Gradual abolition was a consequence of this political wrangling and, as in other states, most white New Jerseyans supported it for self-serving reasons. Most abolitionists “dress[ed] it up as a gift” given from “the empowered possessors of freedom to the unfree and disempowered slave.” Such motivations, though, should not mitigate the actions of slaves who advocated for their own freedom in the 1790s. Indeed, many achieved freedom or an amelioration of their condition in slavery and I explore their experiences as well, especially since they helped create the conditions that allowed legislative abolition occur. In the end though, New Jersey offered fewer avenues for slaves to negotiate than other northern states due to slavery’s growth in the state. The lack of strong white support for abolition independent of politics allowed slaveholders eventually to exploit loopholes in the law, which forced most Jersey slaves to walk a complicated path toward freedom even after gradual abolition began in 1804.5
* * *
In 1784, Connecticut and Rhode Island followed Pennsylvania and passed gradual abolition laws while New Jersey abolitionists, supported by Governor Livingston, proposed that their state follow suit. Livingston strongly supported abolition, writing in 1786 that slavery was “an indelible blot . . . upon the character of those who have so strongly asserted the unalienable rights of mankind.”6 In 1785, Livingston and Quaker activist David Cooper had urged the legislature to ban slave importations and enact gradual abolition. Cooper himself readily believed that blacks and whites “are born equally free” and claimed that because the United States had just fought a war for freedom, Americans could not withhold that freedom from blacks. This revolutionary rhetoric fused religious ideology, morality, and Enlightenment ideals into the postwar abolition fight. Hunterdon County abolitionists, for instance, called for a restoration of the “reverence for liberty which is the vital principle of a republic.”7
The 1785 abolition proposal failed because legislators still believed that stripping slaveholders of their property would push the state deeper into economic recession while continuing slavery could spur recovery. Even Pennsylvania, which enacted gradual abolition in 1780, grappled with abolition’s economic consequences in the midst of war. Abolitionist William Rawle, remembering the 1780 decision years later, claimed that “a fear of inconveniences on account of the war then raging probably prevented the legislature from going further” to pass a stronger abolition law.8 New Jersey, a battlefield for the entire war, registered significant economic losses, especially in the heavily slave-populated areas bordering New York. Whites there opposed a quick move toward abolition; Quaker-dominatedWest Jersey supported its speedy adoption. This sectional split furnished “some of the northern counties” who saw “too rapid a progress in the business . . . with an excuse to oppose it altogether.” Livingston had hoped that abolition would “have gone farther,” but economic distress and slaveholder’s defense of property rights limited political opportunities to abolish slavery.9
Livingston also identified the state’s decision to sell the remaining confiscated loyalist slaves at auction at the end of the war as the “fatal error” that doomed abolition in 1785. Their sale gave “a greater sanction to legitimate the abominable practice” and questioned the justice of mandating “the manumission of slaves, without compensation to the owners” while the state simultaneously “avail[ed] itself of the proceeds in cash of the sales of similar slaves.” Livingston concluded that “it must be wrong in both cases or in neither of them.” The decision to sell loyalist slaves therefore opened lawmakers to charges of hypocrisy if they forced abolition after profiting from the state’s own slaves, resulting in few working to advance black freedom.10
After abolition’s 1785 failure, slavery grew increasingly pervasive in both New Jersey and New York. In the 1790s alone, the slave population of New York City expanded by 22 percent and the number of slaveholders by a third. Few slaves were freed by manumission.11 In New Jersey, the number of slaves increased by 9 percent though, as most of West Jersey was dismantling the institution, that figure clouds its growth in the East. In the 1790s, the slave population increased in seven of the state’s thirteen counties. Essex had the highest growth rate (30 percent), while Bergen and Morris each saw a 22 percent increase. This growth of the slave population reflected the need to rebuild the devastated East Jersey economy, the growing demand for New Jersey’s grain crops, and the dearth of available laborers. As young men migrated to larger cities after the war, immigration from Europe no longer filled the demand. In 1797, Niemcewicz complained that “hired hands are expensive and hard to get,” while the owner of a Paterson textile mill reported “three-quarters of [the] machines lay idle because of lack of hands.” Slave labor filled this gap in East Jersey especially as farmers hoped to profit from the increased value of wheat and flour that the nation had seen between 1780 and 1790. Prices had nearly doubled in that decade and increased throughout the 1790s as Europe descended into war. In comparison, West Jersey had “but few slaves and the number of these continually diminishing” according to the New Jersey Abolition Society in 1801, since by that year, three-quarters of the state’s 12,500 slaves lived in East Jersey’s five counties.12
Table 1. Slave Population Growth and Decline by County, 1790–1800
Far from a small cadre of older New Jerseyans who stubbornly kept their slaves against an increasing abolitionist spirit, New Jersey’s slave system attracted new whites interested in slavery’s benefits. Yearly tax records from Newark (in East Jersey) and Morris (in West Jersey) between 1783 and the early nineteenth century suggest little numerical change in the number of slaves held but reveal the popularity of slaveholding among whites. In Newark in 1783 and 1789, 88 different whites owned the city’s approximately 60 slaves. Only 31 percent of Newark’s 1783 slaveholders still owned slaves in 1789, yet few moved out of Newark. Of the 52 slaveholders on the 1789 list, 30 still appeared in 1796, but only 8 continued to hold slaves. Whites who had previously not owned slaves purchased them after the war even as other northern states had begun to abandon bound labor.13
Few slaveholders in Newark and Morris manumitted their chattel, further illustrating a continued interest in slavery. Between 1783 and 1804, Newark slaveholders provided freedom in 10 of 59 wills and probates. For example, Augustine Bayles of Morris County wanted slavery to continue in his family after his death. Bayles bought Quamini in 1780 and promised him freedom at his death if Quamini served him faithfully. On his deathbed in 1785, Bayles told Quamini that he had indeed “been a good and faithful boy,” but one of Bayles’s friends, Daniel Layten, argued that Bayles needed to provide for his wife after his death. Bayles rescinded his manumission offer and ordered Quamini to serve his wife until she remarried, at which time he would be freed. Bayles’s widow, who eventually remarried, held Quamini in violation of Bayles’s wishes. Although Quamini successfully sued for his freedom with the help of local abolitionists, most slaves in New Jersey never received such freedom after their owner’s death.14
As expected, sales of Jersey slaves increased after the Revolution with Jersey slaveholders advertising 201 slaves for sale in newspapers from 1784 to 1804, forty of them children attached to their parents. Female slaves appeared most frequently (60 percent), as enslaved domestic servants became status symbols who could also reproduce if the state ever enacted gradual abolition. However, slaves used in agricultural or industrial production remained valuable commodities and represented a large proportion of these sales.15 The use of slaves in nonagricultural occupations also became popular as slaveholders adapted bound labor to the new industrializing economy. For instance, the Andover Iron Works in Amwell and the Union Iron Works in Hunterdon County both used slave labor. Andover, for example, employed a slave, Negro Harry, in the late 1790s as a hammer-man and allowed him to hire himself out to other forges when business slowed. Likewise, salt works in East Jersey also hired slave labor; one such business purchased Sampson in 1790 to cut wood and do other odd jobs.16
As the number of slaves increased, racism reinforced slavery’s presence as an intense discussion of black distinctiveness and negative characteristics began in local print