to this author, dictated that freedom from the British would rid all who lived in America from future slavery. Accordingly, the Journal article claimed no man should be born a slave in a nation that fully supported freedom.27
Jacob Green, a Morris County Presbyterian minister, employed this same rhetoric in his church throughout the war to support the Patriots and address abolitionism. Green became heavily invested in the Patriot cause as a member of New Jersey’s Provincial Congress and delegate to the state’s 1776 Constitutional Convention. In a 1779 “Fast Day Sermon,” also published in pamphlet form, Green preached that “supporting and encouraging slavery is one of the great and crying evils among us.” He asked New Jerseyans, “Can it be believed that a people contending for liberty should, at the same time, be promoting and supporting slavery?” Green argued that slaves “never forfeited their right to freedom; ‘tis as the Congress say, a natural right, and an unalienable one.” With this sermon, Green entered into the debate on the paradoxical role of slavery in a nation founded on freedom. Like many others, Green’s abolitionist belief came not from a firm sense of equality between blacks and whites but from the conviction that Americans’ hypocritical actions were sinful.28
In 1780, the editor of the New Jersey Journal, Shepard Kollock, published a two-part letter of Green’s under the penname “Eumenes,” through which Green’s call for liberty for slaves reached a wider audience and increased discussion on the slavery and freedom paradox as the Keystone State debated a gradual abolition law that same year. Green articulated that Americans fought so “that we may be a free people; that we may enjoy the natural rights of mankind, that we may not be reduced to a state of mean and abject slavery.” He challenged New Jerseyans who believed in the natural rights of mankind, contending that those who fought against the British should “cast an eye of pity on the negro slaves among us” as they “are groaning under a bondage which we think worse than death.”29
On March 1, 1780, the Pennsylvania legislature approved a legislative abolition program that angered proslavery advocates across the Mid-Atlantic and precipitated a newspaper war on the subject of abolition. In November, “Eliobo” wrote to the New Jersey Journal that the recent increase in abolitionist sentiment had no basis in any real need for freedom for slaves, since slaves lived “free from all anxiety, perplexing cares, troubles and disappointments.” He rejected Green’s link between the Revolution and abolition, claiming it inappropriate to equate the slavery Great Britain exerted on the colonies with African slavery as the two shared little in common.30 A month later, Eliobo further advanced his proslavery argument by linking himself to the Perth Amboy petition six years earlier that had claimed that abolition would destroy white civilization. Eliobo argued that every “effort of the negroes” would be “to establish upon our ruin” and create a “kingdom of Cuffie.” In an apocalyptic vision of destruction and death, the author predicted that freed slaves would form an alliance with the Indians who, as savage as blacks, would “sweep our land with sallies of murder and rapine. Then will the shrieks and cries of murdered children and the lamentation of assassinated friends weltering in gore” force Americans to realize that abolition produced destruction.31
“Marcus Aurelius,” another author writing in response to Jacob Green and the Pennsylvania law in the New Jersey Journal, joined Eliobo in claiming that even the discussion of liberty for slaves could “stimulate servants to insurrection.” Aurelius became even more enraged with the potential for revolt because he saw a clear difference between national freedom from the British and individual freedom of slaves. He argued that Green “in his heart knows they are measured upon two scales and have no connection with each other.” He, along with others, attacked the very notion that American liberty could ever be construed as equivalent to black liberty because blacks existed in such an inferior state. Their racism not only informed their fear of a race war but also began the process that restricted how far revolutionary freedom could extend to African Americans.32
The proslavery voices that rose in protest were largely motivated by fears of slaves harnessing this abolitionist rhetoric for their own purposes. Like slaves in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Jersey slaves knew about the debates flying around them in the state’s newspapers and used them to negotiate with their masters. In Massachusetts, for example, slaves petitioned the legislature to demand an immediate end to their enslavement and used revolutionary ideas of freedom to do so. No formal petitions from slaves came to the New Jersey legislature, though rural slaveholders definitely believed that the Revolution’s ideas of liberty had influenced their slaves. These rural slaves had let it be known that “it was not necessary (for them) to please their masters for they should not have their masters long.” Revolutionary ideas therefore emboldened slaves to negotiate from a stronger vantage point by using language from the era that their masters knew, understood, and would cause a strong emotional reaction to.33
In the aftermath of Pennsylvania’s passage of gradual abolition, abolitionist voices countered the proslavery opinions in the newspaper debates and again reiterated the powerful link between the American Revolution and abolition. In 1780, the New Jersey Gazette, the Journal’s rival paper, published a series of articles refuting the Journal’s proslavery pieces. John Cooper, a Quaker from Woodbury in Gloucester County who had repeatedly advocated for abolition as a member of the Legislative Council and Council of Safety, knew Green through their shared service in the provisional legislature and on the ten-person committee that wrote the state’s 1776 constitution. Like Green, Cooper argued that the Revolution should force Americans to recognize African American freedom. Cooper believed “in our public and most solemn declarations we say we are resolved to die free—that slavery is worse than death. He who enslaves his fellow creature must be worse than he who takes his life.” As he thought slavery a fate worse than death, Cooper advocated a much more radical agenda than other abolitionists: the immediate abolition of slavery.34
* * *
The Quaker-dominated abolition movement and the republican rhetoric it utilized attempted to transcend ideological and religious boundaries, thereby raising the potential for widespread acceptance of abolition during the Revolution. The revolutionary generation of American slavery brought significant potential for African American mobility and worked to change the way white New Jerseyans thought of slavery and how blacks negotiated for their freedom. The rhetoric of abolition had much to do with this potential and it brought the first real widespread discussions of black freedom to white New Jerseyans.35
Quakers had succeeded at ridding much of West Jersey of slavery but had been less adept at convincing a large number of their fellow white New Jerseyans to join the cause. Anti-abolition New Jerseyans stood steadfastly against black freedom and combated it by trying to break down the connections between the freedom white Americans fought for from Great Britain and the type of freedom abolitionists wanted to give slaves. A successful abolition movement failed to develop because of the fear of race war, raw racism, and the lack of support in slaveholding areas of East Jersey. These fears and lack of organizational support joined together with the economic devastation caused by the Revolution, explored in the next chapter, to stymie the movement even as Pennsylvanians and New Englanders supported gradual abolition. Therefore, by the end of the war, abolitionism in New Jersey remained the legacy of only the Society of Friends and a minority of non-Quakers.
CHAPTER TWO
Sustaining Slavery in an Age of Freedom
The slave Prime experienced a very different American Revolution from most other slaves. A Hunterdon County native, he understood the promise of freedom the American Revolution could bring, especially after Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation and similar edicts from British commanders in New York. However, despite his best efforts, he could never capitalize on that promise as did other black Americans. Instead of ending the war as a freeman, Prime became a “slave of the State of New Jersey . . . liable to be sold as their
