James Gigantino, in his recent book[1] about the gradual abolition era in New Jersey,[2] describes one enslaver’s actions as especially heinous: Middlesex County Judge Jacob Van Wickle, who used his standing as a judge to facilitate an illegal kidnapping and slave trading ring for his own family’s profit.[3] A number of scholars[4] and public history projects[5] have lately documented many aspects of his actions.
Judge Jacob Van Wickle, adapted artist's rendering by Jolyon Pruszinski of detail from
Jacob Van Wickle, by George H. Durie (1841), Reproduced in Louisiana Portraits,
comp. Mrs. Thomas Nelson Carter Bruns (New Orleans: National Society of the
Colonial Dames of America in the State of Louisiana, 1975), 292.
One largely neglected part of this story, however, is that Van Wickle acted as he did while serving as a committed and influential leader at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Spotswood, New Jersey. Neither he, nor his immediate church community saw anything wrong with what he was doing from the standpoint of Episcopal faith practice at the time. He was never removed from church leadership and there is no record of any church censure for his actions. In fact, other leaders from his church helped to cover up his actions. What he did is not only appalling in retrospect, but the public outcry at the time shows that many, at least outside of his church, considered it a sensational transgression even then.
In 1795 Van Wickle married Sarah Morgan and thereafter became inextricably connected with Morgan family financial concerns related to plantation ownership in Pointe Coupee Parish Louisiana. His professional life of many decades was spent as a judge in Middlesex County, New Jersey.
During this time, the New Jersey legislature passed its gradual abolition legislation in 1804, limiting the number of years enslaved persons born after that date could remain enslaved to at most 25 years (for men).[6] Soon after, in 1808, federal law ended the legal importation of enslaved persons to the United States.[7] One effect of this change was to increase the volume of domestic inter-state slave trading, since no additional enslaved persons could be brought into the U.S. This limitation on supply, combined with the increase in interstate slave trading, created a problem for enslaved persons in New Jersey. They were now in the very great danger of being sold or moved to states that had no gradual abolition law and where their promise of ultimate emancipation would not be upheld. The New Jersey legislature responded to this issue by passing further legislation in 1812 preventing the sale out-of-state of enslaved persons without their express consent.[8] This legislation, combined with the gradual abolition law, depressed the sale value of the enslaved in New Jersey markets since their enslavement was legally temporary and they were not easily transferrable to other markets. Meanwhile, the federal ban on importation had dramatically increased the value of already enslaved persons in the South. Van Wickle and his family saw this valuation discrepancy between the local slave markets as an opportunity for massive profit through arbitrage.
The consent required by law in New Jersey to transfer an enslaved person out-of-state had to be verified by a judge of the county Court of Common Pleas. In Middlesex County, that was Van Wickle. His family members and co-conspirators canvassed their contacts, including many politically connected individuals in the state, soliciting the sale of enslaved Blacks. When they wanted to acquire more Blacks, they engaged their henchmen in kidnapping, deceitful recruiting through promises of paid labor, and by the purchase of imprisoned free blacks being held by local jails for being apprehended without papers. They kept the entrapped at the Van Wickle compound in South River, which was described by one visitor as “like a garrison.”[9] Then Van Wickle would use the authority of his office to forge papers of acquiescence to allow the export of these enslaved Blacks, under color of law, to the Morgan family plantations in Louisiana. He even claimed that the cries of infants constituted consent.[10]
Van Wickle was never indicted, even though some of his indicted co-conspirators were found guilty after public outcry came to a head in 1818.[11] However, the sentences these co-conspirators received were exceedingly mild. Citizen petitions and legislative action[12] put an end to the operation of the ring, but not before at least 137 enslaved and free Blacks had been removed from the state against their will and sold into a lifetime of slavery by Van Wickle and his cronies.[13]
Van Wickle’s notoriety among slavery researchers is one thing. Less well known is the fact that he was a devoted and celebrated Episcopalian and an integral member of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Spotswood, New Jersey for well over half a century, including the entire period of the operation of the “ring.”
Van Wickle was baptized as an infant,[14] but it seems unlikely that this was a pro forma baptism since as a very young adult[15] he was already serving on the vestry of St. Peter’s. This began coincident with his older brother Evert’s service as church clerk in 1787.[16] Spotswood was very clearly their family church. Jacob’s wife and children were later baptized at St. Peter’s, and he and his family are listed first on the parish list of communicants in 1823.[17] Such pride of place on the list indicates that he was held in high regard in the church, even in the immediate aftermath of the slavery ring controversy. He served on the vestry periodically during his time at St. Peter’s, but most consistently held the office of church warden starting in 1810. He continued in this role without interruption to the time of his death in 1854.[18] In summary, he was a very central member of the church lay leadership well before the slave ring affair, during it, and long after it. Just before his death he gave a very large sum of money for the building of the second church building,[19] which is the building in use by St. Peter’s today.
