population increased in seven of the state’s thirteen counties. Essex had the highest growth rate (30 percent), while Bergen and Morris each saw a 22 percent increase. This growth of the slave population reflected the need to rebuild the devastated East Jersey economy, the growing demand for New Jersey’s grain crops, and the dearth of available laborers. As young men migrated to larger cities after the war, immigration from Europe no longer filled the demand. In 1797, Niemcewicz complained that “hired hands are expensive and hard to get,” while the owner of a Paterson textile mill reported “three-quarters of [the] machines lay idle because of lack of hands.” Slave labor filled this gap in East Jersey especially as farmers hoped to profit from the increased value of wheat and flour that the nation had seen between 1780 and 1790. Prices had nearly doubled in that decade and increased throughout the 1790s as Europe descended into war. In comparison, West Jersey had “but few slaves and the number of these continually diminishing” according to the New Jersey Abolition Society in 1801, since by that year, three-quarters of the state’s 12,500 slaves lived in East Jersey’s five counties.12
Table 1. Slave Population Growth and Decline by County, 1790–1800
Far from a small cadre of older New Jerseyans who stubbornly kept their slaves against an increasing abolitionist spirit, New Jersey’s slave system attracted new whites interested in slavery’s benefits. Yearly tax records from Newark (in East Jersey) and Morris (in West Jersey) between 1783 and the early nineteenth century suggest little numerical change in the number of slaves held but reveal the popularity of slaveholding among whites. In Newark in 1783 and 1789, 88 different whites owned the city’s approximately 60 slaves. Only 31 percent of Newark’s 1783 slaveholders still owned slaves in 1789, yet few moved out of Newark. Of the 52 slaveholders on the 1789 list, 30 still appeared in 1796, but only 8 continued to hold slaves. Whites who had previously not owned slaves purchased them after the war even as other northern states had begun to abandon bound labor.13
Few slaveholders in Newark and Morris manumitted their chattel, further illustrating a continued interest in slavery. Between 1783 and 1804, Newark slaveholders provided freedom in 10 of 59 wills and probates. For example, Augustine Bayles of Morris County wanted slavery to continue in his family after his death. Bayles bought Quamini in 1780 and promised him freedom at his death if Quamini served him faithfully. On his deathbed in 1785, Bayles told Quamini that he had indeed “been a good and faithful boy,” but one of Bayles’s friends, Daniel Layten, argued that Bayles needed to provide for his wife after his death. Bayles rescinded his manumission offer and ordered Quamini to serve his wife until she remarried, at which time he would be freed. Bayles’s widow, who eventually remarried, held Quamini in violation of Bayles’s wishes. Although Quamini successfully sued for his freedom with the help of local abolitionists, most slaves in New Jersey never received such freedom after their owner’s death.14
As expected, sales of Jersey slaves increased after the Revolution with Jersey slaveholders advertising 201 slaves for sale in newspapers from 1784 to 1804, forty of them children attached to their parents. Female slaves appeared most frequently (60 percent), as enslaved domestic servants became status symbols who could also reproduce if the state ever enacted gradual abolition. However, slaves used in agricultural or industrial production remained valuable commodities and represented a large proportion of these sales.15 The use of slaves in nonagricultural occupations also became popular as slaveholders adapted bound labor to the new industrializing economy. For instance, the Andover Iron Works in Amwell and the Union Iron Works in Hunterdon County both used slave labor. Andover, for example, employed a slave, Negro Harry, in the late 1790s as a hammer-man and allowed him to hire himself out to other forges when business slowed. Likewise, salt works in East Jersey also hired slave labor; one such business purchased Sampson in 1790 to cut wood and do other odd jobs.16
As the number of slaves increased, racism reinforced slavery’s presence as an intense discussion of black distinctiveness and negative characteristics began in local print culture. Reprints of Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) showed Mid-Atlantic whites that blacks were a separate race and sensationalized their association with savagery and war. Almanacs picked up on these discussions and continually portrayed Africans as heathens or devilish apes. Depictions of blacks in literature as inferior and associated with evil followed. For instance, the author of a 1797 pamphlet titled The Devil or the New Jersey Dance described six young whites who hired a black fiddler for an evening. Instead of a single night of festivities, he kept the group for more than thirty days, leaving them “dancing on the stumps of their legs . . . their feet being worn off and the floor streaming with blood.”17
Some New Jerseyans, like Dutch Reformed minster John Nelson Abeel, complained of the dangers of blacks and whites living in close proximity on equal footing and suggested how blacks’ presence could destabilize the social order. Abeel offered that “those negroes who are as black as the devil and have noses as flat as baboons with great thick lips and wool on their heads,” along with “the Indians who they say eat human flesh and burn men alive and the Hotentots who love stinking flesh,” could prove dangerous if freed.18 A 1792 newspaper reiterated this sentiment by claiming that blacks bore “the marks of stupidity . . . in the countenances composed of dull heavy eyes, flat noses, and blubber lips.”19 In New York, racist rhetoric derailed that state’s abolition efforts in the 1780s, while in New Jersey it similarly worked to show blacks as unworthy of freedom.20
Slaveholders who embraced the institution in the 1790s convinced legislators that the institution needed continued regulation and in 1798 they passed a revised slave code that reaffirmed slavery’s legality and confirmed the inclusion of any “Indian, Mulatto or Mestee” currently held as a slave in that category. The reaffirmation of Indian slavery resulted from a court case one year earlier in which Rose, “a North Carolina squaw,” argued that her Indian status “furnishes at least prima facie evidence of her being free.” Elisha Boudinot, a future Supreme Court Justice and abolitionist who assisted Rose, argued that Indian slavery had no basis in law or practice. The defense pointed to slave laws passed in 1713, 1768, and 1769 that made “no discrimination . . . between negroes and Indians.” The court agreed and claimed Indian slaves “stand precisely upon the same footing . . . to be governed by the same rules as that of Africans.” The 1797 court decision and the 1798 statutory reaffirmation of Indian slavery strengthened the differentiation between free whites and enslaved nonwhites and reinforced the place of bound labor in New Jersey.21
The 1798 law also regulated slave behavior, levying restrictions to strengthen the institution. It banned slaves from assembling in a “disorderly or tumultuous manner,” prohibited their movement after 10 p.m., and affirmed longstanding prohibitions on slaves’ ability to testify against free persons. The legislature continued to strengthen slavery in 1801 when it revised a law on slave punishment. That law, like those in the South, allowed courts to sentence slaves convicted of arson, burglary, rape, highway robbery, attempted violent assault and battery, or attempted assault and battery with intent to commit murder to sale outside of New Jersey. Sale or transfer to the Deep South, discussed extensively in Chapter 6, further demonstrated the Revolution’s failure to advance abolitionism.22
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As slavery grew in East Jersey, Quakers and slaves worked to dismantle it in West Jersey. The Society of Friends had been advocates for abolition early on and therefore took the lead in advancing statewide abolition. By 1800, 80 percent of Burlington County blacks and 91 percent of Gloucester’s lived free. In comparison, only 11 percent of Essex County blacks and 6 percent of Bergen’s had gained freedom. This Quaker antislavery activity further bifurcated New Jersey, leaving West Jersey to develop into a free society even before the passage of a gradual abolition law while the institution remained entrenched in the East.23
However, even as Friends advanced abolition, few accepted free blacks as members of their meetings with equal status. Race
