The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II

      State of New Jersey, county lines 1753–1824.

      Based on map created by R. Ryan Lash with information from Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information: Pre-release Version 0.1, 2004.

Introduction

      This book is about the meaning of slavery and freedom in the United States. The setting, though unconventional, is central to American understandings of these two loaded terms. It follows the story of abolition in the North but reverses the usual narrative: slavery did not die after the Revolution, it sustained itself until the Civil War.

      In 1789, Catherine was born a slave in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Like thousands of other slaves in the state, she worked daily for her master, John Hagaman, on his hundred-acre farm in Amwell. Cate, as her master called her, forged relationships with other slaves and in 1811 at twenty-two bore her first child, a boy named Bob, though the boy’s father remains unknown. Four years later, Catherine welcomed a daughter named Hannah. In 1840, Catherine moved with her master to neighboring Raritan without her children. Although the 1850 Census recorded her as a free woman, on February 16, 1856, Hagaman sold sixty-seven-year-old Catherine as a “slave for life” for twenty dollars to Charles Sutphin of Sommerville. After the sale, Hagaman, himself not much older than Catherine, moved with his son Dennis and daughter-in-law Mary to Joshua, Illinois, forty miles west of Peoria.¹

      Northern slaves like Catherine have usually been portrayed as peripheral to the overall development of the North and of the United States even though she experienced slavery decades after abolition’s enactment and in the midst of national debates over abolition and slavery’s westward expansion. Slavery in the North never attained the same position in the economy as it did in the Caribbean, the Chesapeake, or the Low Country since the North remained a society with slaves rather than a slave society. Indeed, early travel accounts describe New Jersey as both a place of few slaves and abundant opportunity. One visitor, Francisco de Miranda, the Spanish general, American ally, and future liberator of Venezuela, remarked during a 1783–1784 stay that he had not “encountered an individual who was ill clothed, hungry, sick, or idle.” Out of all the places he visited in America, de Miranda had never “seen any other place in which the people appear happier and on more of an equality” than New Jersey. According to him, New Jersey was truly the “Garden of America.”²

      Just six years after de Miranda’s visit, roughly 11,500 slaves lived in New Jersey. The “Garden of America” had more enslaved blacks than all of New England combined and almost the same slave to total population ratio as the much larger New York. Of course, the slave populations in most of the South easily outpaced New Jersey, though from 1790 to 1830 the state had more than twice as many slaves as Delaware. Additionally, some Jersey counties de Miranda likely visited heavily depended on slave labor. Bergen, for example, counted over 18 percent of its population as slaves at the time. Slaves likewise made up almost 15 percent of Somerset’s population, while Middlesex and Monmouth had a slave population of just under 10 percent.³

      While less than 1 percent of New England’s population remained enslaved

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