Читать книгу The Ragged Road to Abolition - James J. Gigantino II - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWO

Sustaining Slavery in an Age of Freedom

The slave Prime experienced a very different American Revolution from most other slaves. A Hunterdon County native, he understood the promise of freedom the American Revolution could bring, especially after Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation and similar edicts from British commanders in New York. However, despite his best efforts, he could never capitalize on that promise as did other black Americans. Instead of ending the war as a freeman, Prime became a “slave of the State of New Jersey . . . liable to be sold as their property.”¹

Prime’s master, Princeton physician Absalom Bainbridge, hid his loyalist sympathies until the British marched into his hometown at the end of 1776. On their arrival, Bainbridge volunteered his house as the headquarters of General William Howe and joined the king’s army, in which he served until 1778. Bainbridge was stationed in New York until the British evacuation in 1783, when he moved to London. In his successful 1784 application to the Loyalist Claims Commission, established by Parliament in 1783 to hear cases of loyalists who suffered economic losses as a result of their loyalty, for damages totaling 6,000 pounds sterling, Bainbridge wrote that because of his early support for the king, New Jersey had declared him guilty of high treason and confiscated his property. In addition to his four hundred acre estate, Bainbridge listed numerous pieces of moveable property, including Prime. During the war, Bainbridge tried to remove Prime and his personal property to safety by sending his wife, Prime, and several wagons of household items to a relative’s home in Princeton before moving them all to his father-in-law’s in Monmouth. After Bainbridge left the army in 1778, he sent for his wife and Prime to join him on Long Island, though Prime took advantage of the confusion surrounding the war and successfully ran away to Somerset County.²

Jacob Bergen, the state official charged with the confiscation and sale of loyalist estates in Somerset, seized Prime and considered selling him as the state had done with Bainbridge’s other property. Luckily for Prime, Bergen “humanely declined” to send him “to sale like a beast of the stall” and instead recommended he serve in the Continental Army to alleviate his owner’s debt to the Patriot cause. Prime served for the duration of the war as a teamster and left Continental service in 1783 when he moved to Trenton and began a free life as a day laborer. Only a few months after the Revolution ended, a man named John Taylor appeared at Prime’s home and claimed he had bought Prime from Bainbridge’s wife. At the same time, attorneys representing the state affirmed their previous contention that Prime, as part of a confiscated loyalist estate, belonged to the people of New Jersey and any sale by Bainbridge or his family subsequent to that confiscation was void. As a slave either to Taylor or to the state, Prime would lose the freedom he had gained because of the Revolution. After months of legal wrangling and an appeal to the Supreme Court, in 1786 the state of New Jersey affirmed the legality of Prime’s confiscation and the invalidity of Taylor’s claims. A military veteran who honorably served the Patriot cause left the Supreme Court as confiscated property to be sold by the state to the highest bidder.³

Prime’s transformation from free patriot veteran to confiscated property hits at the very heart of historical understandings of the Revolution. In contrast to arguments put forward by historians that the Revolution laid the groundwork for African American freedom, Prime’s case represents the perpetuation of slavery because of the Revolution, not an extension of freedom supported by revolutionary ideology. Of course, Prime himself did not surrender his freedom and this ideology easily; he authored a petition to the legislature demanding his freedom based on his service to the nation. By 1786, the legislature had freed him and two other slaves caught in his same situation, illustrating that though this ideology had power in New Jersey, it helped only a limited number of slaves.⁴

Slavery survived the Revolution because of New Jersey’s status as a hotly contested revolutionary battleground. British and American troops slogged through the mud of the well-worn road between New York and Philadelphia, trampled through the snow at Morristown, and fought on the plains of Monmouth, which caused state residents to feel the negative effects of war more than most. With almost three hundred separate military engagements and thousands of foraging expeditions by British and Americans, revolutionary New Jersey easily earned the name given to it by historian Leonard Lundin in the 1940s—“The Cockpit of the Revolution.”⁵

The Revolution’s destructive power and disruptive influence on the state’s economy, coupled with the constant threat of British invasion, encouraged lawmakers and white citizens to decline to advance abolition even as it moved forward in Pennsylvania and New England. Opposition to black freedom had already been substantial as abolitionists failed to overcome fears of race war and social dislocation in the state’s ongoing rhetorical battle over slavery. The fallout from the actual battles solidified this opposition to abolitionism and effectively ended the first moves toward abolition begun in the 1770s. Even as the war allowed thousands of blacks to escape to British lines and gain freedom, combat operations in this borderland at the crossroads of the Revolution inflicted a devastating economic toll as both armies routinely ravaged the state. The destructive reality of war overpowered abolitionism in New Jersey and suppressed any desire to free a valuable labor source from those grappling with wartime destruction and an uncertain future.

In addition to exacerbating economic losses, the absconding of hundreds of slaves to British lines and their return as loyalist soldiers created an even more powerful socially produced hysteria and anxiety over a potential statewide slave revolt. Reports of ex-slaves murdering, raping, and pillaging their former hometowns delayed serious discussions of abolition as many Jersey whites believed themselves under attack by a ruthless and uncontrollable enemy. The institution of slavery provided security and control over blacks in the insecurity of war, which encouraged lawmakers at the end of the Revolution to not free the vast majority of confiscated loyalist slaves like Prime. The state’s role as a slave trader both during and after the Revolution reinforced its commitment to a slave system that would successfully defend itself for the next twenty years against a growing abolition movement in the North and the larger Atlantic World.

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Anti-abolition activists responded forcefully in words and actions against the abolitionists’ use of revolutionary rhetoric in support of slave freedom. The petitions that Quaker abolitionists had sent to the legislature and the newspaper debates they provoked helped anti-abolitionists drum up significant support in the state, motivated violence against abolitionists— Jacob Green’s church was sacked in protest—and allowed anti-abolitionists to clearly set out their reasons for opposing black freedom. This group primarily argued that slavery could not be abolished because the Revolution had devastated the state economically and a constant fear of future destruction remained. For instance, one abolitionist critic claimed that New Jersey could not follow its neighbors toward abolition because it had been “laid to waste and rendered desolate by the ravages” of the British army.⁶

Legislators repeatedly used this economic argument to halt abolitionism, believing it too radical a step to take in the midst of war. To the abolitionists, the moral stakes were high as Quaker activist Samuel Allinson wrote in 1778, the “eyes of the world have been and are upon America” in the matter of slavery.⁷ Although Allinson thought the eyes looked specifically toward Pennsylvania and its battle to enact gradual abolition, he also lobbied Governor William Livingston to consider abolition in New Jersey. Livingston, a slaveholder himself, readily adopted Allinson’s abolitionist ideology and freed his slaves. Through frequent exchanges with Allinson, Livingston not only embraced abolitionism but became more accepting of Quakerism, leading him to become Allinson’s principal ally. At the same time, however, Livingston believed the legislature “thinking us rather in too critical a situation to enter on the consideration of it at that time, desired me in a private way to withdraw the message.” Livingston thought that this “critical situation,” the economic losses and fear of British attack, derailed the wartime abolitionist agenda.⁸

The reality of war in New Jersey hit the state’s citizens from almost the very beginning when the British invasion of New York in 1776 forced Washington’s army into a headlong retreat across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. New Jersey became “a ragged borderline between the two Americas, Loyalist and Patriot,” of which the “neutral zone of eastern and northern New Jersey, especially Monmouth and Bergen counties” was where “the violence was most brutal.”⁹ War in New Jersey became a longstanding foraging battle in which both armies scavenged for supplies, with major battles occasionally highlighting the daily struggle for food and influence. As Livingston had alluded, defending the state against British attack preoccupied the minds of most New Jerseyans and therefore limited the abolitionist influence.¹⁰

The relative brutality and cruelty that plagued New Jersey was made abundantly clear by legislators, soldiers, and citizens. In August 1776, Abraham Clark, a member of the Continental Congress, wrote that residents of his native Elizabethtown “are daily alarmed with news of an attack.”¹¹ By the end of September, after British forces had actually invaded, patriots routinely discussed reports of British “savagery.” American General Jedidiah Huntington recorded that with almost one-third of New York City in flames, “unheard of barbarities were committed by the Kings Troops . . . some, it’s said, were thrown into the flames, others tied up by the legs and their throats cut,” all done to “deter” further insurrection.¹²

Figure 1. William Livingston, governor of New Jersey, 1776–1790.

Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

After the British invasion of New Jersey in late 1776, dozens of state leaders and soldiers saw the devastation inflicted by the British, its devastating impact on state residents, and how it pervaded residents’ focus throughout the war. For instance, Samuel Adams wrote to his wife Elizabeth about the “savage tragedies . . . without respect to age or sex” perpetrated by Hessian soldiers, which “have equaled the most barbarous” of all the “nations of the world.” Adams reiterated his belief in the barbarity of the Hessian and British forces the following week to his cousin John, when he again claimed that they had “been most inhumanely used in their persons, without regard to sex or age, and plundered of all they had.”¹³ Echoing Adams, William Whipple wrote to his fellow New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett of the “brutal vengeance of an abandoned soldiery . . . exercised on all without distinction.” The “ravages committed by the enemy” in New Jersey were “really shocking to humanity.” Whipple feared that if the British shifted their operations to New England, his constituents would suffer “greater cruelties than New Jersey has experienced.”¹⁴ These letters echoed reports from field commanders, such as Nathanael Greene, who wrote to his wife in early December 1776 that American soldiers from Maryland and Virginia had been dispatched to New Jersey to “stop the ravages of the enemy.” Unlike other accounts of the campaign, Greene claimed both sides “take the clothes off of the peoples back. The distress they spread wherever they go exceeds all description.”¹⁵

In early 1777, after a congressional committee began investigating British and Hessian conduct in New Jersey, delegates heard reports of numerous rapes and murders perpetrated by forces loyal to the king, further evidence of the war’s destructive power. For instance, Virginian Thomas Nelson described how British soldiers “play the very devil with girls and even old women to satisfy their libidinous appetites . . . there is scarcely a virgin to be found.”¹⁶ In the same vein, Samuel Adams wrote to James Warren about the “shocking inhumanities shown to our countrymen in the Jerseys” as the British engaged in “plundering houses, cruelly beating old men, ravishing maids, murdering captives in cold blood, and systematically starving multitudes of prisoners.”¹⁷ John Adams and Richard Henry Lee both reiterated the “ravages in the Jersies” including “rapes, murders, and devastation . . . [which] would have disgraced the savages of the wilderness.”¹⁸ Likewise, New Jersey native Thomas McCarty recalled the brutal nature of the New Jersey-New York borderland during an engagement with a British foraging party in February 1777. McCarty reported that his unit “attacked the body and bullets flew like hail” causing significant casualties. In speaking of the American wounded, McCarty wrote that the British soldiers had “dashed out their brains those men wounded in the thigh or leg . . . with their muskets and run them through with their bayonets, made them like sieves. This was barbarity to the utmost.”¹⁹ Delegate Whipple believed that this wanton inhumanity inflicted by the British reflected the true state of “British humanity” and that “all America would have experienced” the same if they “submitted to the yoke of the tyrant.”²⁰

Reports of widespread destruction, rape, and murder from the initial 1776–1777 campaign fueled New Jerseyans’ fears of future attacks by the British. This consistent fear made Newark leaders, in the spring of 1777, warn Governor Livingston of “the unhappy situation of this town being so contiguous to the Enemy who threatens us daily with an invasion.”²¹ These fears were never realized as the main British army quickly withdrew from New Jersey, but the campaign of 1777 brought renewed reports of attacks against American civilians. For example, while based in Perth Amboy, Hessian cavalry officer Baron Friedrich Adam Julius von Wangenheim wrote to his brother that “we will soon bring war to an area where no one is suspecting it” and “attack the enemy as on a hunt.” He claimed that his men would “crawl on our bellies through the bushes and if one sees a rebel, one sneaks up to him and shoots him dead” and reiterated the orders of General Howe, who had decided that the army in this campaign needed “to be cruel, since he has seen that with kindness one does not accomplish anything with them—there will be burnings, hangings, and everything will be ruined.”²²

After the Patriot victory at Monmouth, New Jersey settled into a prolonged period of guerrilla warfare between patriots, loyalists, and British military units that sought food and supplies from the countryside, which further damaged the state’s economy. A second cold winter at Morristown (1779–1780) made New Jersey no friend to Continental soldiers as harsh weather, lack of supplies, and poor living conditions affected both their health and discipline. Alexander Scammell, the army’s adjutant general during the second encampment at Morristown, described that the complete lack of discipline rampant among American soldiers, especially thefts from other soldiers and the plundering of local residents’ property, further exacerbated the already present civilian anxiety over their economic livelihood. In January 1780, for instance, Rubin Parker received one hundred lashes on the bare back for theft, while in February the Continental Army executed another soldier for the same crime. Similarly, Scammell recorded death sentences in May 1780 for four soldiers of the Pennsylvania line after they plundered the house of Cornelius Bogart near Paramus.²³ Plundering became so widespread that the General Orders issued on January 28, 1780, prohibited soldiers from leaving camp. Although some soldiers sought riches from plundering civilian homes, hunger motivated many more to search the countryside for food. Plundering continued after Morristown with Eliza Susan Quincy of Basking Ridge writing in her memoirs that in 1781 that a group of armed soldiers broke into her home searching for gold watches. The thieves stole thirty pounds worth of gold and silver before threatening to kill the home’s inhabitants unless they turned over more loot. The robbers proceeded to ransack the house and took twelve ruffled linen shirts, all the plates, the tea and coffee service, and every piece of silver, threatening to burn down the house if the family reported the theft.²⁴

Just as American troops did, British forces also routinely foraged for supplies and angered already economically vulnerable residents. In December 1776, for instance, General Howe reported from New Brunswick that so many solidiers plundered civilian property, it would “be absolutely impossible to prevail upon the inhabitants to bring provisions to market” where the army could legally buy them. Similar reports came from Middlebush in June 1777 when Howe ordered that anyone found guilty of “marauding or pulling down houses, barns or any irregularity” would be punished severely. Punishments for plundering happened with regularity as Howe reported that John Gibson had been sentenced to 1,000 lashes for robbery and Jacob Van Tessel faced death for the same crime.²⁵ Likewise, physician Martin McEvoy stood trial for illegally plundering a horse and cow in 1778, a charge of which the court-martial found him guilty and discharged him from the service. Lt. Boswell of the Maryland loyalists similarly stood trial in September 1778 for taking two horses. Boswell claimed that he only took them because he was “so very lame that he could hardly walk” and, after his unit left New Jersey, he sent the horses back to their owner. Even though the court found him not guilty, the actions he and others took affected not only the economic lives of New Jerseyans but their willingness to support the Continental Army.²⁶

British forces quickly realized that foraging in New Jersey had turned many residents against their cause. As Howe had feared in New Brunswick in 1776, New York’s British governor, James Robertson, wrote to Lord George Germain in 1780 after the Battle of Short Hills that the burning of several houses by area loyalists “deprived us of the reputation the general’s intentions merited and gave too good foundation to the rebels to represent us as inimical to the country.”²⁷ Benedict Arnold likewise argued in 1780 that “plundering the distressed inhabitants of New Jersey” would cause them to support the patriots.²⁸ British actions resulted in just that, as many New Jerseyans allied with Continental forces. By early 1777, Whipple reported that the “ravages committed by the enemy have had a most excellent effect on the people of Jersey” as “the militia now turn out with great spirit and harass the ravagers of their country in every quarter.”²⁹ At the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, Hunterdon County militia officer Joseph Clark reiterated his men’s support for the patriots when he wrote that the battle had “roused the militia . . . they turned out with such a spirit . . . never did the Jerseys appear more universally unanimous to oppose the enemy.”³⁰

