Читать книгу The Ragged Road to Abolition - James J. Gigantino II - Страница 9

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.

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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 for its own school as early as 1780. However, the Salem Monthly Meeting had taken the initiative even earlier in 1778 when it built a school to educate both freed and enslaved blacks.¹⁹

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As West Jersey Quakers pushed abolition in their own communities, they called for a much larger debate on slavery in New Jersey. Dillwyn’s political tract against slavery echoed the intent of several petitions filed with the state legislature in the early 1770s. In 1773 and 1774, Jersey Quakers called for an end to slavery in the state and for an easing of manumission restrictions and limitations to the state’s harsh slave code. In 1775, Chesterfield Quakers advocated for a gradual abolition program, claiming that they wished to “avert the judgments of God from our heads.” The Pennsylvania Gazette replicated this use of religious ideology when it noted that several petitions had been filed with the legislature that advocated support for abolition as “we are Children of one common father.” As the petitions from Chesterfield arrived in the legislature, Burlington and Cumberland County Quakers added their voices to the debate. They argued, in line with Allinson, Dillwyn, and Sharp, that Americans must “show to the World a conduct consistent with the principles of that liberty, which we claim as our birthright” especially in light of the ongoing debate over American liberty and freedom from Great Britain.²⁰

As the imperial crisis heated debate over the idea of American freedom, New Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers utilized the rhetoric of the crisis in their own fight against slavery. For example, in 1774, a Quaker petition to a Pennsylvania assemblyman made such a link by claiming that “at a time when the rights and liberties of the American subjects of the Crown” are at stake, the state must “take a strict view of our own conduct” and laws, which permit slavery to continue. The petitioners continued that “everything in our power should be done to establish impartial, universal liberty” for all slaves in Pennsylvania at the first opportunity.²¹ This link between abolitionism and larger Atlantic issues continued to develop as men like Benezet interacted with French and British abolitionists. For instance, Granville Sharp argued in 1775 that while Africans possessed “a natural right to a free existence,” landholders in the American colonies had a responsibility to “divide what lands they can spare into compact little farms, with a small wooden cottage to each.” This land could be given to freed blacks so they would not revolt to gain economic standing after freedom.²²

Benezet and Sharp no doubt hoped that these petitions would convince non-Quaker New Jerseyans and Pennsylvanians to see slavery in a new light. However, Benezet realistically understood that few even within the society agreed with him that blacks and whites were equal no less voluntarily would give land to them. In 1772, Benezet wrote to Allinson that Americans “would strenuously oppose the scheme of a total abolition of slavery” and instead, like the Chesterfield Friends, would support gradual abolition programs through which slaves could purchase their freedom. He believed that these modifications to slavery could help solve the economic complications that limited support for abolition.²³

Calls for abolition provoked a firestorm of protest from New Jersey’s non-Quaker population, mainly in East Jersey, who were even more dependent on slave labor than their West Jersey neighbors. In 1774, eighty-one angry Perth Amboy residents warned Governor William Franklin of the “dismal consequences” of abolition, especially the possibility of a revolt if whites could not use slavery to control the state’s black population. They believed blacks were “the most barbarous in human matters” and that only slavery kept their barbarism in check. Without it, they would “invade the inhabitants and accomplish that unhuman design . . . to bring the white people into the same state that the Negroes are now in.” They pleaded for Franklin to preserve “the liberty of the white people of this province” and not let the white population fall into bondage itself. Fifty-three residents of Middletown similarly voiced opposition to the Quaker abolition plan after they found their enslaved blacks “very troublesome by running about all times of night, stealing, and taking and riding people’s horses and other mischief.” Freedom would, according to the Middletown petitioners, dramatically increase the frequency of theft and mischief.²⁴

On the eve of the Revolution, New Jersey slaveholders used the fear of insurrection and anxiety over the possibility of fighting hordes of barbarous blacks that sought to invade their homes and consort with their wives and daughters to effectively quell Quaker attempts at advancing abolitionism. The divisions between East and West Jersey exacerbated this tension as abolitionists from the West fought against eastern slaveholders. Slavery’s strength and the lack of both abolitionism and Quakerism in East Jersey led slaveholders there to identify abolitionism as created by outsiders who, though in the same state, did not understand the true dynamics of living in a place where slaves made up a sizeable percentage of the population. The intense relationship East Jersey whites had with slavery before the Revolution prevented Quakers from convincing a large number of them to support black freedom, which effectively stymied any major abolitionist action as the colonies careened toward war.

