Similarly, three Connecticut slaves argued in 1797 that they were “in a much worse situation than we were in before the war,” even though Americans had defeated “the tyrant king of Great Britain” who “assumed the right of depriving all the Americans of their liberty!”60
In New Jersey, Revolutionary ideas encouraged slaves to actively seek out freedom themselves, most commonly by running away. However, absconding declined from its high watermark during the Revolution since slavery’s growth in East Jersey made community and family connections easier. In Bergen County, for example, the average distance between slave-holdings dropped from 3 to 1.5 miles by 1800, which allowed slaves to marry in greater numbers and create families that tied them to their local communities. As opportunity and desire declined, New Jersey newspapers printed 40 percent fewer runaway advertisements between 1784 and 1803 than during the Revolution, averaging 5.8 advertisements per year. Young male slaves continued to make up the majority of runaways, with a median age of twenty-five years. These fugitives deprived Jersey slaveholders of essential laborers to repair the state’s economy after the Revolution. As expected, most runaways (86 percent) came from East Jersey, though even this number represents a fraction of the likely total number. Circumstantial evidence, including Niemcewicz’s account of the Elizabethtown jail teaming with runaway slaves in a year in which only one fugitive advertisement appeared, indicates that runaways remained somewhat prevalent in the late eighteenth century.61
Though slower than during the Revolution, abolitionist activity in the 1790s encouraged slaves to abscond from their masters. One such slave, James Alford, left his master’s Rahway farm in 1794 and headed toward Pennsylvania because, as he described years later, he had heard a divine voice that told him he would soon be free if he sought assistance from local Quakers. Sneaking off the farm to the local Quaker Meeting House, Alford met several abolitionists who taught him how to read and write. He discussed with them at length the divine voice he had heard. After his escape, Alford’s master accused the local Quakers of encouraging him to flee.62
Abolitionism exacerbated the long-held white fear of slave rebellion, leading some masters to negotiate with their slaves to stave off revolt. Newspapers reported vivid firsthand accounts of the bloody rebellion in Saint-Domingue while refugees and their slaves simultaneously spread news of the revolt to American ports from Maine to Georgia. Jersey abolitionists claimed that Francophone settlers and their slaves had migrated to Philadelphia in droves, many of whom eventually settled in West Jersey and dramatically increased the region’s slave population. In Nottingham, for instance, almost half of the city’s forty-five slaves belonged to new French settlers.63 Likewise Susanna Emlen, writing to William Dillwyn in 1792, reported on “a new class of inhabitants in Burlington—a number of those unfortunate Islanders whose slaves have risen and made so much disturbance and valuable effects.” Emlen was surprised by both the large number of new slaves and that many of them had actually helped save their masters’ lives during the rebellion. However, she believed few could “wonder [why] their slaves should demand and forcibly take what had so cruelly been withheld from them.”64
The same almanacs and periodical literature that had encouraged white New Jerseyans to see blacks as inferior and animalistic now began to disparage the Saint-Domingue rebels. Bryan Edwards’s Historical Survey of the French Colony of St. Domingo pointedly accused abolitionists of starting the revolt. New Jerseyans, from their Atlantic connections, learned much from Edwards’s book about the dangers of slavery. They sought to protect themselves from a similar rebellion. In 1794, even local abolitionists warned that a general insurrection much like that of Saint-Domingue could occur if abolition did not begin soon.65
To prevent rebellion, both New York and New Jersey further limited slave movement and communication, and curtailed activities conducted without white supervision. New York banned gambling and the use of lanterns to limit arson, while Newark prevented slaves from meeting together or leaving their masters’ home after ten o’clock at night. Despite these regulations, the mid-1790s saw mysterious fires break out up and down the Atlantic coast, which exacerbated worries of slave revolt. In New Jersey, investigators believed that slaves in Newark and Elizabeth had planned to set fire to the two towns and launch a massive uprising. Other potential revolts, such as when Middlesex County executed three slaves for planning an uprising, upset already anxiety-ridden New Jerseyans.66
In addition to the threat of slave revolt, masters faced the possibility that their own slaves could injure them or damage their property. For example, Margaret, a mother of five, burned down her New Barbados master’s barn, while Nance poisoned her Sussex County mistress’s coffee with arsenic, and Sam, a slave owned by Newark’s Caleb Hetfield, stood accused of raping Mary Russel in 1785.67 Crimes like these led Bergen slaveholders to complain of the “many atrocities, acts of burglary, arson, robbery and larceny which have been committed by slaves in this County and this frequent running away from masters.” They demanded state officials pass stricter laws to preserve slavery.68
However, the fear of revolt, running away, and the increased abolitionist activity encouraged whites to more readily negotiate with slaves for freedom and for better conditions within slavery. The growth of slave communities in East Jersey was certainly a result of successful negotiations between masters and slaves. Slaves took advantage of revolutionary rhetoric and abolitionist agitation to argue for their own benefit. In this way, the nature of slavery slowly began to change as masters understood the limits of slavery in the early republic. These changes cushioned gradual abolition’s eventual blow as masters continually sought ways to sustain slavery within the institution’s changing framework.69
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By 1800, Jersey slavery had grown despite assaults from abolitionists, fears of slave rebellion, and the constant ring of revolutionary freedom. New Jersey stood alone as the only northern state without a gradual abolition law, separating white New Jerseyans from other northerners who had begun to think seriously about slavery’s place in the developing nation. An 1803 pamphlet concerning the death of a slave from Saint-Domingue confirmed this difference as the author noted that New Jersey law “authorized his master to remove him as he would a piece of furniture” unlike the rest of the North.70 New Englanders especially used slavery as a way to contrast a free “North” against a slave “South,” with New Jersey fitting into neither region. As historian Matthew Mason claims, “the North was proud to denominate itself as the ‘free states’ in an ideological world that proscribed bondage as immoral.” White New Englanders saw themselves as fundamentally superior to southerners; their identity was based on the embrace of revolutionary freedom which, in their minds, proved their superiority. As New Jersey had yet to abandon slavery, it could not join this imagined morally superior “free” community, nor did many in the state desire to. Slavery still remained an important institution.71
The fascination with a “free” North began at the Constitutional Convention when regional distrust and differences based on slavery became readily apparent. James Madison famously claimed that the states diverged on issues “not by their difference of size . . . but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.” Madison believed the main problem in forming a new government lay not in a debate over large versus small states but “between the Northern and Southern” as the “institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination” between the two regions. Of course, differences of scale had always existed between the South’s slave societies and the North’s societies with slaves. But since Massachusetts had outlawed slavery and Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all passed gradual abolition laws before the convention, the development of “free soil” led southerners to believe that New York and New Jersey would soon follow suit and the idea of a homogenous North opposed to slavery was born.72
Northerners at the convention did not make it difficult for southerners to see the North as a distinctively free region since northern delegates identified slavery as the root of the new nation’s evil. Rufus King, an adamant Massachusetts abolitionist,