The economic devastation caused by the Revolution became further exacerbated by the work of the slaves themselves since they capitalized on the war’s destructive and disruptive power and struck out for freedom. For example, slaveholders in the most heavily slave populated county, Bergen, saw the loss of hundreds of slaves who joined British forces and no longer supported the county’s agricultural base. One such Bergen resident, Richard Varick, bemoaned in 1778 that “in the beginning of the war, my father had two middle-aged negroes and wenches—he has lost the wench . . . one negro died and the last wench and one negro left with the enemy.”³¹ Varick’s two escaped slaves joined hundreds more who heard the British promise of freedom. The fear that blacks could run away, disrupt New Jersey’s slave system, and potentially serve in the king’s army exacerbated the anxiety caused by the war and further damaged the economic viability of hundreds of slaveholders. The slaves themselves then, even as they sought freedom, inadvertently convinced many whites of the dangers of wartime abolition.³²

British enthusiasm for offering slaves freedom and thereby economically hurting patriot masters began in 1775 when Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, promised freedom to any slave who would fight against the Americans. News of Dunmore’s promise spread far from Virginia and soon slaves in New Jersey understood the British as a beacon of freedom. British commanders across the colonies announced similar declarations. On June 7, 1779, David Jones, the British general in charge of New York, declared that “all Negroes that fly from the Enemy’s Country are Free . . . no person whatever can claim a right to them.” Jones’s declaration exceeded the limited scope of Dunmore’s because he offered freedom to all slaves who escaped to Tory lines, not just males that fought.³³

New Jersey slaves quickly took advantage of the guarantee of freedom by this powerful group of whites and ran away in large numbers. Lutheran minister Henry Muhlenberg saw the support the British had among Jersey slaves, writing that they wished “the British army might win, for then all Negro slaves will gain their freedom.” This belief, according to Muhlenberg, was “universal among the Negroes in America.”³⁴ For the most part, he was right. Thousands of blacks ran toward British lines, covered by the disorder of war, especially in the Mid-Atlantic. The fugitive slave population of Philadelphia doubled and nearly quadrupled in New York.³⁵ Runaway advertisements provide a rough estimate of the general characteristics and quantity of slaves who fled New Jersey. From 1776 to 1783, New York and New Jersey newspapers ran 314 runaway advertisements. As historian Billy Smith found studying Philadelphia papers, the Revolution produced a significant uptick in runaways. Smith measured an annual average of 43 runaway advertisements per year from 1750 to 1775. During and immediately after the Revolution, that number more than doubled to 102 annually.³⁶ In New Jersey, these runaways remained, as would be expected, overwhelmingly male (79.6 percent), between sixteen and twenty-five (51.6 percent), and therefore easily integrated into the British military. Of course, not all slaves who ran away became soldiers. Phillis Sparrow, a twenty-eight year-old woman who belonged to Charles Suydam of New Brunswick, left her master in 1776 and fled to a free life in British-occupied New York. Similarly, in 1777, Richard Stevens’s slave from Hunterdon County left his master and fled to Staten Island after coaxing by Jinlay Drake, who specifically decried military service.³⁷

The constant military maneuvering in the state transformed New Jersey into a battleground not only over food but between slavery and freedom as British lines within the state and the freedom they offered ebbed and flowed throughout the war. Fleeing slavery was easy in New Jersey, as few slaves needed to travel far from their masters’ homes to find a British unit. As in other occupied areas, slaves could easily acquire protection from British troops and access freedom by “simply walking out of their master’s homes.”³⁸ Some did not have to walk far at all since passing British troops lured many slaves away with promises of freedom. A twenty-eight-year-old male slave owned by Joseph Holmes of Upper Freehold did just that when he fled to British troops that had marched onto his master’s land.³⁹ Similarly, Ennis Graham claimed that a large body of Hessian soldiers carried off his slave Oliver on their way to the Battle of Trenton in December 1776, while Thomas Edgar of Woodbridge saw his thirty-five-year-old male slave flee to nearby British forces during the same campaign.⁴⁰

Slaves ran away from their masters with the understanding that a chance at freedom with the British outweighed both the dangers of simply absconding and the realities of an unfree life in Patriot New Jersey. For example, in 1778 twenty-two-year-old Boston ran away after his owner, Ann Griffith, told him that he would be sent to serve with the Continental Army. In making his escape, perhaps Boston believed that military service with the British, who guaranteed freedom, was a better alternative than service with the Americans, who did not. Griffith, however, soon found Boston on the British schooner Revenge, commanded by Captain William Cook, who had just recently surrendered to American forces on the Delaware River. Griffith applied for Boston to be returned immediately. Cook, unlike other British mariners who interpreted Dunmore’s Proclamation to free slaves who boarded British ships, met with a local man named Martin Delany and planned to sell Boston for up to 125 pounds. One witness overheard Cook plotting to sell Boston “to the first West Indian vessel that he met” and reap a huge profit. Griffith’s case became even further complicated as an American Admiralty Court condemned Cook’s ship and cargo, including Boston, as confiscated property liable for sale. In the end, Griffith regained custody of Boston, but many more who lost slaves to the British did not. In total, more than 150 Jersey masters filed claims with the state for slaves lost to British forces.⁴¹

The animosity caused by British foraging raids increased as New York became the epicenter of free black life in the United States, growing due to the surging numbers of Jersey runaways. A resident of New Barbadoes in Bergen County complained in May 1780 that “twenty-nine negroes of both sexes have deserted within two weeks past.”⁴² This represented a steady increase in absconding slaves and necessitated the expanded use of the militia to apprehend them. For example, in 1777, Major Samuel Hayes of the Essex County militia reported that he had seized two absconding slaves in Newark, bound for New York. That same year, Monmouth County militiamen captured slaves Joe and Scipio under suspicion that they intended to join the British.⁴³ In 1782, one slave arrested for attempted escape to New York was “tied . . . to the tail of a horse . . . his feet were fastened in the stocks and at night his hands also.”⁴⁴ However, increased militia action barely scratched the surface of the runaway threat and did not effectively deter migration to New York.⁴⁵

The foraging raids and the rising number of absconding slaves focused attention on the British and the perceived threat that a radical change in the state’s racial structure could bring.⁴⁶ Thousands of New Jerseyans filed damage claims with the legislature in 1781 and 1782, showing how the British army, as Abraham Clark wrote, “one of which the most savage known among civilized nations” had “spread desolation through” New Jersey and precipitated an economic and social crisis.⁴⁷ However, Continental forces had also helped spur this crisis. Continental General Lord Sterling, for instance, ordered his quartermasters in December 1778 to seize American property and pay the “usual price” for it even though he found the whole process “extremely disagreeable . . . but necessary.”⁴⁸ As inflation racked the economy, Sterling’s paper money gave little comfort to Jersey families, leaving thousands upon thousands with limited resources for their own survival like William Dow, who had already petitioned the state legislature in 1779 for payment for property taken by patriots. Dow claimed that the military not only confiscated the ferry he operated on the Peapack River, but also twelve sheep, and that they severely damaged his house. Likewise, in Westfield, a small town in Essex County, 113 residents filed claims ranging from Susanna Halsey, who lost household furniture and clothing, to Daniel Connet who lost eight sheep, a horse, two hogs, thirty fowl, tea, wheat, corn, and three hives of bees.⁴⁹

