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
Slaves in New Netherland were jacks-of-all-trades, feeding not only the agricultural base of the colony but performing artisan trades, building colonial infrastructure, and completing hundreds of other tasks to establish and maintain the colony. By 1664, one out of every eight white New Netherland residents owned slaves. At the same time, the enslaved also intertwined their creole and African roots with Dutch culture. Pinkster, a celebration of Pentecost, first was celebrated in 1628 and saw African music and dance come alive in the New World. This African influence was sustained by new slaves imported directly from Africa and from Spanish and Dutch Caribbean traders.28
After the Dutch surrender at New Amsterdam in 1664, Charles II’s brother James, duke of York, gained title to the region and quickly granted New Jersey to two proprietors, George Carteret and John, Lord Berkeley. Unbeknownst to them, New York’s military governor, Colonel Richard Nicolls, transferred large tracts of land to New England Puritans, Quakers, and Baptists who eagerly moved into the eastern part of New Jersey and established Elizabethtown, Newark, Piscataway, Woodbridge, Middletown, and Shrewsbury between 1664 and 1666. These overlapping land grants caused havoc in determining land ownership in early New Jersey and eventually led to a series of land riots and proprietary revolts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The proprietary period’s conflicts also diminished the profits that Carteret and Berkeley reaped from New Jersey. After settlers in East Jersey established an independent assembly, ejected the proprietary governor, Carteret’s cousin, and allied with