transformed its remaining slaves into “apprentices for life,” yet another form of slavery, white actors consistently supported a gradual approach to abolition and resisted slavery’s immediate end. Even in a society with slaves where gradual abolition was well underway, slavery proved resilient.
This consistent engagement with and appreciation of the state’s past and current slave system stands in stark contrast to portrayals of New Englanders at the same moment in time. New England’s prominent role in the abolition movement allowed abolitionists there to disown slavery from their own history and reinterpret it as a minor institution that resembled apprenticeship far more than chattel bondage. They used this New England identity to demarcate the entire North and define the two regions as in mortal combat over slavery.20 New Jersey’s embrace of slavery, not its disownment, has significant ramifications for historical understandings of the coming of the Civil War by showing how antebellum northern whites were influenced by their state’s past and continuing relationship with slavery. Although white New Jerseyans repeatedly opposed slavery’s expansion in the West, slavery’s continuation forced a ready acknowledgement of the state’s role in ensuring the return of fugitive slaves and in not interfering with the institution in the South. Indeed, Jersey politicians constantly reminded their northern and southern counterparts of their experience with slavery as they dealt with sectional tensions. Slavery’s persistence therefore not only shatters the rather simplistic dichotomy between a slave South battling a free North but shows how those New Jerseyans who lived in a slave state used their slaveholding experience to create peace and order on the southern border over fugitive slaves, embraced a general anti-abolitionism and support for interstate comity to get that peace, and respected southern economic and social interests in keeping slavery more than their radical northern neighbors who opposed fugitive recoveries and courted southern distrust.
Several excellent works on slavery’s demise in the North laid the groundwork for my understanding of slavery’s place in nineteenth-century New Jersey. Gary Nash and Jean Soderlund’s pioneering work on slavery’s slow death in Pennsylvania showed that, like in New Jersey, masters “were more notable for shrewd calculations of how to extricate themselves at little cost from an involvement in owning fellow human beings than for a rise in their moral sensibilities.”21 Likewise, Shane White’s expertly crafted Somewhat More Independent, which focuses on New York City, demonstrated slavery’s growth there after the Revolution in the same way it grew in New Jersey. Graham Hodges’s work is perhaps one that most emphasizes the role of African Americans in their own abolition and the growth of the free black community, which did much to move African Americans to center stage and advance northern slavery studies from its ideological and political foundation established by Arthur Zilversmit in the late 1960s.22 Yet this resurrection of African American agency frequently directed the focus to a fully free black community and focused primarily on institutional life, not to the reality that gradual abolition created multiple gradations of freedom for blacks to inhabit daily in their work, family, religious, and social lives. Instead, my work here aligns more closely with Joanne Pope Melish’s and shows how the gradual abolition process actually affected enslaved as well as free black and white lives on the ground.23
Focusing on the expansive reach of slavery does not mean an abandonment of African American agency. On the contrary, the enslaved remained key actors especially in the nineteenth century when they navigated a difficult terrain where slaves, slaves for a term, and free blacks all lived in overlapping layers of freedom. Jersey’s enslaved did, as historian Ira Berlin has shown again and again, negotiate for better lives despite the fact that the institution’s slow death “handicap[ed] the efforts of black people to secure households of their own” and “encouraged the notion that black free people were no more than slaves without masters.” In this way, Berlin is correct in arguing that “slavery hardly behaved like a moribund institution” after gradual abolition began, remaining important in many areas of the North, most notably New Jersey. I build on Berlin’s insights as I unpack the slow death of slavery to show how it shaped the state, nation, and New Jersey’s nineteenth-century black communities.24
However, Jersey blacks did not only, as Berlin argues, “owe their liberty to the changes unleashed during the Age of Revolution,” but instead to a much longer and convoluted process of freedom. It is within that longer freedom process that African American agency becomes somewhat limited. Jersey blacks faced insurmountable odds in the early nineteenth century, perhaps greater than anywhere else in the North. They had no white allies as the state abolition society quickly disbanded after gradual abolition began, lived under a legal system that was firmly controlled by slaveholders or those supportive of their interests, and saw most free blacks who could have assisted them leave for the larger black communities in New York or Philadelphia. For those reasons, the negotiations and interactions between the enslaved and white masters that resulted in freedom were fewer than in other northern locales. From the available sources, I show the integral role of Jersey blacks in gradual abolition, but far too often could not capture the extent of these negotiations, largely due to the rarity of sources recording Jersey slaves, especially after 1840.25
This book then is about a tug of war with a wide variety of protagonist voices. It engages the ideology of the Revolution, religious commitments to abolition, economic interests of slaveholders, familial bonds and community networks of slaves, the law’s role in creating and sustaining slavery, and, most important, how whites and blacks dealt with the transition from slavery to freedom. It delves into a number of different historiographical arguments and pieces together how New Jerseyans and other northerners struggled with defining slavery’s end. Above all, it shows that Catherine’s 1856 sale was not a historical anachronism. Instead, her sale reflected the experience of slaves and slaves for a term in antebellum New Jersey. The “Garden of America” was a place of inequality and unfreedom, worked by slaves such as Catherine just like so many other gardens in the United States.
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A study of slavery’s slow demise in the nineteenth century needs first to be grounded in how the institution became an integral part of New Jersey society, since slavery’s colonial beginnings had massive ramifications for how the institution sustained itself later on. Slavery’s beginning in New Jersey cannot be divorced from its interaction with the Atlantic World and its relationship with neighboring New York. In 1626, the first African slaves arrived in New Netherland to work for the Dutch West India Company and soon became incredibly important since the new colony suffered chronic labor shortages as few white immigrants chose to settle there. This first generation of slaves quickly became integrated into society as the astute creoles understood that slavery was a form of clientage that they could use to their advantage. The paltry numbers of Europeans likewise gave slaves power as their labor became increasingly needed by the company in its bid to stabilize itself against Indian, Spanish, English, and Swedish threats. By 1630, Dutch and Walloon settlers had established themselves on the west bank of the Hudson River in present-day Bergen County and brought the first enslaved Africans to what would become New Jersey. However, continued Indian conflicts restricted how far the Dutch moved across the river and caused most Dutch settlements to be short-lived, such as Pavonia, which was destroyed by Indians, or founded in the last years of Dutch rule, as was Bergen after Indian threats had dissipated.26
Like in other colonies, New Jersey’s charter generation lived in a society that had neither firmly delineated laws on slavery nor used race to determine enslaved status. Instead, freedom in New Netherland was flexible, with small free black neighborhoods growing in the 1630s, formed by blacks who managed to negotiate with the company or their individual masters for freedom. Some used religion to claim freedom since the Dutch Reformed Church mandated slave baptism and encouraged masters to establish pathways to freedom for their slaves. Others used the daily interactions they had working with whites to negotiate with masters to let them purchase or otherwise secure freedom. Yet, black labor remained at the core of New Netherland’s labor force and the colony’s growth did much to transform slavery into the main tool of agricultural expansion, especially in northeast New Jersey.27
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