The damages inflicted by the war had a direct impact on slaveholders’ unwillingness to support freedom for their chattel. Between 1775 and 1783, slaveholders in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, instructed the executors of their wills in the cases of nineteen different slaves to either transfer the slave to a family member or sell the slave and distribute the proceeds among their descendants. Statewide during the same period, 83 percent of slaves mentioned in wills were sold or bequeathed to a slaveholder’s heirs, while only 17 percent gained their freedom. New York City slaveholders’ wills similarly limited freedom; only 14 percent of slaveholders’ wills from 1777–1783 provided it. Even as Quakers brought discussions of abolition to the forefront of regional consciousness, the revolutionary spirit did not infect the vast majority of New Jersey or New York slaveholders. This unwillingness among slaveholders to manumit their slaves had a direct correlation with the economic devastation. In East Jersey, the section of the state with more slaveholders and the most damage caused by the war, slaveholders likely felt they had spent enough to ensure the triumph of American freedom. A request from the state to grant freedom to their slaves and therefore lose more of their property would have been too much for them to muster.⁵⁰

Pennsylvanians, on the other hand, had a much different war experience than did New Jerseyans, which made abolitionists there able to advance gradual abolition in the midst of conflict. The Pennsylvania state legislature had license to act on abolition in 1780 because the war had largely been confined to the state’s sparsely populated western and northeastern frontiers after the patriots expelled the British from Philadelphia. With little interaction between the British and patriots in the last three years of the war, state legislators did not have, as New Jersey legislators did, a war-related reason to delay abolition.⁵¹

The Revolution, instead of forcing Jersey legislators to see the paradox between slavery and freedom and compel a radical societal shift from the colonial period, continued the status quo of slavery in New Jersey and only strengthened when ex-slaves began to use the Revolution to gain permanent freedom outside the United States at the end of the war. British General Guy Carleton, the commander at New York City, proclaimed that any slave who had joined the British before 1780 had the right to leave the colonies for a free life in Canada, Sierra Leone, or Britain itself. Carleton responded to Washington’s complaints about the removal of former American slaves by claiming that he had “no right . . . to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper” as he had found many of them living free when he arrived in New York.⁵² Therefore, any slave who had absconded to New York before Carleton had assumed command, and many more who had achieved freedom since then, could leave New York unimpeded. British Prime Minister Lord North affirmed Carleton’s interpretation and extended that logic when he wrote in August 1783 that those blacks who had entered British lines before the “execution of the preliminaries of peace” should be able to leave as freed people, leading hundreds of former slaves to board British evacuation ships.⁵³

The British decision to remove former slaves from New York, Charleston, and other British-controlled territory angered those New Jerseyans who had seen their property abscond to the British. American commissioners responsible for upholding the 1783 Paris Peace Treaty vehemently protested the decision as a violation of the treaty’s seventh article, which prohibited the British from carrying away blacks from the United States. Three commissioners wrote to Carleton in June 1783 decrying the presence of fourteen ships bound for Nova Scotia that contained “upwards of one hundred negroes, seventy three of which appeared to be the property of American subjects.”⁵⁴ The commissioners considered the sailing of these ships an infraction of the Paris Treaty, a point reiterated in a May 1783 meeting in Newark. The meeting of patriot slaveholders crafted several resolutions published in local newspapers and sent to Carleton, which claimed that since Great Britain had not complied with the treaty’s provisions regarding slaves, the United States should not implement the fourth article, which mandated the full repayment of lawful debts owed to British creditors and the fifth article, which promised to restore confiscated loyalist estates.⁵⁵ Carleton linked the “circumstances of additional rage” that Americans had displayed by stripping loyalists of their lives and property with the increased discontent over treaty violations concerning slaves, one that he feared “will probably in the same narrow spirit be adopted by others.”⁵⁶

As Carleton predicted, arguments against removal surfaced in other meetings across New Jersey that questioned the commitment of both the British and American governments to the Paris Treaty with respect to slaves. In a second Essex County meeting, ninety residents claimed that the British had not done enough “to restore property found within their lines” and refused permission for Americans to attempt to secure ownership of their slaves individually. Many Jersey masters, without a system to recapture fugitives, saw their property leave New York for free lives elsewhere. One such Elizabethtown native, Sarah Haviland, complained to the American treaty commissioners that loyalists had forcibly taken her two male slaves, Jacob and Joe, to Staten Island. Both would soon leave the city bound for Nova Scotia as Haviland, a seventy-year-old widow, could not recapture them herself nor could she rely on any other means to assist her.⁵⁷

Unfortunately for Haviland and other former masters, the British routinely defended escaped slaves who lived in New York. In one case, Constable Thomas Willis suffered fines and exile from the city for helping return escaped slave Caesar to Elizabethtown.⁵⁸ Dinah Archey, a runaway living in New York, hoped for a similar defense when her master, William Fancey, attempted to seize her in 1783. She requested protection from Carleton, claiming that she had answered Howe’s Proclamation and entered New York five years earlier.⁵⁹ Likewise, New Yorkers Jacob Duyree, Adam Todd, and Fredrick Fighleman endured a British trial in June 1783 for trying to carry off Francis Griffin, a freed black under British protection. In this case, Duyree claimed that he had found Griffin, his former slave who had fled to New York City. Griffin had agreed to travel with Duyree up the Hudson River back to his home to help his former master transport flour to New York City and to reconnect with his wife, who remained Duyree’s slave. Griffin secured a pass from the office of police, which, in his mind, allowed him to return unimpeded to New York because he had qualified for freedom under the British proclamation. Once close to the Hudson River, Duyree and his co-defendants forced Griffin into “a cart with a rope about his neck” and loaded him onto a sloop near Dean’s Wharf. Luckily for Griffin, Hessian soldiers boarded his former master’s ship, arrested Duyree, and freed him. After a lengthy trial, a court found Duyree guilty of trying to reenslave Griffin, fined him fifty guineas to be directed to “the poor and sick Negroes who have taken protection under the British government,” and expelled him from British territory.⁶⁰

The British, attuned to the unpopularity and potential ramifications of their decision to remove former American slaves from New York, agreed to record information on each African American who left on British ships in 1783. The Book of Negroes contains over three thousand names, including at least 175 ex-slaves from New Jersey. Of those, some like Joseph and Betsey Collins of Hackensack ran away together from their separate masters in 1779. Others like Polly of Burlington came to New York in 1776 in search of greater economic opportunities than she could have attained with the Patriots. In New York, Polly met her husband, Job Allen, a former slave from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and together they had two small children before leaving for a new life in Nova Scotia.⁶¹

This exodus of blacks to Canada, Britain, and eventually Sierra Leone represented a powerful step in the development of black freedom, raised significant ire among Jersey masters interested in sustaining slavery, and proved important in delaying abolition. Although those who left represented a small percentage of New Jersey’s total slave population, others likely hid their identities as former slaves or possibly escaped via other ports within the colonies. Detailed records remain for at least two of these men, Anthony Smithers and John Baptist, both of whom filed claims for their service with the Loyalist Claims Commission but do not appear in the Book of Negroes. Smithers claimed that he lived as a free black man in Gloucester County, where he owned fourteen acres of land and valued his property at 720 pounds. He reported that he had joined the British army during its occupation of Philadelphia. Likewise, Baptist, also from Gloucester, testified that he joined the British army in Philadelphia as a freeman. He had lived with his sister on three acres of land and held an estate worth 675 pounds.⁶²

The commission ruled both Baptist’s and Smithers’s claims invalid, since they shared some key similarities, especially the certification of the claim by the same two men, John Williams and Thomas Watkins. The commission knew that Williams and Watkins lodged several blacks in London and helped them file claims. Dozens of former American slaves ended their military careers starving in the city’s streets. Both Baptist and Smithers likely had participated in an elaborate fraud led by Williams and Watkins in September 1783. All of the claims submitted by black men that month had been certified by the duo and provided incredibly similar information with little more than the name and some personal information altered. These two claims, like those of other former American slaves, represent the difficulties ex-slaves had even after they had gained freedom. These men became destitute and desperate. Their condition led to an even greater diaspora of former American slaves as they left the difficult streets of London for Sierra Leone or as criminals to the Botany Bay Colony in Australia.⁶³

