This book is about the meaning of slavery and freedom in the United States. The setting, though unconventional, is central to American understandings of these two loaded terms. It follows the story of abolition in the North but reverses the usual narrative: slavery did not die after the Revolution, it sustained itself until the Civil War.

In 1789, Catherine was born a slave in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Like thousands of other slaves in the state, she worked daily for her master, John Hagaman, on his hundred-acre farm in Amwell. Cate, as her master called her, forged relationships with other...

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...

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...

Julian Niemcewicz, the exiled Polish statesman and writer, moved to Elizabethtown in 1797 and married Susan Livingston Kean, the niece of former governor William Livingston. He bought an eighteen-acre farm and settled into his new life as a gentleman farmer. His wife had a close association with slavery, as her deceased husband, John Kean of South Carolina, owned over one hundred slaves. After Kean’s death in 1795, Susan owned and traded those slaves, continuing to do so after her remarriage. Even though slavery was integral to the couple’s household, Niemcewicz remained puzzled as to slavery’s place in American society. After...

In 1824, after crossing the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, Peter Chandler scribbled in his diary: “Today left the land of slavery, New Jersey. The blacks are permitted to be held in bondage. Almost every farmer has from one to half a dozen slaves.” Chandler’s assessment of the state of slavery after his seven-week tour of New Jersey stands in stark contrast to the historical memory of slavery fifty years later. In 1878, local historian Joseph Atkinson published hisHistory of Newark, in which he boldly stated that “slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1820 to the everlasting credit of...

In an 1851 memoir written by Quaker William Allinson, former slave Quamino Baccau described how his master, William Griffith, had offered him freedom in 1806 at age forty-four. Allinson, grandson of Samuel Allinson, an abolitionist in the 1770s, portrayed Quamino as “downtrodden, meek, and poor” and minimized Quamino’s role in his own freedom by using his enslaved name, Baccau, instead of his freed name, Smock, to validate the role of whites as mediators of black freedom. In writing about Quamino’s negotiation for freedom, Allinson claimed Griffith had asked him, “Would you like to be free?” to which he responded, “I...

Jacob Van Wickle sat in his Middlesex County home in 1818 with money on his mind. He realized that New Jersey slaves sold at prices far below what Mississippi and Louisiana plantation owners paid for similar chattel. Van Wickle used this knowledge and a loophole embedded in state law to create the largest slave trading operation in New Jersey, selling dozens of “cheap” Jersey slaves to the New Orleans market. At the same time, dozens of Jersey slaveholders left the state with their slaves to take advantage of the growing economic opportunities available in the Old Southwest, specifically the states...

Prime, who gained his freedom in 1786 from the New Jersey legislature for meritorious service in the Revolution, became part of the first generation of free blacks in nineteenth century New Jersey. In the early abolition period, he requested that the Hunterdon County Court of Common Pleas absolve him of fines levied for his failure to attend militia duty. Prime argued that since he did not possess “an equal right with white state subjects as I cannot hold land, serve on juries, nor be a witness, nor sue for debt,” he should not be required to serve. Prime therefore experienced...

Slavery’s persistence in antebellum New Jersey worked to limit free African Americans’ ability to succeed in the abolition period and placed them outside the body politic. Stripped of their right to vote, marginalized as slaves despite their free status, and declared “undesirable” by the colonization society, blacks tried to integrate into white political, economic, and social structures through a complex process of identity construction by which elite blacks challenged racial inequality through demonstrating their suitability for citizenship. Eventually they created their own communities to find respectability in a white-dominated republic. This fight for civil rights and the creation of free...

After gradual abolition’s passage in 1804, former New Jersey abolition society member and Quaker William Newbold was one of the few whites who believed slavery remained a major issue in the state. Writing to his brother in 1823, he claimed that “slavery as it now exists amongst us, politically demands that something should be done. Morality and philanthropy echoes to the call and asks for an amelioration and final extinction.” Newbold suggested that they “form an association … to embrace the willing minded” and engage in the “gradual and final emancipation of slaves … upon moderate and rational principles with...

Historian William Gillette cautions others not to “concentrate on the infinitesimal minority of eighteen quasi-slaves” recorded in the 1860 New Jersey census but on “the state’s 25,318 free African Americans.”¹ He shows that the presence of these slaves encouraged past historians to assert that New Jersey was a hotbed of Copperhead sentiment and made the state appear “separated only by an accident of geography from the rebellious South.”² Of course, New Jersey’s southern sympathizing had some electoral proof to it. New Jerseyans voted against Abraham Lincoln in both 1860 and 1864 and voted for Democrats to occupy the governor’s mansion...