The Ragged Road to Abolition

Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865

James J. Gigantino II

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780812290226
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges. The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery's slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey's gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state's black population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery's persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of black freedom and helped whites to associate "black" with "slave, " enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey's growing free black population.By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.

CHAPTER ONE

Debating Abolition in an Age of Revolution

In 1688, Germantown, Pennsylvania, Quakers released an antislavery petition that became the first in a series of discussions among Mid-Atlantic Quakers on the morality of owning slaves. For the next hundred years, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, with which most New Jersey Friends associated, debated the paradox of enslaving Africans while believing that all individuals were spiritually equal. The tension created by the paradox grew over time and transformed Philadelphia and Western New Jersey into hotbeds of abolitionist thought, protest, and activism that impacted how both non-Quaker whites and African Americans debated abolition as slavery became increasingly important in the late colonial period.¹

The role of Quakerism in the growth of the eighteenth-century abolition movement is critical to the eventual enactment of gradual abolition laws across the North. Quakers, although in most cases far from racial egalitarians, became the first organized group to consistently advocate against slavery. They successfully orchestrated slavery’s end among their own members and eventually moved their advocacy to a wider audience. Quaker politicians and those elected from constituencies dominated by Friends argued for statewide abolition while Quaker-authored pamphlets, petitions, and newspaper articles circulated to members and nonmembers alike. The debate over slaveholding within the Society of Friends therefore influenced the statewide debate over slavery and fused together abolitionist rhetoric, Patriot discussions of Britain’s tyrannical enslavement of the colonies, and slaves’ own calls for freedom. Abolitionists and slaves took advantage of the Patriots’ similar rhetorical use of “freedom” and “slavery” to make strong parallels between the imperial struggle over freedom from Great Britain and the hypocrisy of continued African enslavement. The Revolution therefore made the idea of freedom a right that transcended race and encompassed transatlantic affairs. This forced white New Jerseyans to debate slavery openly and decide if their fight for freedom from Great Britain should be seen as part of a wider freedom struggle.

As the eighteenth-century Quaker abolition movement developed, Jersey Quakers stimulated a debate on the morality of slavery that reached a far greater audience than that of their local meetings. These debates permeated revolutionary society and became part of much larger discussions about the role of freedom in the new United States. Quaker considerations of morality intertwined with the revolutionary drama unfolding around New Jerseyans and convinced some non-Quakers to join the debate about the future of slavery in New Jersey. Abolitionist ideology, its relationship to American freedom, and the ethical and moral implications of holding slaves during a war for freedom soon emanated regularly from multiple denominations’ pulpits, print sources, and slaves’ mouths.

However, despite New Jersey being a hotbed of early abolitionism, abolition remained a highly contentious and disputed proposition since slavery had been so deeply intertwined into colonial society. Despite debates over revolutionary freedom and its application to slaves, retorts of racial amalgamation, race war, racial inferiority, and potential economic losses limited that freedom’s impact. In the heated ideological battle over slavery, Quakers, abolitionists, and slaves powerfully connected the Revolution and abolitionism to convince many New Jerseyans of abolition’s importance, but this formidable weapon did not triumph over slaveholder and anti-abolitionist fear mongering and their systematic defense of the right to own slaves. The dangers of a radical restructuring of the state’s racial order failed to win many converts to the abolitionist cause, especially in East Jersey where slavery had entrenched itself far more deeply. The failure of abolitionism to take hold allowed white New Jerseyans to strengthen the institution of slavery in the midst of the war and during its aftermath.

* * *

Although not the first Quaker abolitionist, Burlington County native John Woolman became one of the society’s most ardent eighteenth-century proabolition voices. Woolman, an itinerant Quaker preacher, traveled from the Carolinas to New England to Europe advocating the freedom of both African slaves and Indians. Woolman went farther than Quaker leaders William Edmundson and George Fox who expressed concern over the spiritual welfare of those Friends who owned slaves. Edmundson and Fox challenged Quaker slaveholders in the Caribbean in the 1650s and 1660s to bring religion to their slaves and moderate their treatment. However, as Edmundson and Fox did not attack the institution directly, they failed to change the ownership patterns of any society members, although their actions influenced Woolman years later to take their ideas to the next level.²