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For white New Jerseyans, runaway slaves not only threatened wealth and status, but more important, stoked preexisting fears of slave rebellion. After the several slave conspiracies during the colonial period, Jersey whites had highly regulated slave movement, deprived slaves of the ability to own property or sell goods to whites, and prohibited slaves from frequenting taverns, possessing liquor, carrying firearms, or congregating at night. These new regulations, in full effect during the Revolution, resulted in harsher punishments for slaves who committed crimes against whites and further vigilance by whites trying to protect themselves. For example, in 1750 Perth Amboy authorities burned two slaves at the stake for murdering their mistress, which city leaders required that all Perth Amboy slaves attend as a warning against future transgressions.⁶⁴

The anti-abolition petitions written before the Revolution had repeatedly warned of the death and destruction that would result from black savagery. These beliefs took on some basis in reality for many slave masters when fear of black revolt came alive in 1772 as, in the midst of abolitionist discussions, Somerset County slaveholders learned that their slaves had congregated in mass meetings at night to discuss freedom. Masters in Somerset had feared just such discontent as they had repeatedly observed their slaves disobeying the state’s slave code. In 1771, for instance, Somerset County justice of the peace Jacob Van Noorstrand recorded the convictions of ten slaves for violating the nine o’clock curfew and for theft.⁶⁵ Similar occurrences of rebellious activity occurred in Middlesex County in 1771 when Isaac, a slave of Joseph Moore, stole from a neighbor’s house, and continued throughout the Revolution, as George Ryerson of Bergen County found out when his slave Bet burned down his barn in 1780.⁶⁶

Jersey slaves, absorbing the rhetoric of revolution from patriot sources, forced the issue of slave freedom even farther when, in 1774, slaveholders in Shrewsbury and Middletown complained that their slaves increasingly ignored the curfew regulations and, as in Somerset, met at night to create a plan to “cut the throats of their masters” and take over the state. In 1775, the Committee of Safety in Shrewsbury safeguarded against black revolt by banning all slave meetings. Any slave found off his master’s property would be arrested immediately. Shrewsbury leaders ordered the militia to conduct nightly slave patrols and gave it authority to punish slaves with at least fifteen lashes for a variety of offenses.⁶⁷

The fires that ravaged Baltimore, Philadelphia, Savannah, and New York in December 1776 further inflamed tensions among whites already anxious over the possibility of revolt. In 1797, Alexander Hamilton received a letter from Angelica Church, who still suffered from “terrors of fevers and Negro plots” that she traced back directly to the fires of December 1776. New York City newspaper reports claimed that “the minds of the citizens are in a state of agitation” because many believed rebellious slaves had set the fires.⁶⁸ The fears that kept Church awake at night had been realized for New Yorkers even before 1776. In 1775, whites in densely slave-populated Ulster and Queens Counties reported foiling two separate slave revolts. Ulster slaves had planned to set fire to their masters’ houses and then attack the whites as they fled from the blazes. In Queens, white leaders reported that slaves for “many miles” had been involved in an abstract plot to “destroy the white people.”⁶⁹ In 1778, masters discovered another such plot in Albany when an anonymous letter claimed that slaves had been ready to kill their masters and set fire to the town.⁷⁰ These fears were not confined to the New York area. South Carolina slaveholders were panicked by the “dread of instigated insurrections” when they thought that a sloop carrying the new royal governor, William Campbell, brought with it arms for slaves.⁷¹ Likewise, Gervais Werch, writing from Charleston in 1775, believed South Carolinians were “threatened with insurrections from our slaves and invasions from our neighbors.”⁷² Even the Marquis de Lafayette’s party chose, when sailing to Charleston, to “carry arms rather than clothing to defend . . . against marauding Negroes.”⁷³

As in New York and South Carolina, the danger of black revolt became more prevalent as British forces crisscrossed New Jersey and freedom for slaves became that much more tangible. In August 1776, Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, a Princeton lawyer and member of the Second Continental Congress, wrote to John Adams that New Jersey had to call out its militia “in such numbers for the defense of our country” as the “slaves left at home excite an alarm for the safety of their families.”⁷⁴ In 1779, Sergeant’s fears became reality as local loyalists and British forces coaxed slaves near Elizabethtown to murder their masters. Even though Elizabethtown authorities discovered the plot in its planning stages and quickly suppressed it, that the plot existed at all highlights the important role that the British played as an outside agitator in stoking fears of rebellion. For these reasons, abolition became a far more problematic endeavor because whites believed slavery allowed them to maintain control over a potentially rebellious black population.⁷⁵

British efforts at creating an atmosphere conducive to slave revolt caused owners to not only fear mass plots but individual slave action as well. Daniel Hart’s murder by his slave Cuffee in Hopewell Township was representative of this fear among Jersey whites. In 1779, Cuffee stabbed his master with a penknife dozens of times before ultimately killing him with an ax. Local lore recorded that Cuffee fled the scene, pursued by Hart’s neighbors. Cornered near a local stream, Cuffee hanged himself from a tree rather than be captured. A local writer quickly wrote a multiverse ballad about the murder, which claimed how “Hart’s wicked negro did slay him . . . the neighbors then for him did look . . . hung with a rope upon a limb . . . the next day they did then prepare a fire to burn his body there . . . all Negroes who have life and breath, take warning of his wretched death, don’t take an ax or use a knife to destroy your master’s life.” Of course, the ballad served to make Cuffee’s death an example to local blacks in order to prevent similar violence in the tense revolutionary environment.⁷⁶

Many Jersey masters saw British efforts to recruit blacks as particularly dangerous because the British army provided a ready vehicle for ex-slaves to spread destruction and death in retribution for past wrongs. In their rhetoric about the Revolution, patriot authors frequently claimed that the Crown had brought war upon itself through the agitation of the colonists’ enemies: Indians and slaves. For example, in 1775 Benjamin Franklin wrote that William Draper’s Thoughts of a Traveler upon Our American Disputes had excited “the domestic slaves” and encouraged them to “cut their master’s throats.” Lord Dunmore’s proclamation further fueled this desire and excited a larger “insurrection among the blacks.”⁷⁷ North Carolinian Thomas Burke wrote in a similar vein in 1777, claiming that the British had tried to entice the “savage Indians” to make war “on Western frontiers” and excite “insurrections . . . among the slaves.” Even after the Revolution, George Mason remembered that slaves had been a “dangerous instrument” in the hands of the enemy as the British had attempted to “arm the servants and slaves” of both Maryland and Virginia.⁷⁸

Of course, rhetoric turned into reality when British forces in New York, inundated with runaway slaves, began to recruit them into the army. The rate of recruitment increased significantly after Henry Clinton’s 1779 guarantee of freedom to all slaves who deserted their masters, even though the practice had been ongoing since 1777 and even had been discussed by the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, as early as May 1775. Indeed, in June 1775, General Thomas Gage believed that the “crisis” had become so dire that “we must avail ourselves of every resource even to raise the Negroes in our cause” as the American “rage and enthusiasm” for war had been shown by this point. By July 1776, patriot leaders received reports of large numbers of blacks mustering with British regiments.⁷⁹

Black British troops plundering white-owned property first signaled the elevation of black power in New Jersey and assaulted the state’s racial hierarchy since, for the first time, blacks had been empowered to take white property and frequently did so in the king’s service. In two cases adjudicated in Mount Holly in June 1778, British officials investigated former slaves for plundering, even though foraging for supplies across the state had led to routine looting of private property. In one case, ex-slave Primus Cuffey captured and killed a pig, claiming in his defense that he did not know of the general order against plundering. The court still found him guilty and he received five hundred lashes. Unlike Cuffey, James Powers and Samuel Martin, accused of breaking into a civilian’s home and stealing meat, convinced the court martial of their innocence.⁸⁰

