Summary: Slavery was first introduced to the New Jersey region by the Dutch, but the English expanded and codified the enslavement of Blacks. English Barbadian enslavers settled in New Jersey and brought with them the brutal legal structures that had begun to develop in the Caribbean. Slavery became especially well established in East Jersey, but was employed throughout the state as part of a plantation economy.
Slavery in New Jersey in the Colonial Era
The earliest legal establishment of slavery in the land that would become New Jersey can be dated to the Dutch presence in the area prior to its English annexation. English settlement of the region only began in earnest following the annexation in 1664 of “New Netherland,” which to that point had been settled mostly by the Dutch in the vicinity of New Amsterdam (modern-day New York City) and by Swedes in the region along the lower Delaware River (formerly “New Sweden”). By the time the British took over, hundreds of enslaved people were already held against their will in both of these settled areas. The slavery set up by the Dutch in these areas was not legally racialized,[1] but it was widespread, with approximately one eighth of Dutch settlers in New Netherland owning slaves.[2] Once taken by the English, the territory was established as a proprietary colony, sold to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley of Stratton, and split into East Jersey and West Jersey, dividing the region according to its two primary established areas of European settlement.
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| The East-West Jersey divide superimposed over modern New Jersey county lines. |
At this time the English continued to allow slavery throughout their colonies. In fact before the annexation, the Crown was already directly profiting from the Atlantic slave trade. From 1660 it had operated a transportation monopoly in the Atlantic as the sole legal provider of enslaved peoples to British colonies.[3] British settlement in New Jersey after the annexation mainly came from migration between colonies, including plantation owners from the British colonies of the West Indies who came for the promise of land granted in proportion to the number of enslaved persons brought.[4] These, largely Anglican, settlers moved to East Jersey, while much of West Jersey became increasingly dominated by Quaker influence. Ultimately, West and East Jersey were unified in 1702 into a single royal Province of New Jersey; however, the legal statutes regarding slavery adopted for the whole colony were based mostly on East Jersey precedent.
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| Royal African Company coat of arms |
Barbadian settlers especially had brought with them to East Jersey the legal precedents of the English colonies of the West Indies. There, during the seventeenth century under the colonial plantation system, the English had developed both racialized chattel slavery and the new linguistic-legal conventions of “Black” (associated with “slave” and “pagan”) and “White” (with “free” and “Christian”).[5] The legal statutes of East Jersey, formalized in 1694 and 1695,[6] replicated and perpetuated these particularly English (and by extension, Anglican) systemic developments. After the unification of East and West Jersey the Barbadian plantation owners of East Jersey, through their political influence in the legislature,[7] managed to extend these laws to the entire unified province by way of the 1704 omnibus slavery bill. Among the provisions of this bill were the prohibition of property ownership for both slaves and free Blacks, and the formal disqualification of Christian baptism as legal grounds for manumission[8] (which had been a rather well-established European custom).[9] This latter provision was passed with full approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
These harsh laws were amplified in an even more draconian slave code, passed by the legislature in 1713-1714 in response to anxieties over “slave conspiracies” in the state. The codes effectively ended manumission, as those who desired to free Blacks they had previously enslaved would be required both to pay the Provincial government a bond of £200 upon manumission and then to render to each freed slave a further £20 every year.[11] The effect of these laws was both to control and to grow the enslaved population in the state and, by extension, to strengthen the role of slavery in the state economy. As a result, through the middle of the eighteenth century slavery took on an increasingly important role in the economy of New Jersey, becoming the “primary labor supply” in rural areas, but in truth, “[operating] in almost every imaginable locale and time.”[12] The enslaved population of New Jersey also rapidly increased as a result of increased importation of enslaved Blacks directly from Africa, and on the eve of the Revolution enslaved persons made up over seven percent of New Jersey’s population, while in some east New Jersey counties the figure stood at as much as fifteen percent.
[1] “Like in other colonies, New Jersey’s charter generation lived in a society that had neither firmly delineated laws on slavery nor used race to determine enslaved status.” Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 12.
[2] Joyce Goodfriend, "Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam," New York History 59 (1978): 142-43.
[3] William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 22-23. The monopoly was initially called the “Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa” but was reorganized and renamed "Royal African Company" after 1672, continuing to operate as a monopoly until 1712 when the Crown began to allow other merchants to profit from the trade as well.
[4] Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 13: “each settler received 150 acres and an additional 150 acres for each male slave and 75 for each female slave.”
[5] Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 70 (2013): 446-47.
[6] Which in Monmouth County required landowners to own slaves: Julian P. Boyd, ed., Fundamental Laws and Constitutions of New Jersey, 1664-1964, New Jersey Historical Series 17 (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1964), 51-67.
[7] The so-called Anglican “ring.” See Nelson R. Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey (Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954), 373-75.
[8] See “An Act for Regulating Negro, Indian, and Mallatto Slaves within this Province of New Jersey,” December 12, 1704, in Bernard Bush, Laws of the Royal Colony of New Jersey, Vols. 1-5 (Trenton: New Jersey Archives, and Records Management, 1977-1986), 2:28-30.
[9] In part, as a result of the Doctrine of Discovery.
[10] The administration of the Archbishop had drafted a law “For Converting the Negroes &c In the Plantations” which specifically stated that baptism did not in any way change the property status of a slave. This was sent to various authorities in the colonies to influence the legislative process. See “1st draught” in Lambeth Palace Archives, Gibson Papers, MSS 941, No. 72. Also Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, 225.
[11] “An Act for Regulating of Slaves,” March 11, 1713/14, in Bush, Laws of the Royal Colony of New Jersey, 2:136-40.
[12] Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 17, 3.
[13] U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1975), 2:1168; See also Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 17.