After the 1688 Germantown Petition, Quakers in the Philadelphia area began to question the morality of slavery. By 1713, the Chester, Pennsylvania, Monthly Meeting had called for the emancipation of slaves and in 1715 the Yearly Meeting requested that Friends treat their chattel with Christian compassion.³ With these debates as a backdrop, Woolman, while living in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1742, “had a life-transforming attack of conscience” when he authored a bill of sale for a black woman for his employer. Woolman wrote extensively in his journal that “writing an instrument of slavery for one of my fellow creatures felt uneasy,” which made him conclude “slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.”⁴ This inconsistency impelled him to embark on what became his life’s work: to convince Quakers to abandon slavery. Woolman, unlike other Friends who had endorsed slavery as long as owners treated slaves well, built his understanding of slavery from New Testament passages that echoed the same Enlightenment ideals that would be utilized in the future by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Woolman argued that even though Old Testament law accepted slavery, Friends must completely reinterpret their view of charity and morality to align with the Golden Rule.⁵

In 1754, Woolman, along with Anthony Benezet, authored an official warning to Friends about slavery that reversed the Yearly Meeting’s hesitant stance on attacking slavery and “ushered in a new phase in the Quaker fight against slavery.” It had an “explosive impact” on Quakers in Greater Philadelphia, and along with Woolman’s own writings, declared slavery sinful and encouraged the society to fundamentally reform. Woolman argued that the slave trade represented the root of slavery’s evil since it separated families and eliminated the ability of Africans to have a relationship with God. He claimed that the Golden Rule alone dictated that slavery existed in direct contradiction to Christianity.⁶ The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting took up Woolman’s focus on the Golden Rule when it questioned its application to slavery that same year. The meeting asked “do we act consistent with this noble principle” or have Quakers acted “so inconsistent with ourselves to purchase such who are prisoners of war and thereby encourage this unchristian practice?” Answering in the negative, the meeting lamented the “dreadful scenes of murder and cruelty those barbarous ravages must occasion in these unhappy people’s country” yet many Friends continued to support slavery since it had become so vital to the rural economy.⁷

Woolman’s interaction with other major antislavery activists, including Anthony Benezet and Benjamin Franklin, produced a hotbed of Quaker abolitionist activity in 1750s Philadelphia. Benezet, on his own, went farther than Woolman in his belief in black equality, advocating that slaves lived as equals in the sight of God. Woolman and Benezet worked together to advance abolitionism within the Philadelphia meeting. Throughout the 1760s they discussed education reform for blacks, the lynchpin in Benezet’s agenda, and created a transatlantic network of abolitionism that traded ideas, beliefs, and empirical evidence to assist abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic.⁸

Woolman’s death in 1772 did not silence the debate within the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on slavery. Benezet, especially after his 1771 publication of Some Historical Observations of Guinea, which firmly advocated that Africans were equal to whites, forcefully supported a pro-abolition agenda in Philadelphia.⁹ Along with Benezet, other Jersey Quaker abolitionists joined the discussion that Woolman had begun. In 1773, William Dillwyn of Burlington published a tract that he directed at both Quakers and political powerbrokers in the legislature. Dillwyn rightfully observed that although “many in these northern provinces” might admit the “injustice of the slave trade in general,” they “may yet be unwilling to view it as a matter sufficiently important” for legislation.¹⁰ Dillwyn argued that the issue of abolition must be addressed by making a comparison to the distressed situation between the American colonies and Great Britain, asking how can the colonies, “when so loudly complaining of (England’s) attacks on our political liberty,” tolerate “this violent invasion of natural liberty, subjecting the Africans . . . to the most abject state of perpetual personal slavery?”¹¹

Other Jersey Quaker abolitionists picked up on the same linkage between the burgeoning abolition movement and the brewing discontent over British imperial policies and made that link a central focus of the revolutionary period. In 1774, Burlington Quaker Samuel Allinson wrote to Patrick Henry and claimed that the call for abolition had never been louder “than at a time when many or all the inhabitants of North America are groaning under unconstitutional impositions destructive of their liberty.” Allinson further pondered if God would forgive Americans for their failure to treat African Americans humanely. Granville Sharp, one of Britain’s leading antislavery advocates with whom Woolman and Benezet had corresponded, echoed Allinson’s words when in 1774 he told Allinson that if the colonists “hope(d) to maintain their own natural rights and to have justice on their side . . . they ought not to deny the same rights to others by persisting in the practice of the most abominable and unchristian oppression.”¹²

