slavery. They successfully orchestrated slavery’s end among their own members and eventually moved their advocacy to a wider audience. Quaker politicians and those elected from constituencies dominated by Friends argued for statewide abolition while Quaker-authored pamphlets, petitions, and newspaper articles circulated to members and nonmembers alike. The debate over slaveholding within the Society of Friends therefore influenced the statewide debate over slavery and fused together abolitionist rhetoric, Patriot discussions of Britain’s tyrannical enslavement of the colonies, and slaves’ own calls for freedom. Abolitionists and slaves took advantage of the Patriots’ similar rhetorical use of “freedom” and “slavery” to make strong parallels between the imperial struggle over freedom from Great Britain and the hypocrisy of continued African enslavement. The Revolution therefore made the idea of freedom a right that transcended race and encompassed transatlantic affairs. This forced white New Jerseyans to debate slavery openly and decide if their fight for freedom from Great Britain should be seen as part of a wider freedom struggle.
As the eighteenth-century Quaker abolition movement developed, Jersey Quakers stimulated a debate on the morality of slavery that reached a far greater audience than that of their local meetings. These debates permeated revolutionary society and became part of much larger discussions about the role of freedom in the new United States. Quaker considerations of morality intertwined with the revolutionary drama unfolding around New Jerseyans and convinced some non-Quakers to join the debate about the future of slavery in New Jersey. Abolitionist ideology, its relationship to American freedom, and the ethical and moral implications of holding slaves during a war for freedom soon emanated regularly from multiple denominations’ pulpits, print sources, and slaves’ mouths.
However, despite New Jersey being a hotbed of early abolitionism, abolition remained a highly contentious and disputed proposition since slavery had been so deeply intertwined into colonial society. Despite debates over revolutionary freedom and its application to slaves, retorts of racial amalgamation, race war, racial inferiority, and potential economic losses limited that freedom’s impact. In the heated ideological battle over slavery, Quakers, abolitionists, and slaves powerfully connected the Revolution and abolitionism to convince many New Jerseyans of abolition’s importance, but this formidable weapon did not triumph over slaveholder and anti-abolitionist fear mongering and their systematic defense of the right to own slaves. The dangers of a radical restructuring of the state’s racial order failed to win many converts to the abolitionist cause, especially in East Jersey where slavery had entrenched itself far more deeply. The failure of abolitionism to take hold allowed white New Jerseyans to strengthen the institution of slavery in the midst of the war and during its aftermath.
* * *
Although not the first Quaker abolitionist, Burlington County native John Woolman became one of the society’s most ardent eighteenth-century proabolition voices. Woolman, an itinerant Quaker preacher, traveled from the Carolinas to New England to Europe advocating the freedom of both African slaves and Indians. Woolman went farther than Quaker leaders William Edmundson and George Fox who expressed concern over the spiritual welfare of those Friends who owned slaves. Edmundson and Fox challenged Quaker slaveholders in the Caribbean in the 1650s and 1660s to bring religion to their slaves and moderate their treatment. However, as Edmundson and Fox did not attack the institution directly, they failed to change the ownership patterns of any society members, although their actions influenced Woolman years later to take their ideas to the next level.2
After the 1688 Germantown Petition, Quakers in the Philadelphia area began to question the morality of slavery. By 1713, the Chester, Pennsylvania, Monthly Meeting had called for the emancipation of slaves and in 1715 the Yearly Meeting requested that Friends treat their chattel with Christian compassion.3 With these debates as a backdrop, Woolman, while living in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1742, “had a life-transforming attack of conscience” when he authored a bill of sale for a black woman for his employer. Woolman wrote extensively in his journal that “writing an instrument of slavery for one of my fellow creatures felt uneasy,” which made him conclude “slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.”4 This inconsistency impelled him to embark on what