Direct action against patriots did more than property crimes to instill trepidations among white New Jerseyans, as black British regiments targeted patriots along the ragged borderland between American and British territory. Newark minister Alexander MacWhorter described the dangers of arming black men when he detailed the aftermath of a British attack on his city in 1777. The enemy force, which included black British troops, made the town “look more like a scene of ruin than a pleasant well cultivated village.” Former slaves invaded and assaulted at least three men. One man was “cut and slashed” horribly while “three women were most horridly ravished by them, one of them an old woman near seventy years of age, whom they abused in a manner beyond description, another of them was a woman considerably advanced in her pregnancy, and the third was a young girl.”⁸¹

The Newark raid reflected whites’ most powerful fears, that ex-slaves would kill, rape, and pillage their former masters’ homes and families. Even some British officers believed that marauding black troops were particularly dangerous because they “distress and maltreat the inhabitants infinitely more than the whole army at the same time that they engross, waste, and destroy.”⁸² The danger these blacks represented came into clearer focus in 1782 when the British court-martialed nine former slaves for the murder of Cornelius Nissee of Bergen County. The nine defendants all served as members of British militia units based in Bergen Neck. Major Thomas Grant, who commanded the Refugee Corps at Bergen Neck, testified that these soldiers operated independently of whites in certain circumstances. William Grant, one of the men on trial, confessed that a former slave named Sisco, whom they called Colonel, advocated that the group should “go out . . . to take a rebel.” The nine left their camp, seized two Bergen residents and marched them a few miles before releasing one. Sisco ordered the group to shoot the other, Nissee, at which time Grant objected. Another prisoner, Caesar Totten, stepped in and shot him in the chest while a second shot came from Daniel Massis’s gun. The group then took Nissee’s money, clothing, and shoes, hid the body with branches and leaves, and traveled back to their camp.⁸³

After further investigation, British officers discovered that one of the ex-slaves knew why the group selected Nissee to execute—he had been a fellow soldier’s former owner. Harry Scobey, also accused of capital murder, had been Nissee’s slave before he absconded to the British. According to the investigating officer, Scobey had been angry with Nissee because he had sold his wife out of New Jersey. For the British, the case hinged on if Scobey had been present at the killing or if he had motivated the men to search for his former master. In its decision, the court affirmed that Scobey and four other defendants either had not been at the scene of the crime or had not encouraged it. Four others, however, received death sentences for Nissee’s murder. On a practical level, even though Scobey did not actively attempt to seek out his former master, it is of particular interest because the act of ex-slaves murdering slaveholders increased concern among Jersey whites that violence from blacks in British employ would affect slavery’s operation.⁸⁴

These vivid examples of former slaves conspiring to exert power over white New Jerseyans, especially their former masters, stoked white concerns across the state that the British were actively fomenting a race war. Colonel Tye, or Titus, a slave from Colts Neck in Monmouth County, became the prime example of these fears after he absconded from his master the day after Lord Dunmore promised freedom to Virginia slaves. Even though he did not yet know of Dunmore’s Proclamation, Titus believed that the British would free him from slavery. Once the British occupied New York, Titus joined the British army like so many others who had fled their patriot masters. He returned to New Jersey as Colonel Tye and fought with British forces at the Battle of Monmouth. In 1778 and 1779, Tye led a band of mostly black guerrilla fighters who operated out of a base called Refugeetown on British controlled Sandy Hook. Tye and his men attacked wealthy slaveholding patriots, burned houses, seized guns, and foraged for food and supplies in order to disrupt patriot activities and maintain the British war machine. In one 1780 engagement, Tye led a biracial group of thirty blacks, twenty white loyalists, and thirty-two Queen’s Rangers to capture leading Monmouth County patriot Barnes Smock. In addition to Smock, the party took twelve other Monmouth patriots prisoner, destroyed one cannon, captured two artillery horses, and burned several patriot homes. In his report of the raid to Governor Livingston, New Jersey militia officer David Forman pleaded with him to take into “account of our other numerous distresses” and send additional troops to protect the region.⁸⁵

Monmouth County residents decried the attacks by their former slaves and requested emergency assistance from Governor Livingston. The county had already been devastated by the early years of the war and was even more battered after the Battle of Monmouth. John Fell, a delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote to Robert Morris that Monmouth County had been ravaged by the war “as bad as Bergen,” the county that bore much of the blunt of British raiding parties. Fell further relayed the story of a relative whose slave escaped from her Monmouth house. This slave, Fell claimed, “makes the fifth Negroe had gone to the enemy and has besides robbed the house.”⁸⁶ After the attacks by Colonel Tye, the county residents claimed that “it is not possible . . . to prevent the frequent ravages of the enemy . . . they have been in Shrewsbury twice since” the last petition.⁸⁷

In response to the distress caused by these former slaves, Livingston declared martial law and sent 210 men from Hunterdon and Burlington to Monmouth to defend against Tye.⁸⁸ However, during the summer of 1780, Tye continued to engage Monmouth County patriots and in September 1780 made his most dramatic attack, attempting to capture Monmouth militia officer Joshua Huddy. After a fierce two-hour battle in Toms River, he ultimately failed. Huddy escaped (though loyalists, including elements of Tye’s unit, eventually captured and hanged him on a Monmouth County beach) and Tye and his soldiers returned to their base on Sandy Hook. Tye suffered a minor bullet wound to the wrist in the battle. Lacking appropriate medical treatment, the wound became infected and Tye died of lockjaw a few days after the failed raid.⁸⁹

Tye, as leader of the Sandy Hook unit, had done much to bring fear and destruction to the county where he had toiled as a slave. His fellow ex-slaves continued to inspire fear after his death, where, led by ex-slave Colonel Stephen Blucke, they persisted in raiding patriot targets. In 1782, for example, forty whites and forty blacks under Blucke attacked the salt works at Forked River and raided nearby homes. These black troops continued operations until 1783 when the Black Brigade became the last British unit to evacuate New York.⁹⁰

The attacks of Colonel Tye and the black guerrilla fighters from Refugeetown instilled genuine fear among white slaveholders throughout New Jersey and destabilized the racial order. They wondered that if Tye could be so destructive against his former owners, how their slaves would act if they gained freedom. While the destructive impact of the war definitely slowed the path toward abolition, the fear of black revolt and the images of black violence against whites caused many to question if abolitionism, making steady progress in Pennsylvania and New England, was right for New Jersey. Fear of the consequences of abolition, the violence MacWhorter saw in Newark, and the attacks Colonel Tye executed in Monmouth helped stymie efforts to extend the Revolution’s rhetoric of freedom to those still held in bondage.

* * *

As opposed to the promises of the king’s army, service with Continental forces never guaranteed freedom since Americans hoped to reinforce the institution, not destroy it by freeing too many slaves. New Jersey, like most states, did not allow slaves or freed blacks to join the militia, thereby reinforcing the state’s existing racial boundaries. George Washington purged his army of all blacks only five days after Lord Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation, fearing that the enlistment of blacks would “render slavery more irksome to those who remain in it” because black troops might lead an uncontrollable liberation movement. In a society that continually dreaded slave revolt, Washington’s call for limitations on black enlistment seemed logical and comforting to many whites who feared armed slaves.⁹¹

By early 1776, however, Washington faced a manpower shortage and began to allow free blacks and slaves to serve, most notably in Rhode Island. Washington himself remained hesitant about their enlistment, especially in South Carolina and Georgia. The lack of strong support from Washington led both states to use slaves not as soldiers but as bounties. In the last four years of the war especially, South Carolinians used slaves as an enlistment bonus for white soldiers. However, South Carolina general and politician John Laurens believed that even this generous bounty would prove futile as most eligible men had already joined the military.⁹² Instead, James Madison pondered if it would be more expedient “to liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves” since enlisting blacks would “certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty.”⁹³

