The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II

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