declined by 68 percent and Cumberland’s by 38, while those in East Jersey grew by 20 to 30 percent. These ex-slaves added to the already burgeoning free black community that had formed as a result of earlier Quaker manumission efforts.36
Both Quaker advocacy of abolition on a personal level and individual slaves negotiating with masters to gain their freedom worked simultaneously to destabilize the institution. For instance, John Hunt, a member of Burlington County’s Evesham Meeting, recorded his extensive efforts to convince recalcitrant Quaker slaveholders to abandon slavery. These Quakers put pressure on slaveholders to manumit at the same time slaves themselves pressured them for freedom from within. In July 1787, Hunt visited the home of Joseph and Mary Garwood, fellow Evesham Friends, to discuss manumission plans. Joseph purposely avoided meeting with Hunt, which led Hunt to instead “press things closest home upon” Mary. Ten days later, Hunt revisited the Garwoods with fellow Quakers Samuel Allinson and Elizabeth Collins. Mary again stopped the trio from seeing her husband, claiming he was “indisposed with bad fits.” Hunt suspected that Garwood had feigned illness to avoid a confrontation. In this case, Garwood’s slaves and their white allies failed in their negotiations for freedom as Garwood sold them to stave off potential economic losses.37
On the other hand, Hunt and Allinson convinced John Cox to manumit his slaves in 1787, though they failed to accomplish the same with Jacob Brown the following year. Likewise, Hunt visited the home of Micajah Wills and his wife several times between 1787 and 1794, but ultimately failed to convince Wills to manumit his chattel, though he kept in close contact with Wills’ slaves. In 1794 Hunt attended a funeral for one of them, where he remarked that while the slaves “behaved very sober,” the whites in attendance failed to keep quiet throughout the service, a jab at the demeanor of those who refused abolition.38 Other Quakers, including Allinson’s son William, continually toured New Jersey trying to convince individuals to free their slaves. In 1804, for instance, William “set out on a tour into Sussex” on a mission to secure the freedom of two black families, though in 1803 he recorded his displeasure at the task, writing that he had engaged in the “irksome” task of “abolition business most of the afternoon.”39
In addition to individual meetings, Hunt attended religious services held by Burlington Friends for free blacks where they participated in both religious conversations and discussed the latest abolition news, which made them part of the abolition process and gave them power to take action to ensure freedom for themselves and their families. At one 1796 meeting, for instance, the organizers read information on the state of abolition in the North from the PAS, which the blacks in attendance discussed. Hunt remarked that one black attendee, Hannah Burros, took center stage and explained New Jersey’s complicated relationship with slavery to the others. Hunt seemed to think very highly of Burros, visiting her seven months later after she fell ill. Hunt wrote that she was “quite deranged and [had] lost her reason” and that he became emotional at her “sorrowful condition,” praying for her recovery.40
These local Quaker meetings also sought to help educate West Jersey’s free black population to show whites that blacks could learn and were worthy of freedom. In a 1790 letter to Quaker abolitionist William Dillwyn, Susana Emlen claimed that several night schools that taught “the Negroes reading, writing, and arithmetic” had recently opened in Burlington as a way “to atone in some measure for the wrong they have suffered.”41 The schools, opened between 1789 and 1791 by the Burlington Quarterly Meeting, joined those already operated by the Upper Springfield Monthly Meeting. Similarly, Salem Quarterly Meeting in 1790 solicited donations of funds to create integrated schools for both poor white and black children. By 1793, the funds raised by those Quarterlies funded the creation of three schools in southwest New Jersey, with another opening in 1794, all controlled by Quaker educators who taught an integrated student population.42 Likewise, Philadelphia’s Free Black School assisted Trenton Quakers form a larger school to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic in evening classes year round to the city’s black adults. It copied the structure of the Burlington School Society for the Free Instruction of the Black People, formed in 1790, with both struggling against negative perceptions of their students by local whites. For example, in 1793, the Burlington school’s leadership complained that it had encountered many who thought blacks too ignorant and unworthy to educate.43
The Quaker interest in manumission and education led hundreds of slaves to escape slavery but also gave ex-slaves allies to help develop their lives in freedom. Even though some Quaker efforts were undoubtedly paternalistic, freed slaves took advantage of them to create independent households and thriving businesses. One such ex-slave, Cyrus Bustill of Burlington, owned a profitable bakery that sold flour, cakes, bread, and biscuits to local residents and those who travelled on the Delaware. Eventually, Bustill and his family moved to Philadelphia, where he attended Quaker meetings, belonged to the Free African Society, and taught in a school for freed slaves before his death in 1806. Like Bustill, Samson Adams, an ex-slave from Trenton, sold soap, which enabled him to buy a house in town and employ a housekeeper. Surviving records indicate that he had made a number of alliances with whites; almost fifty Trenton residents donated labor, supplies, or money to help him complete his home. The records reveal that Adams traded soap, food, and other goods with blacks and whites throughout the region. At his death in 1792, Sampson had accumulated a substantial personal estate that he divided among his family, with two white customers serving as his executors.44
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Jersey Quakers had quickly realized that they needed an organization to coordinate their abolitionist activities and therefore latched onto the PAS, the most prominent abolitionist group in the United States. Sixteen of the original PAS members lived in New Jersey, many of whom prosecuted cases on behalf of the society. For example, Richard Waln, an affluent Monmouth County Quaker, communicated frequently with PAS leadership in Philadelphia and, as one of its founding members, helped free numerous blacks unlawfully held in bondage. In 1788, for instance, Waln intervened in the case of a Jersey child held as a slave even though his mother had been freed before his birth. Waln and the PAS, like most gradualists, believed litigation was the best avenue to defeat slavery. However, by early 1793 even Waln cited the lack of interest in abolition and the need for a more organized response to slavery in New Jersey. After Trenton PAS member Isaac Collins, who had done much legal work for slaves, ended his membership in the society, Waln lamented that a larger state network would be needed to fervently advance abolitionism.45
Years of communicating with members like Waln had convinced the PAS that it needed to create an autonomous society in New Jersey. In January 1793, a committee formed to organize a New Jersey abolition society and by April they reported that they had founded the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, headquartered in Burlington. The collaboration between the New Jersey society and the PAS continued as members from both organizations routinely exchanged information about specific cases.46 The newly formed society used the Declaration of Independence’s doctrine that “all men are created equal” to find fault with the state for withholding the principles of “justice . . . life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from “an unfortunate and degraded class of our fellow citizens.” This rhetoric, of course, had been used by other abolition groups throughout the Mid-Atlantic. For instance, Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller of the New York Manumission Society argued that “any civilized country . . . [should] oppose . . . slavery,” especially in “this free country” where “the plains . . . are still stained with blood shed in the cause of liberty” and “the noble principle that ‘all men are born free and equal’ ” reigns.47
Quakers joined the new society en mass and dominated membership in at least five county-level auxiliaries. In Burlington, for instance, Quakers made up 70 percent of the sixty-five total members, while in Gloucester they represented 40 percent of the membership. In proslavery East Jersey, all but four of the members of the Middlesex/Essex chapter came from the Society of Friends and the Hunterdon County chapter even met at the Friends’ Meeting House. The society therefore became the arm of Quaker abolitionist outreach.48
The