In some commanders’ minds, black troops had an important role to play in the American military: as foils against black British troops. In New Jersey, for example, Governor Livingston asked Washington in 1777 that if nothing else could restrain the barbarity of the British who ravaged the state the preceding year, “it may not be improper to let loose upon them a few of General Stephen’s tawny Yagers, the only Americans that can match them in their bloody work.” The men Livingston referred to, black soldiers serving in Major General Adam Stephen’s Virginia brigade, could, in Livingston’s opinion, fight the black British troops on their own terms because of their perceived inherent barbarity.⁹⁴ In the same way, General Anthony Wayne advocated in 1782 that Georgia enlist black troops as “a matter of necessity,” since the British had actively recruited a black corps in Charleston and Savannah.⁹⁵ The British interest in recruiting blacks remained high as Lord Dunmore, writing from South Carolina, believed that they would be the “most efficacious, expeditious, cheapest, and certain means of reducing (the patriots) to a proper sense of their duty.” Dunmore claimed that blacks were better suited for service in the warmer southern climate and many in the British ranks believed that using black troops would “strike at the root of all property . . . making the wealth and riches of the enemy the means of bringing them to obedience.” These blacks, according to the report, would “bring the most violent to their senses.”⁹⁶

In the midst of the British invasion of 1776, open discussion among delegates to the Continental Congress ensued over the possibility of raising a battalion of blacks in New Jersey to serve as a home guard. New Jersey’s Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant sent his plan to raise this regiment to John Adams in August 1776 since he believed the militia could provide only a limited defense. According to him, Congress could enlist blacks and pay slaveholders fifty pounds per slave plus provide an exemption from militia service for those who offered their slaves. Under Sergeant’s plan, slaves’ monthly salary would repay the state for their purchase price. Once the debt was extinguished, the slave would earn his freedom. Sergeant theorized that any slave who committed a crime or engaged in misconduct while a soldier would be returned to slavery, a punishment designed to stymie the three objections he foresaw to his plan. The first, that slaves “generally are cowards,” would be answered easily by suggesting that the idea of “liberty before their eyes as the reward of their valour” will motivate them. Second, Sergeant claimed that his plan would negate the possibility of revolt because the slaves, if they could gain freedom, would work toward that rather than fomenting rebellion. Finally, Sergeant countered the fear many whites had of the presence of large numbers of freed blacks in American society after the war by arguing that ex-slaves could be resettled on western lands because, in his opinion, “there is room enough on this continent for them and us too.”⁹⁷ Adams responded to Sergeant a few days later that “your negro battalion will never do” because “South Carolina would run out of their wits at the least hint of such a measure.” Adams then quietly dropped Sergeant’s plan, fearful of South Carolina’s response.⁹⁸

Sergeant’s plan, unpopular even among New Jerseyans who feared rebellion, was never adopted by state legislators, nor was any other regulated strategy for the enlistment of slaves or freed blacks. Instead, blacks in the New Jersey militia and Continental Line served in integrated units as teamsters, servants, and in some cases, ordinary enlisted men. Even though some used their Revolutionary experience to acquire freedom, land, or pensions, these men were atypical and did not represent the wider experience of Jersey blacks or any commitment to black freedom. Haphazardly executed, the enlistment of black troops mainly served white interests because slaves could serve as substitutes for their masters. Sketchy military service records reveal that at least twenty-nine blacks served with various New Jersey units, though it is likely that more remain unrecorded. Reports from Hessian soldiers indicate the wide use of black troops in New Jersey. Some, writing about their service in Springfield, remarked that “Negroes, in common with other cattle, are very prolific here.” They claimed that “the negro is sometimes sent to war instead of his youthful owner” and therefore “there is scarcely a regiment in which you shall not find some well-built and hardy fellows” serving as substitutes for whites.⁹⁹

One of these slaves, Samuel Sutphen of Somerset County, joined the Patriot cause as a substitute for his owner, Casper Berger. His original owner, Barbardus LaGrange, had declared his loyalty to Britain and fled to New York, leaving Sutphen to be confiscated as part of a forfeited loyalist estate. Berger bought Sutphen from the state and offered him freedom if he served as his substitute for the war’s duration. Sutphen agreed and joined the Somerset County Militia and later served in a Cumberland County unit as well. In his 1832 pension application, Sutphen claimed that he fought at the Battle of Long Island and served on garrison duty at several locations in New Jersey that winter. In January 1777, he fought at Princeton with Washington, engaged in several skirmishes in summer and fall 1777 around the Millstone River, and, by 1778, marched to Monmouth where he narrowly missed the battle with the British. Sutphen then joined the expedition to Fort Stanwix, New York, where he and his unit pursued Britain’s Indian allies as far north as Buffalo. On his return south, Hessians and British Highlanders ambushed his company in Westchester County, where a bullet drove his pants button into his right leg just above the ankle. Waylaid because of his injury for almost three months, Sutphen returned to Readington and served until 1780. However, upon his discharge, Berger reneged on his promise of freedom and sold him to Peter Ten Eyck. Ten Eyck then sold him to John Duryea, who then sold him to Peter Sutphen. By 1805, Samuel Sutphen finally achieved legal freedom only by purchasing himself, not due to his revolutionary service.¹⁰⁰

Sutphen, eighty-five when he applied for a federal pension, managed to secure numerous letters of support from prominent Somerset whites who believed, as supporter William Gaston claimed, that Sutphen was “highly meritorious of a pension” because he “ably and nobly performed” his duties as a soldier. The federal government, however, rejected his claim, explaining in an 1833 letter “that being a slave originally,” Sutphen “was not bound to serve in the militia and the circumstances of each tour of actual service (were) not . . . stated as was required.” In a continuing debate on the status of his claim, the Pension Office in 1834 and 1835 maintained that his service against the Indians remained “very doubtful” and that he most likely had not served a full six months as required by the pension law. In an unlikely show of support to a black veteran, the Frelinghuysen family, a powerful Jersey political dynasty, intervened and petitioned the state legislature to support Sutphen. In response, the state granted Sutphen a pension for the last five years of his life.¹⁰¹

Though rare, other New Jersey blacks managed to negotiate for freedom, pensions, and land in exchange for their participation in the Patriot cause. John Ceasar from Sussex County, for example, a private in the Fourth New Jersey, joined the army in December 1776 and served in multiple units before his discharge in May 1783. In a 1780 muster roll, his unit recorded that Ceasar had received a western land grant that he augmented in 1800 with another. Similarly, Oliver Cromwell of Burlington County joined the Second New Jersey Regiment in 1777 at age twenty-six. He served at the Battle of Short Hills among other engagements and was discharged in June 1783. For at least part of his service, Cromwell belonged to the same regiment as another young African American, Thomas Case, who served for nine months in Phillips’ Company, Second New Jersey Regiment, from 1778 to 1779. For his service, Cromwell received a land grant in 1791 and successfully applied for a pension of ninety-six dollars a year in 1820 at age sixty-seven. In his application, Cromwell claimed that after his military service, he became a “common laborer . . . but from age” he could no longer “get a livelihood.” He listed approximately ten dollars in property and reported that he needed to care for his twenty-five-year-old infirm daughter and two young sons, ages twelve and ten. Cromwell continued to collect that pension until he died in 1852, just two months short of his hundredth birthday.¹⁰²

Unlike the cases of Sutphen and Cromwell, most records list only the most basic information about blacks who fought with the patriots. Negro Stephen, for example, joined the Second Regiment of Continental Dragoons in December 1781 as a private, while Negro Pomp, a teamster in charge of a four-horse wagon, served in Trenton in 1780. Negro Jack, Negro Cezar, Negro Dick, and Negro Will all did the same, but no additional information survives to tell more than their names and occupations within the army. With limited records available, it remains incredibly difficult to reconstruct the lives of these enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans in Continental service. However, as New Jersey, like most other states, never actively recruited black soldiers or promised freedom in exchange for military service, it stands likely that most of these enslaved men returned, like Samuel Sutphen, to their masters as slaves.¹⁰³

