money gave little comfort to Jersey families, leaving thousands upon thousands with limited resources for their own survival like William Dow, who had already petitioned the state legislature in 1779 for payment for property taken by patriots. Dow claimed that the military not only confiscated the ferry he operated on the Peapack River, but also twelve sheep, and that they severely damaged his house. Likewise, in Westfield, a small town in Essex County, 113 residents filed claims ranging from Susanna Halsey, who lost household furniture and clothing, to Daniel Connet who lost eight sheep, a horse, two hogs, thirty fowl, tea, wheat, corn, and three hives of bees.49
The damages inflicted by the war had a direct impact on slaveholders’ unwillingness to support freedom for their chattel. Between 1775 and 1783, slaveholders in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, instructed the executors of their wills in the cases of nineteen different slaves to either transfer the slave to a family member or sell the slave and distribute the proceeds among their descendants. Statewide during the same period, 83 percent of slaves mentioned in wills were sold or bequeathed to a slaveholder’s heirs, while only 17 percent gained their freedom. New York City slaveholders’ wills similarly limited freedom; only 14 percent of slaveholders’ wills from 1777–1783 provided it. Even as Quakers brought discussions of abolition to the forefront of regional consciousness, the revolutionary spirit did not infect the vast majority of New Jersey or New York slaveholders. This unwillingness among slaveholders to manumit their slaves had a direct correlation with the economic devastation. In East Jersey, the section of the state with more slaveholders and the most damage caused by the war, slaveholders likely felt they had spent enough to ensure the triumph of American freedom. A request from the state to grant freedom to their slaves and therefore lose more of their property would have been too much for them to muster.50
Pennsylvanians, on the other hand, had a much different war experience than did New Jerseyans, which made abolitionists there able to advance gradual abolition in the midst of conflict. The Pennsylvania state legislature had license to act on abolition in 1780 because the war had largely been confined to the state’s sparsely populated western and northeastern frontiers after the patriots expelled the British from Philadelphia. With little interaction between the British and patriots in the last three years of the war, state legislators did not have, as New Jersey legislators did, a war-related reason to delay abolition.51
The Revolution, instead of forcing Jersey legislators to see the paradox between slavery and freedom and compel a radical societal shift from the colonial period, continued the status quo of slavery in New Jersey and only strengthened when ex-slaves began to use the Revolution to gain permanent freedom outside the United States at the end of the war. British General Guy Carleton, the commander at New York City, proclaimed that any slave who had joined the British before 1780 had the right to leave the colonies for a free life in Canada, Sierra Leone, or Britain itself. Carleton responded to Washington’s complaints about the removal of former American slaves by claiming that he had “no right . . . to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper” as he had found many of them living free when he arrived in New York.52 Therefore, any slave who had absconded to New York before Carleton had assumed command, and many more who had achieved freedom since then, could leave New York unimpeded. British Prime Minister Lord North affirmed Carleton’s interpretation and extended that logic when he wrote in August 1783 that those blacks who had entered British lines before the “execution of the preliminaries of peace” should be able to leave as freed people, leading hundreds of former slaves to board British evacuation ships.53
The British decision to remove former slaves from New York, Charleston, and other British-controlled territory angered those New Jerseyans who had seen their property abscond to the British. American commissioners responsible for upholding the 1783 Paris Peace Treaty vehemently protested the decision as a violation of the treaty’s seventh article, which prohibited the British from carrying away blacks from the United States. Three commissioners wrote to Carleton in June 1783 decrying the presence of fourteen ships bound for Nova Scotia that contained “upwards of one hundred negroes, seventy three of which appeared to be the property of American subjects.”54 The commissioners considered the sailing of these ships an infraction of the Paris Treaty, a point reiterated in a May 1783 meeting in Newark. The meeting of patriot slaveholders crafted several resolutions published in local newspapers and sent to Carleton, which claimed that since Great Britain had not complied with the treaty’s provisions regarding slaves, the United States should not implement the fourth article, which mandated the full repayment of lawful debts owed to British creditors and the fifth article, which promised to restore confiscated loyalist estates.55 Carleton linked the “circumstances of additional rage” that Americans had displayed by stripping loyalists of their lives and property with the increased discontent over treaty violations concerning slaves, one that he feared “will probably in the same narrow spirit be adopted by others.”56
As Carleton predicted, arguments against removal surfaced in other meetings across New Jersey that questioned the commitment of both the British and American governments to the Paris Treaty with respect to slaves. In a second Essex County meeting, ninety residents claimed that the British had not done enough “to restore property found within their lines” and refused permission for Americans to attempt to secure ownership of their slaves individually. Many Jersey masters, without a system to recapture fugitives, saw their property leave New York for free lives elsewhere. One such Elizabethtown native, Sarah Haviland, complained to the American treaty commissioners that loyalists had forcibly taken her two male slaves, Jacob and Joe, to Staten Island. Both would soon leave the city bound for Nova Scotia as Haviland, a seventy-year-old widow, could not recapture them herself nor could she rely on any other means to assist her.57
Unfortunately for Haviland and other former masters, the British routinely defended escaped slaves who lived in New York. In one case, Constable Thomas Willis suffered fines and exile from the city for helping return escaped slave Caesar to Elizabethtown.58 Dinah Archey, a runaway living in New York, hoped for a similar defense when her master, William Fancey, attempted to seize her in 1783. She requested protection from Carleton, claiming that she had answered Howe’s Proclamation and entered New York five years earlier.59 Likewise, New Yorkers Jacob Duyree, Adam Todd, and Fredrick Fighleman endured a British trial in June 1783 for trying to carry off Francis Griffin, a freed black under British protection. In this case, Duyree claimed that he had found Griffin, his former slave who had fled to New York City. Griffin had agreed to travel with Duyree up the Hudson River back to his home to help his former master transport flour to New York City and to reconnect with his wife, who remained Duyree’s slave. Griffin secured a pass from the office of police, which, in his mind, allowed him to return unimpeded to New York because he had qualified for freedom under the British proclamation. Once close to the Hudson River, Duyree and his co-defendants forced Griffin into “a cart with a rope about his neck” and loaded him onto a sloop near Dean’s Wharf. Luckily for Griffin, Hessian soldiers boarded his former master’s ship, arrested Duyree, and freed him. After a lengthy trial, a court found Duyree guilty of trying to reenslave Griffin, fined him fifty guineas to be directed to “the poor and sick Negroes who have taken protection under the British government,” and expelled him from British territory.60
The British, attuned to the unpopularity and potential ramifications of their decision to remove former American slaves from New York, agreed to record information on each African American who left on British ships in 1783. The Book of Negroes contains over three thousand names, including at least 175 ex-slaves from New Jersey. Of those, some like Joseph and Betsey Collins of Hackensack ran away together from their separate masters in 1779. Others like Polly of Burlington came to New York in 1776 in search of greater economic opportunities than she could have attained with the Patriots. In New York, Polly met her husband, Job Allen, a former slave from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and together they had two small children before leaving for a new life in Nova Scotia.61
This exodus of blacks to Canada, Britain, and eventually Sierra Leone represented a powerful step in the development of black freedom, raised significant ire among Jersey masters interested
