Revolution’s end to pass a gradual abolition statute. In that battle, the memory of the meaning of the Revolution, not the actual reality of its destructive power, became critical in convincing legislators to support abolitionism.
CHAPTER THREE
Abolishing Slavery in the New Nation
Julian Niemcewicz, the exiled Polish statesman and writer, moved to Elizabethtown in 1797 and married Susan Livingston Kean, the niece of former governor William Livingston. He bought an eighteen-acre farm and settled into his new life as a gentleman farmer. His wife had a close association with slavery, as her deceased husband, John Kean of South Carolina, owned over one hundred slaves. After Kean’s death in 1795, Susan owned and traded those slaves, continuing to do so after her remarriage. Even though slavery was integral to the couple’s household, Niemcewicz remained puzzled as to slavery’s place in American society. After discovering that Elizabethtown’s prison kept only “negro slaves who have deserted their masters,” he wondered how Americans could support slavery in a “free and democratic Republic,” especially after they had just fought a long and bloody revolution for that freedom.1
Niemcewicz recognized what historian Edmund Morgan eventually termed “the American Paradox,” the growing interest in slavery in the aftermath of a revolution for freedom. While the American Revolution represented a new birth of political freedom, most slaves remained in bondage after the guns fell silent. Economic imperatives allowed for slavery’s growth in the Deep South while revolutionary ideology pressed for the institution’s end in the Upper South and the North. This freedom paradox helped convince Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to either abolish slavery or pass gradual abolition laws in the 1780s. Likewise, Virginians, Marylanders, and Delawareans questioned the institution by forming abolition societies and loosening manumission restrictions. Though no Chesapeake states went as far as abolition, economic changes and rhetoric equating British tyranny to slavery’s oppression slowly altered perceptions of the institution.2
However, New Jersey did not immediately follow the lead of Pennsylvania and New England. As opposed to Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, who believed the American Revolution was abolition’s “seed,” I maintain that the Revolution helped entrench slavery deeper in New Jersey and served as a bulwark against freedom. The years after the war likewise marked an increase in slavery’s numerical pervasiveness and overall popularity. It took twenty years of abolitionist activity, protests from slaves, and a political realignment to force New Jersey to adopt gradual abolition in 1804.3
In this period of struggle, white and black New Jerseyans debated the ideas of freedom within the context of a growing economic and social interest in slavery. While slavery grew, Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) members and Jersey Quakers founded the state’s first abolitionist organization, the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, in 1793. However, this largely West Jersey Quaker organization remained weak throughout its existence and actually aggravated racial tensions. By 1800, East and West Jersey had fractured on the slavery question. West Jersey had largely eliminated slavery, while in contrast, most East Jersey whites supported bound labor and saw the West’s advocacy of abolition as an intrusion into their economic livelihood. Slavery became the divisive issue that inflamed a long history of disunity between the two regions that in turn delayed abolition.
Neither abolitionist rhetoric nor resistance from slaves alone tipped the state toward gradual abolition. Instead, the partisan debates between Federalists and Democratic Republicans in the 1790s dealt slavery’s final blow. Unlike the movements in other states where abolitionism developed organically without strong political affiliations, Jersey Democratic Republicans advanced abolitionism to showcase their political suitability as adherents to the true spirit of 1776. They used abolition as a symbol of that revolutionary spirit, which united East and West Jersey interests and empowered the new party politically and morally.4
Gradual abolition was a consequence of this political wrangling and, as in other states, most white New Jerseyans supported it for self-serving reasons. Most abolitionists “dress[ed] it up as a gift” given from “the empowered possessors of freedom to the unfree and disempowered slave.” Such motivations, though, should not mitigate the actions of slaves who advocated for their own freedom in the 1790s. Indeed, many achieved freedom or an amelioration of their condition in slavery and I explore their experiences as well, especially since they helped create the conditions that allowed legislative abolition occur. In the end though, New Jersey offered fewer avenues for slaves to negotiate than other northern states due to slavery’s growth in the state. The lack of strong white support for abolition independent of politics allowed slaveholders eventually to exploit loopholes in the law, which forced most Jersey slaves to walk a complicated path toward freedom even after gradual abolition began in 1804.5
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In 1784, Connecticut and Rhode Island followed Pennsylvania and passed gradual abolition laws while New Jersey abolitionists, supported by Governor Livingston, proposed that their state follow suit. Livingston strongly supported abolition, writing in 1786 that slavery was “an indelible blot . . . upon the character of those who have so strongly asserted the unalienable rights of mankind.”6 In 1785, Livingston and Quaker activist David Cooper had urged the legislature to ban slave importations and enact gradual abolition. Cooper himself readily believed that blacks and whites “are born equally free” and claimed that because the United States had just fought a war for freedom, Americans could not withhold that freedom from blacks. This revolutionary rhetoric fused religious ideology, morality, and Enlightenment ideals into the postwar abolition fight. Hunterdon County abolitionists, for instance, called for a restoration of the “reverence for liberty which is the vital principle of a republic.”7
The 1785 abolition proposal failed because legislators still believed that stripping slaveholders of their property would push the state deeper into economic recession while continuing slavery could spur recovery. Even Pennsylvania, which enacted gradual abolition in 1780, grappled with abolition’s economic consequences in the midst of war. Abolitionist William Rawle, remembering the 1780 decision years later, claimed that “a fear of inconveniences on account of the war then raging probably prevented the legislature from going further” to pass a stronger abolition law.8 New Jersey, a battlefield for the entire war, registered significant economic losses, especially in the heavily slave-populated areas bordering New York. Whites there opposed a quick move toward abolition; Quaker-dominatedWest Jersey supported its speedy adoption. This sectional split furnished “some of the northern counties” who saw “too rapid a progress in the business . . . with an excuse to oppose it altogether.” Livingston had hoped that abolition would “have gone farther,” but economic distress and slaveholder’s defense of property rights limited political opportunities to abolish slavery.9
Livingston also identified the state’s decision to sell the remaining confiscated loyalist slaves at auction at the end of the war as the “fatal error” that doomed abolition in 1785. Their sale gave “a greater sanction to legitimate the abominable practice” and questioned the justice of mandating “the manumission of slaves, without compensation to the owners” while the state simultaneously “avail[ed] itself of the proceeds in cash of the sales of similar slaves.” Livingston concluded that “it must be wrong in both cases or in neither of them.” The decision to sell loyalist slaves therefore opened lawmakers to charges of hypocrisy if they forced abolition after profiting from the state’s own slaves, resulting in few working to advance black freedom.10
After abolition’s 1785 failure, slavery grew increasingly pervasive in both New Jersey and New York. In the 1790s alone, the slave population of New York City expanded by 22 percent and the number of slaveholders by a third. Few slaves were freed by manumission.11 In New Jersey, the number of slaves increased by 9 percent though, as most of West Jersey
