The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II

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