Slavery in New Jersey: A Roundtable

Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review, 2022

Slavery was first introduced to the New Jersey region by the Dutch, but the English expanded and codified the enslavement of Blacks. English Barbadian enslavers settled in New Jersey and brought with them the brutal legal structures that had begun to develop in the Caribbean. Slavery became especially well established in East Jersey, but was employed throughout the state as part of a plantation economy.

New Jersey history, 2012

Through an examination of materials from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania collections (the Richard Waln Papers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers) and the New Jersey State Archives, the paper highlights select sample writs of habeas corpus and manumission cases before the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1775-1783. The stories narrated in these documents tells a story of freedomand lack of freedomin New Jersey during and after the American Revolution. Slavery was alive and flourishing during post-Revolutionary War America. In New Jersey, historian Giles Wright noted the little-known fact that the number of New Jersey slaves increased after the American Revolution, reaching its peak number in 1 Giles Wright brought me to his New Jersey Historical Commission office to review concepts in my research, and advised me of additional areas to consider. This paper is dedicated to him. I want to thank the New Jersey Historical Commission for its funding of a 2009 Mini-Grant for my research on Richard Waln and New Jersey manumission cases/Writs of Habeas Corpus. Thank you to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for approvals to use its documents and quote from them. Thank you to Graham Russell Hodge's path breaking work on slavery in Monmouth County, New Jersey because his book included two key sentences written about Waln identified him as an abolitionist. Dr. Mark Lender provided guidance and suggestive direction on how the manumission research and writing about Waln could be helpful to New Jersey history, and I am grateful for his comments and encouragement of my research and public history presentations at Kean University. Thanks also to Dr. Jonathan Mercantini for his encouragement and inclusion of my research in Kean programs. Cheryl Stoeber-Goff, Museum Curator, Historic Services Office at the Monmouth County Parks, opened the door so I could use important resources in her office, at the encouragement of Gail Hunton. Cheryl's support helped move me along. Thank you to the Landmarks of American History NEH workshop organizers and participants in the June 2008 Philadelphia Workshop. This forum enabled me to research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania with several access passes to begin to develop the research focus. Thank you to Historian Tammy Gaskell for assisting me in the navigation of permissions from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Thanks to the reference librarians and archival staff at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and The Haverford College Quaker Collections for helping me dig into manuscript collections with a context. Thank you to all the outstanding reference librarians and archivists at the New Jersey State Archives, in particular Bette Epstein. Thank you to the reference librarians at Kean, Rutgers Alexander Library, Rutgers Special Collections, OCC, MCCC, and Brookdale who helped me find resources. Finally since this article was submitted, I want SHEAR and AAG for inviting me on national conference panels to explore further the ideas in this paper and challenging my thinking about slavery and freedom as it relates to emerging free black communities, the next area of my continuing research. I also want to thank ASALH for providing the earliest national forum for my scholarship. Finally, much appreciation is expressed to Dr. Craig Coenen and Dr. Jay Spaulding for their encouragement and support of my research and public history engagement.

New Jersey History, 2012

New Jersey was a state divided by slavery. After the Revolution, slavery continued its decline in West Jersey, home of the state's most-fervent abolitionists. But slavery in East Jersey expanded in the years following independence. This paper examines divisions between east and west in the early Republic. As the smoke dissipated over the war-ravaged state of New Jersey following the American Revolution, the carnage of the previous eight years was evident. Thousands of lives were lost, families were torn apart, forest reclaimed productive farmland, and property everywhere was looted, requisitioned, or in ruins. From this darkness came light. The American Revolution seemingly drove an ideological stake in the hearts of those who wished to deprive liberty to those who were in most need of itslaves. The Quakers of West Jersey, motivated by moral concerns, initiated an abolitionist movement among their group as early as 1775. By 1800, there were only 507 slaves living in all of West Jersey. New Jersey Governor William Livingston declared slavery "inconsistent with humanity and Christianity" and freed his two slaves in 1787. Going further, Gloucester County resident, David Cooper, acknowledged "that blacks are born equally free with whites; it is declared and recorded as the sense of America." Amid the chaos of the postwar period, more slaves escaped from their masters than during any other

History Press, 2021

A popular intervention in the professional discussion of racial enslavement in the eighteenth century. This work counters prevailing assumptions about the exclusive importance of the antebellum South as a site of enslavement.

Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) Journal, 2017

Was New Jersey the most resistant to ending slavery among northern states, or was it a progressive place where formerly enslaved Black people found unique opportunities to pursue freedom, self- determination, and defense from potential captors? The answer depends on where you look. This article describes how resistance to abolition was driven by counties in the state's northern region, and uses US Census data to elucidate stark geographic differences in manumission trends. A case study of Timbuctoo in the state's southern region is presented, to illustrate how some Black people in southern counties purchased land, established institutions, and read about themselves in local newspapers during the antebellum period.

Slavery & Abolition, 2022

In 1804, New Jersey (NJ) legislators enacted a 'Law for Gradual Abolition.' However, this act did not free a single person nor did the 1846 'Act to Abolish Slavery,' when all those still enslaved became 'apprentices for life.' Contributing to the growing literature addressing enslaving in the Northern US, and various gradations of freedom and unfreedom within and across wage labour and enslaving within shifting and developing capitalist economies, this article uses Census records and registers of children born to enslaved women to reveal enduring patterns of bondage holding Black people, particularly children, in conditions of unfreedom through and possibly after the Civil War, with far more enslaved people existing than is currently recognized. This data suggests the necessity of reconceptualising the lived experiences of 'free' Black people there as closer to enslaved, or 'unfree,' similar to that which has been documented elsewhere in the US and globally. These findings have significant implications for the longevity and potential contemporary legacies of legal mechanisms enabling this labour exploitation and divesting Black people of their freedom, earnings, and legal personhood in Northern states post-emancipation.

Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review, 2023

In the period after the Revolution some positive legal changes in New Jersey affected enslaved Blacks, including ending the importation of slaves and removing some of the obstacles to manumission, followed eventually in 1804 by the Gradual Emancipation Act, but in other ways the situation for Blacks worsened. Free Blacks were stripped of their right to vote in 1807 and White racism prevented the Black exercise of many freedoms that Whites took for granted. The free Black population grew every year, especially following the late 1820s when gradual emancipation finally began to take effect, and throughout the mid-1800's Black New Jersey residents managed to carve out a difficult existence in a state where racist attitudes were so established that even the ratification of 13th Amendment after the Civil War was initially rejected by the state legislature.

Conference and related events, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, July 25-28, 2002

New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

2009

This dissertation argues that, in Rhode Island, the institution of slavery, the process of emancipation and circumscribed black freedom was fundamentally influenced by the businesses of slavery. The businesses of slavery include the West Indian rum and slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade and the negro cloth industry. Specifically, I contend that in Rhode Island these businesses led to the legalization of race-based slavery, buttressed the local economy, and helped to maintain the institution of slavery throughout the Americas. Academic scholarship and public knowledge of northern slavery and emancipation in the United States remains relatively slim. American slavery has become almost synonymous with the American South, disregarding the fact that it was an institution that was socially accepted, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. Furthermore, most emancipation studies focus on the Civil War era, rather than the decades of freedom struggles in the post-revolutiona...