The Ragged Road to Abolition - James J. Gigantino II

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attempted to remove their slaves to New York so as not to let them fall into the hands of the patriots. Prime’s owner Bainbridge attempted this, but because Prime ran away, he lost him to Patriot confiscation. However, some slaves did the opposite of Prime and resisted confiscation by running toward their loyalist masters. For example, the slave of loyalist John Ackerman escaped from the man who had bought him at auction, Andrew Hopper, in 1778. The slave, whose name remains unrecorded, fled to Ackerman’s protection in New York.122

      Like New Jersey, other states confiscated and sold slaves from loyalist estates and reinforced slavery within their borders. In Connecticut, Jeremiah Leaming joined the British along with his slave Pomp after loyalists burned Norwalk in 1779. Pomp ran away from his master but, as part of a traitor’s estate, he belonged to the people of Connecticut. However, due to his perceived loyalty to the American cause, the legislature granted Pomp freedom.123 Similarly, southern states like Georgia and South Carolina used confiscated slaves as teamsters, servants, and military laborers to build defensive fortifications. As discussed earlier, South Carolina offered a slave to every white man who joined the army and a slave to any soldier who could recruit twenty-five men, while Georgia awarded slaves to soldiers and sold them to finance the state government.124

      The most important part of New Jersey’s slave sales, however, rested in how the state dealt with its confiscated slaves at the end of the Revolution. In neighboring New York, the New York Manumission Society successfully lobbied that state’s legislature to free all remaining confiscated slaves in 1786 instead of selling them, though most of the confiscated able-bodied slaves had already been sold. The society even obtained a guarantee of taxpayer support to care for the slaves in their old age.125 In New Jersey, however, the legislature only agreed to free three confiscated slaves who had actively supported the Patriot cause. In 1784, the legislature freed Peter Williams, a slave of John Heard from Woodbridge who, in 1780, had joined the Continental Army after his master had enlisted in the British military.126 Likewise, two years later, the legislature read the petition of Bainbridge’s slave Prime, who had, like Williams, absconded from his loyalist master and joined the New Jersey militia. They granted Prime freedom in 1786. In 1789, Cato became the final slave to earn freedom due to military service, as he too had joined the Patriots after his master fled to the British.127 With only three emancipation bills, the legislature made clear that it fully supported the sale of confiscated slaves and the continued bondage of those not under state control. That only three slaves gained freedom after the Revolution reinforced the unfree status of African Americans in New Jersey. These confiscated slaves would, in the mid-1780s, play a major role in convincing the legislature to delay gradual abolition.128

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      Prime’s ability to negotiate for freedom due to his service in the Continental Army at one level places him among an incredibly small group of slaves who accessed a free life through service with the Americans. However, in a larger sense Prime is representative of the Revolution’s impact on slaves. Some, like Prime, used the war to their advantage and seized freedom themselves but most understood that slavery remained an entrenched system in New Jersey.

      The emergence of a strong post-revolutionary slave system owed much to New Jersey’s position as a borderland between Patriot and Loyalist America. Abolitionists had championed the idea of black freedom but, with no organized state-level abolition society and the reality that British forces slept close by, legislative abolition stalled. The ravages of total war combined with the fears created by the actions of Colonel Tye and other ex-slaves who joined the British army convinced many whites that wartime abolition would result in further dislocation and lack of control. Of course, Jersey blacks used the Revolution to seek freedom on their own terms, yet these methods proved largely ineffective in overturning entrenched proslavery thought and practice for more than a small minority of slaves. Their exploits actually reinforced the state’s racial boundaries, strengthened anti-abolition sentiment, and limited abolition’s reach because absconding slaves helped exacerbate white anxieties of revolt.

      In the end, the state’s confiscation and sale of loyalist owned slaves represented the true meaning of the Revolution for African Americans in New Jersey: Revolutionary freedom would not extend to them. The Revolution reinforced the colonial slave system in the short run instead of convincing New Jerseyans to support gradual abolition laws, as had occurred in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In New Jersey, it took twenty-one years after the Revolution’s end to pass a gradual abolition statute. In that battle, the memory of the meaning of the Revolution, not the actual reality of its destructive power, became critical in convincing legislators to support abolitionism.

      Abolishing Slavery in the New Nation

      Julian Niemcewicz, the exiled Polish statesman and writer, moved to Elizabethtown in 1797 and married Susan Livingston Kean, the niece of former governor William Livingston. He bought an eighteen-acre farm and settled into his new life as a gentleman farmer. His wife had a close association with slavery, as her deceased husband, John Kean of South Carolina, owned over one hundred slaves. After Kean’s death in 1795, Susan owned and traded those slaves, continuing to do so after her remarriage. Even though slavery was integral to the couple’s household, Niemcewicz remained puzzled as to slavery’s place in American society. After discovering that Elizabethtown’s prison kept only “negro slaves who have deserted their masters,” he wondered how Americans could support slavery in a “free and democratic Republic,” especially after they had just fought a long and bloody revolution for that freedom.1

      Niemcewicz recognized what historian Edmund Morgan eventually termed “the American Paradox,” the growing interest in slavery in the aftermath of a revolution for freedom. While the American Revolution represented a new birth of political freedom, most slaves remained in bondage after the guns fell silent. Economic imperatives allowed for slavery’s growth in the Deep South while revolutionary ideology pressed for the institution’s end in the Upper South and the North. This freedom paradox helped convince Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to either abolish slavery or pass gradual abolition laws in the 1780s. Likewise, Virginians, Marylanders, and Delawareans questioned the institution by forming abolition societies and loosening manumission restrictions. Though no Chesapeake states went as far as abolition, economic changes and rhetoric equating British tyranny to slavery’s oppression slowly altered perceptions of the institution.2

      However, New Jersey did not immediately follow the lead of Pennsylvania and New England. As opposed to Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, who believed the American Revolution was abolition’s “seed,” I maintain that the Revolution helped entrench slavery deeper in New Jersey and served as a bulwark against freedom. The years after the war likewise marked an increase in slavery’s numerical pervasiveness and overall popularity. It took twenty years of abolitionist activity, protests from slaves, and a political realignment to force New Jersey to adopt gradual abolition in 1804.3

      In this period of struggle, white and black New Jerseyans debated the ideas of freedom within the context of a growing economic and social interest in slavery. While slavery grew, Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) members and Jersey Quakers founded the state’s first abolitionist organization, the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, in 1793. However, this largely West Jersey Quaker organization remained weak throughout its existence and actually aggravated racial tensions. By 1800, East and West Jersey had fractured on the slavery question. West Jersey had largely eliminated slavery, while in contrast, most East Jersey whites supported bound labor and saw the West’s advocacy of abolition as an intrusion into their economic livelihood. Slavery became the divisive issue that inflamed a long history of disunity between the two regions that in turn delayed abolition.

      Neither abolitionist rhetoric nor resistance from slaves alone tipped the state toward gradual abolition. Instead, the partisan debates between Federalists and Democratic Republicans in the 1790s dealt slavery’s final blow. Unlike the movements in other states where abolitionism developed organically without strong political affiliations, Jersey Democratic Republicans advanced abolitionism

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