* * *

In addition to fears of slave revolt and economic devastation, anxiety over a sizeable loyalist population led the state to reinforce slavery by confiscating and selling loyalist property. The revolutionary government in Trenton demanded that residents take loyalty oaths to affirm their standing within the new American body politic. Those who refused became targets of both ridicule and violence, leading thousands of New Jerseyans to flee to British lines and thousands more to remain neutral or harbor secret loyalist sentiments. The anxiety created by the constant British attacks increased the intensity of anger and animosity toward Jersey loyalists and precipitated laws that punished the disloyal by confiscating their property to help finance the war effort. Loyalists Daniel and Henry Van Mater, for example, claimed in 1779 that Jersey loyalists “have been since obligated to quit their homes and property in a very precipitate manner,” which had left many in severe financial straits after the state confiscated them. Guy Carleton similarly remarked that New Jersey patriots increasingly excluded the loyalists “with circumstances of additional rage,” making their loyalty even more problematic for them.¹⁰⁴ Patriots regularly confiscated and sold loyalist estates, which included land, houses, horses, kitchenware, bedding, and, most important, slaves. The state-sponsored sales of slaves symbolized the state’s reaffirmation that African Americans were equated with property, not freedom.¹⁰⁵

Though the sale of loyalist-owned slaves reinforced the equation of slaves as property, it had more to do with the hatred of loyalists and the need to profit from them rather than a concerted proslavery effort. New Jersey’s first state legislature, after it had deposed Royal Governor William Franklin, drafted new laws that imposed rigid guidelines on loyalty, which warned of the presence of persons “so wicked as to devise the destruction of good government or to aid or assist the enemies of the state.” It declared those who remained loyal to the Crown guilty of high treason.¹⁰⁶ In 1778, the legislature enacted even more stringent regulations requiring the confiscation of property owned by those convicted of treason. The Commissioners of Forfeited Estates in each of New Jersey’s thirteen counties began to depose witnesses and establish cases that called into question the loyalty of hundreds of New Jerseyans. The commissioners brought treason cases before sympathetic patriot juries that routinely found the accused guilty, which triggered the seizure and sale of the traitor’s property.¹⁰⁷

New Jersey patriots ecstatically supported the confiscation of loyalist estates and encouraged the state to enact harsher anti-Tory laws. In 1781, ninety-eight patriots in Morris County petitioned for a law to allow the confiscation of property belonging to “a number of evil minded villains and disaffected persons” who entered New Jersey “in a secret and clandestine manner for the purpose of plundering and taking away the . . . property of the (state’s) good inhabitants.” These patriots demanded compensation from them for their economic losses.¹⁰⁸ Similarly, Monmouth County residents applauded confiscation in 1779 and asked the legislature to use the money raised to reimburse them for damages caused by British raids, including those from Colonel Tye’s unit.¹⁰⁹

Patriotic fervor quickly turned to outrage and demands for greater state oversight when residents learned that the commissioners of the forfeited estates had abused their powers. Monmouth County patriots complained of the dishonorable conduct of the commissioners in manipulating sales so that friends, allies, and relatives could purchase estates at cut-rate prices. In Monmouth, as in other locales, the commissioners frequently published notices only one day before the sale, ignored higher bids in favor of their lower bidding friends, accepted bids after the auction had closed, sold estates as one cohesive package instead of in individual pieces, and prevented bidders from inspecting the property before the auction as required by law. These failures forced the legislature to enact even stricter sale regulations and required the legislative and executive branches to take an active and integrated role in the sales of loyalist property, including slaves.¹¹⁰

The state’s role in slave sales had been ongoing since the early 1700s because British and later American admiralty courts routinely approved the sale of “Prize Negroes” captured from enemy ships. The eighteenth century especially saw hundreds of these captured black mariners sold into slavery since the colonies waged war almost continually since the 1730s in conflicts such as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, King George’s War, and the Seven Years’ War. The war against Spain in the late 1730s and early 1740s brought hundreds of “dark-skinned Spanish sailors” into American ports, especially in New York and New Jersey, which served as colonial privateering centers. Mid-Atlantic admiralty courts frequently determined that “the mere darkness of the Spaniards’ skin” enabled them to be sold as slaves even if they had been previously free. One such former Spanish sailor, George, a twenty-six-year-old slave from Burlington County, likely had been captured by privateers since records describe him in 1749 as a “Spanish mulatto fellow” who spoke “indifferent English” and had once “been a privateering.”¹¹¹

During the American Revolution, American admiralty courts continued the colonial practice of condemning captured black British mariners as slaves for sale. The prize system in the Mid-Atlantic both inflicted extensive damage to the British while enriching American seamen, ship owners, and government officials who regulated these sales. As historian Charles Foy contends, the prize system “extended the reach of American slavery beyond the shores of the Americas” and in turn reinforced slavery in the United States. Privateers, motivated more by profit than ideology, saw blacks as a profitable revenue source. These vulnerable individuals could be taken easily and sold as commodities in other ports, which led ship captains to actively seek out blacks on the high seas. Congressional laws on prizes allowed for considerable leeway in local admiralty court decisions about the status of blacks found on British ships. In New Jersey, especially along the Delaware River, courts operated from “the assumption that a black mariner was a slave” and could be sold as a prize along with any other goods found on the ships.¹¹² For instance, on June 26, 1782, James Esdall of Burlington adjudicated the sale of Obadiah Gale and Edward Cater, both of whom had served aboard a British privateer but who had not been slaves.¹¹³ In the same year, John Bray, the captain and owner of the gunboat Revenge, attacked the British cutter Alert and forced the ship to run aground. Salvaging “a quantity of power, arms, a valuable chest of medicine,” Bray reported to Governor Livingston that he sent the ship’s crew to Elizabethtown for exchange but kept the eleven blacks he found on board because the admiralty court declared them captured goods instead of crew members. Bray, in June 1782, sold nine of these Prize Negroes in Trenton at auction.¹¹⁴ The process played out the same way in October 1779 when American privateers captured the British ship Triton and six black mariners went to auction in Burlington.¹¹⁵

The state’s experience in selling Prize Negroes informed its sales of loyalist-owned slaves. However, surviving records on these sales remain in short supply. Records of individual estate sales that contain inventories listing slaves exist for only a few counties and record only twenty-nine slaves sold by the state.¹¹⁶ Records filed at the end of the Revolution with the Loyalist Claims Commission include evidence of at least 112 more.¹¹⁷ Of course, the total of 141 slaves likely represents only part of the real total as extraneous sources refer to slaves not included in these records.¹¹⁸

A majority of the slaves confiscated from loyalists came from masters who had rejected the American cause very early on. For instance, Absalom Bainbridge, Prime’s owner who began this chapter, joined the king’s forces in 1776 and left Princeton with the British after their defeat in January 1777.¹¹⁹ Like Bainbridge, fellow Princeton resident Richard Cochran joined the British as soon as General Howe entered the city in 1776. Cochran helped procure provisions for the army, served as a deputy commissary, and administered oaths to local civilians. He claimed that because of his loyalty, patriots had seized his property, sold it at auction, and, in his own words, threatened to “hang me up were I ever to return to that country.” Due to poor health, he left military service and moved to London with his two sons in January 1778, leaving his wife and daughter in British-occupied New York. Cochran claimed an estate valued at just over 6,100 pounds, which included eight slaves (four men, two women, and two children), one of whom, his “Negro man named Mingo, was esteemed the most valuable Negro in New Jersey.” The commission approved his claim but paid only 1912 pounds because they believed his new position as a clerk provided him a stable salary.¹²⁰

While many loyalists fled the state with their families, others left their property in New Jersey to be protected by their wives. In July 1777, the state Council of Safety argued that these wives “obstruct(ed) the commissioners for seizing and disposing of the personal estate” by secretly and gradually moving property into New York. The council banished eighteen women to New York, “after their husbands,” so that the commissioners could more easily confiscate their property.¹²¹ Likewise, certain slave owners 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.