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Once the Revolution began, the rhetorical devices Patriots employed to rally support for the war moved discussions of freedom and abolitionism to center stage as Americans used language imbibed with the concepts of freedom and slavery to discuss their relationship with Great Britain. Slave-holding New Jerseyans positioned their own battle against the British as a crusade to free themselves from British bondage. For instance, in October 1776 the state’s General Assembly, in describing the American relationship with Great Britain, called for “deliverance from the galling yoke of slavery, the unparalleled unanimity of the American states in refitting the encroachments of despotism.” Even Thomas Paine’s Common Sense used the image of slavery when he claimed that Americans had been “enslaved by the want of laws” and that the colonies had been “at last cheated into slavery.” Bergen County slaveholders adopted this same rhetoric in 1783 when they argued that the United States would continue as a “vassal” of British slavery if the nation approved the Treaty of Paris. The binary between slavery and freedom gave Patriots a readily understood way to communicate that they believed the British impositions on the colonies were similar to the oppression of slaves by slaveholders.²⁵

Abolitionists saw the widespread use of this antislavery rhetoric in the fight against Great Britain and increasingly employed it against slavery. For example, Allinson wrote to Governor William Livingston in 1778 claiming that the colonies went to war “to avoid what she called slavery and to preserve and transmit to posterity her right to possession of liberty” while at the same time they “confirmed laws that hold thousands of human beings, children of the same common Father . . . in ignoble and abject slavery.” This emphasis on the hypocrisy of enslaving one race while fighting for freedom from the British, spread to other abolitionists and became a repetitive cry in abolitionist tracts.²⁶ Likewise, in neighboring Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush openly equated the American fight for freedom with the abolition movement. He argued that the Pennsylvania legislature needed to “excise the cancer of slavery from the American body politic” while Americans simultaneously fought for their own freedom from Great Britain. Paine joined Rush’s attack on slavery by drawing on a natural rights argument related to the American Revolution. In response to Paine, a New Jerseyan wrote in the New York Journal that freedom was the birthright of all men regardless of color. Destiny, according to this author, dictated that freedom from the British would rid all who lived in America from future slavery. Accordingly, the Journal article claimed no man should be born a slave in a nation that fully supported freedom.²⁷

Jacob Green, a Morris County Presbyterian minister, employed this same rhetoric in his church throughout the war to support the Patriots and address abolitionism. Green became heavily invested in the Patriot cause as a member of New Jersey’s Provincial Congress and delegate to the state’s 1776 Constitutional Convention. In a 1779 “Fast Day Sermon,” also published in pamphlet form, Green preached that “supporting and encouraging slavery is one of the great and crying evils among us.” He asked New Jerseyans, “Can it be believed that a people contending for liberty should, at the same time, be promoting and supporting slavery?” Green argued that slaves “never forfeited their right to freedom; ‘tis as the Congress say, a natural right, and an unalienable one.” With this sermon, Green entered into the debate on the paradoxical role of slavery in a nation founded on freedom. Like many others, Green’s abolitionist belief came not from a firm sense of equality between blacks and whites but from the conviction that Americans’ hypocritical actions were sinful.²⁸

In 1780, the editor of the New Jersey Journal, Shepard Kollock, published a two-part letter of Green’s under the penname “Eumenes,” through which Green’s call for liberty for slaves reached a wider audience and increased discussion on the slavery and freedom paradox as the Keystone State debated a gradual abolition law that same year. Green articulated that Americans fought so “that we may be a free people; that we may enjoy the natural rights of mankind, that we may not be reduced to a state of mean and abject slavery.” He challenged New Jerseyans who believed in the natural rights of mankind, contending that those who fought against the British should “cast an eye of pity on the negro slaves among us” as they “are groaning under a bondage which we think worse than death.”²⁹

