master, Princeton physician Absalom Bainbridge, hid his loyalist sympathies until the British marched into his hometown at the end of 1776. On their arrival, Bainbridge volunteered his house as the headquarters of General William Howe and joined the king’s army, in which he served until 1778. Bainbridge was stationed in New York until the British evacuation in 1783, when he moved to London. In his successful 1784 application to the Loyalist Claims Commission, established by Parliament in 1783 to hear cases of loyalists who suffered economic losses as a result of their loyalty, for damages totaling 6,000 pounds sterling, Bainbridge wrote that because of his early support for the king, New Jersey had declared him guilty of high treason and confiscated his property. In addition to his four hundred acre estate, Bainbridge listed numerous pieces of moveable property, including Prime. During the war, Bainbridge tried to remove Prime and his personal property to safety by sending his wife, Prime, and several wagons of household items to a relative’s home in Princeton before moving them all to his father-in-law’s in Monmouth. After Bainbridge left the army in 1778, he sent for his wife and Prime to join him on Long Island, though Prime took advantage of the confusion surrounding the war and successfully ran away to Somerset County.2
Jacob Bergen, the state official charged with the confiscation and sale of loyalist estates in Somerset, seized Prime and considered selling him as the state had done with Bainbridge’s other property. Luckily for Prime, Bergen “humanely declined” to send him “to sale like a beast of the stall” and instead recommended he serve in the Continental Army to alleviate his owner’s debt to the Patriot cause. Prime served for the duration of the war as a teamster and left Continental service in 1783 when he moved to Trenton and began a free life as a day laborer. Only a few months after the Revolution ended, a man named John Taylor appeared at Prime’s home and claimed he had bought Prime from Bainbridge’s wife. At the same time, attorneys representing the state affirmed their previous contention that Prime, as part of a confiscated loyalist estate, belonged to the people of New Jersey and any sale by Bainbridge or his family subsequent to that confiscation was void. As a slave either to Taylor or to the state, Prime would lose the freedom he had gained because of the Revolution. After months of legal wrangling and an appeal to the Supreme Court, in 1786 the state of New Jersey affirmed the legality of Prime’s confiscation and the invalidity of Taylor’s claims. A military veteran who honorably served the Patriot cause left the Supreme Court as confiscated property to be sold by the state to the highest bidder.3
Prime’s transformation from free patriot veteran to confiscated property hits at the very heart of historical understandings of the Revolution. In contrast to arguments put forward by historians that the Revolution laid the groundwork for African American freedom, Prime’s case represents the perpetuation of slavery because of the Revolution, not an extension of freedom supported by revolutionary ideology. Of course, Prime himself did not surrender his freedom and this ideology easily; he authored a petition to the legislature demanding his freedom based on his service to the nation. By 1786, the legislature had freed him and two other slaves caught in his same situation, illustrating that though this ideology had power in New Jersey, it helped only a limited number of slaves.4
Slavery survived the Revolution because of New Jersey’s status as a hotly contested revolutionary battleground. British and American troops slogged through the mud of the well-worn road between New York and Philadelphia, trampled through the snow at Morristown, and fought on the plains of Monmouth, which caused state residents to feel the negative effects of war more than most. With almost three hundred separate military engagements and thousands of foraging expeditions by British and Americans, revolutionary New Jersey easily earned the name given to it by historian Leonard Lundin in the 1940s—“The Cockpit of the Revolution.”5
The Revolution’s destructive power and disruptive influence on the state’s economy, coupled with the constant threat of British invasion, encouraged lawmakers and white citizens to decline to advance abolition even as it moved forward in Pennsylvania and New England. Opposition to black freedom had already been substantial as abolitionists failed to overcome fears of race war and social dislocation in the state’s ongoing rhetorical battle over slavery. The fallout from the actual battles solidified this opposition to abolitionism and effectively ended the first moves toward abolition begun in the 1770s. Even as the war allowed thousands of blacks to escape to British lines and gain freedom, combat operations in this borderland at the crossroads of the Revolution inflicted a devastating economic toll as both armies routinely ravaged the state. The destructive reality of war overpowered abolitionism in New Jersey and suppressed any desire to free a valuable labor source from those grappling with wartime destruction and an uncertain future.
In addition to exacerbating economic losses, the absconding of hundreds of slaves to British lines and their return as loyalist soldiers created an even more powerful socially produced hysteria and anxiety over a potential statewide slave revolt. Reports of ex-slaves murdering, raping, and pillaging their former hometowns delayed serious discussions of abolition as many Jersey whites believed themselves under attack by a ruthless and uncontrollable enemy. The institution of slavery provided security and control over blacks in the insecurity of war, which encouraged lawmakers at the end of the Revolution to not free the vast majority of confiscated loyalist slaves like Prime. The state’s role as a slave trader both during and after the Revolution reinforced its commitment to a slave system that would successfully defend itself for the next twenty years against a growing abolition movement in the North and the larger Atlantic World.
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Anti-abolition activists responded forcefully in words and actions against the abolitionists’ use of revolutionary rhetoric in support of slave freedom. The petitions that Quaker abolitionists had sent to the legislature and the newspaper debates they provoked helped anti-abolitionists drum up significant support in the state, motivated violence against abolitionists— Jacob Green’s church was sacked in protest—and allowed anti-abolitionists to clearly set out their reasons for opposing black freedom. This group primarily argued that slavery could not be abolished because the Revolution had devastated the state economically and a constant fear of future destruction remained. For instance, one abolitionist critic claimed that New Jersey could not follow its neighbors toward abolition because it had been “laid to waste and rendered desolate by the ravages” of the British army.6
Legislators repeatedly used this economic argument to halt abolitionism, believing it too radical a step to take in the midst of war. To the abolitionists, the moral stakes were high as Quaker activist Samuel Allinson wrote in 1778, the “eyes of the world have been and are upon America” in the matter of slavery.7 Although Allinson thought the eyes looked specifically toward Pennsylvania and its battle to enact gradual abolition, he also lobbied Governor William Livingston to consider abolition in New Jersey. Livingston, a slaveholder himself, readily adopted Allinson’s abolitionist ideology and freed his slaves. Through frequent exchanges with Allinson, Livingston not only embraced abolitionism but became more accepting of Quakerism, leading him to become Allinson’s principal ally. At the same time, however, Livingston believed the legislature “thinking us rather in too critical a situation to enter on the consideration of it at that time, desired me in a private way to withdraw the message.” Livingston thought that this “critical situation,” the economic losses and fear of British attack, derailed the wartime abolitionist agenda.8
The reality of war in New Jersey hit the state’s citizens from almost the very beginning when the British invasion of New York in 1776 forced Washington’s army into a headlong retreat across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. New Jersey became “a ragged borderline between the two Americas, Loyalist and Patriot,” of which the “neutral zone of eastern and northern New Jersey, especially Monmouth and Bergen counties” was where “the violence was most brutal.”9 War in New Jersey became a longstanding foraging battle in which both armies scavenged for supplies, with major battles occasionally highlighting the daily struggle for food and influence. As Livingston had alluded, defending the state against British attack preoccupied the minds of most New Jerseyans and therefore limited the abolitionist influence.10
