The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II

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