On March 1, 1780, the Pennsylvania legislature approved a legislative abolition program that angered proslavery advocates across the Mid-Atlantic and precipitated a newspaper war on the subject of abolition. In November, “Eliobo” wrote to the New Jersey Journal that the recent increase in abolitionist sentiment had no basis in any real need for freedom for slaves, since slaves lived “free from all anxiety, perplexing cares, troubles and disappointments.” He rejected Green’s link between the Revolution and abolition, claiming it inappropriate to equate the slavery Great Britain exerted on the colonies with African slavery as the two shared little in common.³⁰ A month later, Eliobo further advanced his proslavery argument by linking himself to the Perth Amboy petition six years earlier that had claimed that abolition would destroy white civilization. Eliobo argued that every “effort of the negroes” would be “to establish upon our ruin” and create a “kingdom of Cuffie.” In an apocalyptic vision of destruction and death, the author predicted that freed slaves would form an alliance with the Indians who, as savage as blacks, would “sweep our land with sallies of murder and rapine. Then will the shrieks and cries of murdered children and the lamentation of assassinated friends weltering in gore” force Americans to realize that abolition produced destruction.³¹

“Marcus Aurelius,” another author writing in response to Jacob Green and the Pennsylvania law in the New Jersey Journal, joined Eliobo in claiming that even the discussion of liberty for slaves could “stimulate servants to insurrection.” Aurelius became even more enraged with the potential for revolt because he saw a clear difference between national freedom from the British and individual freedom of slaves. He argued that Green “in his heart knows they are measured upon two scales and have no connection with each other.” He, along with others, attacked the very notion that American liberty could ever be construed as equivalent to black liberty because blacks existed in such an inferior state. Their racism not only informed their fear of a race war but also began the process that restricted how far revolutionary freedom could extend to African Americans.³²

The proslavery voices that rose in protest were largely motivated by fears of slaves harnessing this abolitionist rhetoric for their own purposes. Like slaves in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Jersey slaves knew about the debates flying around them in the state’s newspapers and used them to negotiate with their masters. In Massachusetts, for example, slaves petitioned the legislature to demand an immediate end to their enslavement and used revolutionary ideas of freedom to do so. No formal petitions from slaves came to the New Jersey legislature, though rural slaveholders definitely believed that the Revolution’s ideas of liberty had influenced their slaves. These rural slaves had let it be known that “it was not necessary (for them) to please their masters for they should not have their masters long.” Revolutionary ideas therefore emboldened slaves to negotiate from a stronger vantage point by using language from the era that their masters knew, understood, and would cause a strong emotional reaction to.³³

In the aftermath of Pennsylvania’s passage of gradual abolition, abolitionist voices countered the proslavery opinions in the newspaper debates and again reiterated the powerful link between the American Revolution and abolition. In 1780, the New Jersey Gazette, the Journal’s rival paper, published a series of articles refuting the Journal’s proslavery pieces. John Cooper, a Quaker from Woodbury in Gloucester County who had repeatedly advocated for abolition as a member of the Legislative Council and Council of Safety, knew Green through their shared service in the provisional legislature and on the ten-person committee that wrote the state’s 1776 constitution. Like Green, Cooper argued that the Revolution should force Americans to recognize African American freedom. Cooper believed “in our public and most solemn declarations we say we are resolved to die free—that slavery is worse than death. He who enslaves his fellow creature must be worse than he who takes his life.” As he thought slavery a fate worse than death, Cooper advocated a much more radical agenda than other abolitionists: the immediate abolition of slavery.³⁴

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The Quaker-dominated abolition movement and the republican rhetoric it utilized attempted to transcend ideological and religious boundaries, thereby raising the potential for widespread acceptance of abolition during the Revolution. The revolutionary generation of American slavery brought significant potential for African American mobility and worked to change the way white New Jerseyans thought of slavery and how blacks negotiated for their freedom. The rhetoric of abolition had much to do with this potential and it brought the first real widespread discussions of black freedom to white New Jerseyans.³⁵

Quakers had succeeded at ridding much of West Jersey of slavery but had been less adept at convincing a large number of their fellow white New Jerseyans to join the cause. Anti-abolition New Jerseyans stood steadfastly against black freedom and combated it by trying to break down the connections between the freedom white Americans fought for from Great Britain and the type of freedom abolitionists wanted to give slaves. A successful abolition movement failed to develop because of the fear of race war, raw racism, and the lack of support in slaveholding areas of East Jersey. These fears and lack of organizational support joined together with the economic devastation caused by the Revolution, explored in the next chapter, to stymie the movement even as Pennsylvanians and New Englanders supported gradual abolition. Therefore, by the end of the war, abolitionism in New Jersey remained the legacy of only the Society of Friends and a minority of non-Quakers.