legal support for slaves and, led by former state attorney general Joseph Bloomfield, widely distributed previous New Jersey Supreme Court decisions to ensure their use as precedent in freedom cases. In one such case, Frank, a free black Middlesex County resident, had contracted with his wife Cloe’s owner, Issac Anderson, in 1778 to purchase her for the sum of 180 pounds. Now both free, the couple had a child, Benjamin, but then separated. By 1803, medical issues prevented Cloe from supporting herself or her son. The local overseers of the poor followed state law and charged Issac Anderson for Cloe and Benjamin’s care as her former owner. Less than a month later, Cloe died, which left Anderson supporting Benjamin. Because Anderson supported him, he believed Benjamin to be his slave. Applying precedent from previous cases, society lawyers sued Anderson and claimed that Benjamin, now twenty-one, had been born free because Cloe’s owner had manumitted her before his birth. After an intense legal battle, Anderson finally agreed that he did not have the right to hold Benjamin but demanded $150 in payment for his expenses related to Benjamin’s upbringing. After some negotiations, the society agreed to pay Anderson the $150 to ensure Benjamin’s freedom.49
Abolitionist lawyers routinely faced staunch opposition from those who attempted to hold onto their slaves through duplicitous means. In the case that provided the legal precedent for Benjamin’s freedom, Joseph Bloomfield argued in 1790 for the freedom of Silas, a child born after his mother, Betty, had been freed in her master’s will but served that master’s family under a fifteen-year indenture. The owner of the indenture, James Anderson (no relation to Issac Anderson above), claimed that since Betty had not yet been freed, her children should be considered slaves. Bloomfield countered that Betty gained her freedom at the moment of her master’s death but remained under contract for fifteen years. He successfully argued that any child born during an indenture subsequent to manumission would be free from birth.50
Figure 2. This Membership Certificate of the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery illustrates how white society members saw themselves as bestowing liberty to the enslaved.
Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
The increased presence of abolitionists in New Jersey motivated slaves to take action themselves to press their freedom through the courts since they now had allies who could assist them. Cuff, a slave from Somerset County, had been promised freedom by his master, Gilbert Randolph, either at his own death or when his son, James, came of age. However, when James came of age, Randolph reneged on the agreement and demanded ten additional years of service. Cuff, likely hearing of the court cases proceeding across New Jersey, absconded from his master and eventually convinced abolitionist lawyers to take up his case, one that won him his freedom.51
Abolitionist lawyers also filed suit to protect free blacks from being kidnapped and sold south, thereby limiting the illegal slave trade that thrived along the coast from New Hampshire to Georgia. For instance, in May 1803 the society’s lawyers litigated a case involving the sloop Nancy, owned by Ruben Pitcher, which had left Boston with four free blacks shackled in its hold. All had been held for debts, some as small as six dollars, in the Boston jail. Pitcher paid their debts and arranged for them to work off that debt on his farm on Martha’s Vineyard. A few days later, Pitcher loaded the four onto the Nancy and set sail for Savannah to sell them as slaves. Pitcher docked in Egg Harbor, New Jersey, for provisions, where the four blacks seized the opportunity to escape and fled to local abolitionists who arranged for the Nancy’s confiscation and their freedom. In a similar case, William Griffith, the future president of the society, arranged for the purchase and manumission of Charlotte, a Monmouth County slave whose owner had planned to sell her illegally to the West Indies.52
Outside the courtroom, the society lobbied legislators and participated in abolition conventions designed to address black freedom on a national level. In 1794, the society sent Joseph Bloomfield to a Philadelphia abolitionist convention, which elected him president. The convention called on Congress to halt the slave trade, arguing that its end must occur in order to “vindicate the honor of the United States, the rights of man, and the dignity of human nature.”53 Upon returning to New Jersey, Bloomfield and the society used these ideas of universal justice to argue that New Jersey needed to enact an abolition plan to fulfill the nation’s revolutionary promise. Society members told the state legislature that “natural feelings of the human heart . . . acknowledged by Americans in their act of Independence, as among the most undeniable rights of man” demanded that the state assist in freeing enslaved blacks.54
Bloomfield used this tie between revolutionary freedom and abolition as the main vehicle to support black freedom. Under his leadership, abolitionists gathered dozens of petitions to show that whites wanted abolition. These petitions, signed mainly by society members and Quakers, called for an end to “heredity human bondage” in the state by using the “great principles of justice and truth” from the Revolution. This Enlightenment rhetoric and revolutionary ideology would ensure that “common rights and happiness” be granted to all New Jerseyans.55 On a personal level, Bloomfield firmly believed in this logic, arguing in a 1795 letter to Philadelphia merchant Samuel Coates that in a state whose laws “proclaim liberty and happiness to all her citizens,” slavery could never survive.56
Like gradual abolitionists in other states, few society members believed in black equality; racism still dominated New Jersey’s abolitionist discourse and limited actions that alleviated the social and economic rift between free blacks and whites. In some cases, the society even opposed funding programs that supported free black education and instead focused their attention solely on slavery’s destruction. For example, in 1796 the society forced its Gloucester chapter to recall funds earmarked to educate black children. Even in the society’s pleas to the legislature, it targeted only the legal institution of slavery instead of improving free black life. The society claimed its members could be “consoled with the reflection that in a course of years, slavery would cease with the lives of those who now endure it,” but few tried to advocate for either immediate abolition or for a wholesale change in the way that whites saw blacks. Indeed, on the eve of gradual abolition, society president Griffith claimed that the phrase “in New Jersey, no man is born a slave” should be the mantra of abolitionists. The society’s primary goal remained gradual legal abolition.57
Overall, the society was largely ineffective at advancing abolition statewide. In 1798, it tabled action on several petitions and court cases due to the “the scattered situation of the Society and the extreme difficulty of forming efficient cooperation in those parts of the state where the necessity is the greatest.” Three years later, in 1801, the lack of abolitionist support forced Bloomfield to report to the National Convention of Abolition Societies that “the scattered situation of this Society occasions many embarrassments and difficulties . . . [as] members . . . are often so far apart as to render it impracticable for them” to work together. Thus, the society was never as powerful as societies in Pennsylvania or New York. Jersey abolitionists struggled to coordinate branches across the state without a large commercial center to organize around. The society also received little support from residents in East Jersey, where the majority of the slaves lived and legal cases were heard. The dearth of active East Jersey members and the overabundance of members who happily talked of abolition in counties with few slaves caused difficulty in actually ensuring that the society’s efforts reached those who needed them the most.58
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Though white abolitionists believed their efforts had made great strides, New Jersey’s slaves and free blacks worked equally hard to negotiate for the liberties that they had heard about since the first dissent arose between Great Britain and the colonies. In the Mid-Atlantic, blacks published several freedom petitions, following the lead of New England blacks. For example, in 1800 Philadelphia free blacks wrote to congressional leaders to highlight the Revolutionary antecedents of abolition, claiming that abolition shared much in common