Faced with increasing pressure from multiple angles, Quaker meetings began to prohibit their members from owning slaves in 1774. By 1776, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting banned members from slaveholding and placed pressure on those recalcitrant Quakers who refused to abandon it.¹³ At this point, Quaker support for abolitionism was overwhelming compared to the tepid support that Woolman and Benezet first received when they authored the 1754 Epistle. The Yearly Meetings’ instructions to abolish slavery set to work a manumission process that freed hundreds of Quaker-owned slaves. As the state had not yet developed a uniform system to record manumissions, Quaker meetings took responsibility for mediating slave freedom. In the Burlington Monthly Meeting, for example, Samuel Allinson dutifully kept a register of the forty-five manumissions completed by members from 1776 to 1781. This support paid dividends when in 1776 the Egg Harbor Monthly Meeting reported that it had freed all of its slaves, save one, and, in 1778, the Burlington Monthly Meeting claimed all but a few slaves under age twenty-one had been freed.¹⁴

Despite the large number of manumissions administered by Quaker Meetings, many within the society were reticent to free their slaves due to the substantial economic losses that freedom necessitated. Since 1713, the state required masters to post sizeable bonds to guarantee that former slaves would not become destitute and therefore dependent on poor relief, and many owners became understandably dissuaded from manumission. Many in Chesterfield slowed their support for abolition while the same lack of enthusiasm occurred at Salem in 1777 when that monthly meeting indicted Charles Fogg for selling “two girls . . . (and) render(ing) their case little better than slaves.” Even though the meeting managed to buy back one of the two, Fogg’s choice to sell rather than manumit illustrates the continuing power that economic incentives had over ideology. Similar incidents took place in Shrewsbury in 1772 when the freedom of two slaves dramatically divided the meeting. The Yearly Meeting stepped in to adjudicate the Shrewsbury dispute while in Chesterfield most members felt “discouraged from the apprehension of encumbrance which it might occasion to their outward estates and some few refuse at present” to liberate their chattel. Chesterfield continued to drag its feet on abolition, reporting in 1778 to the Quarterly Meeting that many members still did not wish to free their slaves.¹⁵

Fear of economic losses persuaded many Quakers to fulfill their abolitionist duty while maintaining the labor of their young slaves. As most Americans firmly believed in the indenture and unfreedom of minors, many Jersey Quakers granted provisional freedom to slaves under twenty-one but required them to complete a term of service before they could achieve legal freedom. Quaker meetings tacitly approved of this process as it ensured future freedom at adulthood. In one such case, Rachel Moore of Burlington manumitted her slave, seven-year-old Negro Jane, in 1771 by confirming her future freedom at age thirty, but first sold her to Thomas Gordon, a fellow Quaker from Philadelphia. Though Moore made it “clearly understood . . . that Negro Jane is hereby manumitted and made free,” she first had to serve twenty-three years with Gordon.¹⁶

Even though some Quakers voluntarily left or were disowned by the society over slavery, a much larger percentage of Friends hoped to “erase the moral blot of slavekeeping” from their memory. Many Greater Philadelphia Quakers atoned for their lapse in moral judgment in owning slaves through a coordinated effort to assist their former chattel in their new role as freed people. In 1775, the Yearly Meeting remarked that abundant progress had been made in the promotion of abolition and “a considerable number (of blacks have) been restored to liberty.” The overall success of the abolitionist movement within the Society of Friends led to a substantially freer West Jersey and a more concerted emphasis on the religious care of former slaves. Schools aimed at religious instruction, some led by Benezet, developed in the region along with the continued growth of abolitionism.¹⁷

Quaker attention to atoning for slavery in the late 1770s and early 1780s led Samuel Allinson and other Burlington Quakers to develop a system of religious and educational meetings for ex-slaves that met at rotating West Jersey meetinghouses in Burlington, Mount Holly, Crosswicks, and Mansfield to, in the words of the Burlington Quarterly Meeting, promote “their instruction in the principles of Christian religion and the pious education of their children.”¹⁸ Though the organizers of the meetings had a definite tone of moral superiority (they needed to “educate” their “uneducated” ex-slaves), these meetings soon became not only about religion but afforded free blacks badly needed educational opportunities. Indeed, they also promoted the formation of free black communities by bringing together a rural black population at regular intervals. These former slaves latched onto these meetings because of their usefulness—they endured the paternalistic rhetoric and embraced them to create alliances, bonds, and relationships that would help them survive in a society where blacks were still overwhelmingly enslaved. By 1783, Philadelphia Quakers formed a school dedicated to providing education to free black children while the Salem and Gloucester Quarterly Meeting began raising funds...