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| St. Peters Church Spotswood, photo by Ben McLaughlin, modified by Jolyon Pruszinski, CC BY-SA 3.0 |
He, his wife, and many of his children are buried in the graveyard,[20] an exclusive honor typically allowed only to those who were highly regarded in the church and involved heavily in its financial support. The funerial entry made in the parish register at the time of his death, likely by the rector, reads: per multos annos sacrorum ustor dem in aedem sacram,[21] or “for the sake of many years of sacrifice I, the cremator, commit [van Wickle] to a holy grave.” This note may explain the rationale for interring his remains in the particularly honored burial place of the church graveyard.
The honor in which he was held, and the leadership he was allowed to exercise, were not a result of Van Wickle’s actions in the ring being unknown to his church community. The court case was very high profile, being both initiated by printed newspaper allegations and covered extensively thereafter.[22] Moreover, Van Wickle’s fellow church leaders actually helped him cover up his crimes. A former St. Peter’s vestryman, Cornelius Johnson,[23] testified before a Justice of the Peace that he was “well acquainted with the house of Jacob Van Wickle” and the condition of the “colored people” there, claiming that he “never saw anything like a garrison or a guard, or cruel treatment, but the reverse, they all appeared to have their liberty and to be well-satisfied.”[24] His testimony, and that of five other men, was taken by Oliver Johnston,[25] who was a then- and long-serving, vestryman at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.[26] Johnston submitted this testimony to the New Brunswick Fredonian for printing alongside Van Wickle’s aforementioned public statement disavowing any illegal activity.
It is clear from the complicity of fellow church leaders in the cover-up, and from his seamless participation in St. Peter’s leadership before, during, and after the affair, that Jacob Van Wickle’s horrific actions against free and enslaved African-Americans in New Jersey for the sake of his own family’s profit were not widely considered untoward or unchristian in the Episcopal Church in New Jersey at the time.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] James J. Gigantino, II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
[2] That is, the period in New Jersey after the passing of the 1804 bill which “gradually” abolished slavery (children born into slavery after the passing of the bill had to serve as a slave 21 years if female or 25 years if male before the law required that they be freed) and 1865 when the ratification by the states of the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution made slavery illegal except as punishment for a crime throughout the United States.
[3] Also known as “Van Wicklen,” “Van Winkle,” “Van Sickle,” etc.
[4] Some excellent documentation of primary sources related to Van Wickle and the slave ring are available through the Rutgers University Scarlet and Black Research Center which hosts New Jersey slavery records. See “Jacob Van Wickle (1770-1854)” at https://records.njslavery.org/s/doc/item/1284, accessed September 26, 2023. See also Francis Pingeon, “An Abominable Business: The New Jersey Slave Trade, 1818,” New Jersey History 109.3 (1991): 15-35; James J. Gigantino, II, “Trading in Jersey Souls: New Jersey and the Interstate Slave Trade,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 77.3 (2010): 281-302; Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 69-80; Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 79; and Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 157-160.
[5] See the presentation from the Lost Souls Memorial Project (“Inside the Van Wickle’s Slave Ring: ‘Exposing a Scene of Villany’” at https://lostsoulsmemorialnj.org/wp-content/uploads/Inside-Van-Wickles-Slave-Ring.pdf, accessed September 25, 2023); the material published by the East Brunswick Historical Society (“Van Wickle and Morgan Slave Ring Leaders East Brunswick, NJ (1818)” at https://purehistory.org/van-wickle-and-morgan-slave-ring-leaders-east-brunswick-new-jersey-1818/, accessed September 26, 2023); “The 1619 Project” article by Anne C. Bailey, “They Sold Human Beings Here,” New York Times, February 12, 2020 at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/12/magazine/1619-project-slave-auction-sites.html, accessed September 26, 2023; the Rutgers University Scarlet and Black Research Center article “Removal to Louisiana: The Van Wickle Slave Ring,” at https://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu/archive/exhibits/show/hub-city/removal-to-louisiana, accessed September 26, 2023); Regina Fitzpatrick “New Jersey State Archives Van Wickle Slave Ring Free Digital Collection,” at https://www.njstatelib.org/news/vanwickleslaveringcollection/, accessed September 26, 2023; and the State of New Jersey, “Documents at the New Jersey State Archives relating to the Van Wickle Slave Ring,” at https://www.nj.gov/state/darm/WebCatalogPDF/VanWickle/VanWickleTableOfContents.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
[6] “An act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” February 15, 1804, Acts 28th G.A. 2nd sitting. https://dspace.njstatelib.org/xmlui/handle/10929/68964, accessed September 26, 2023.
[7] See “An Act to prohibit the importation of Slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, from and after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eight,” passed March 2, 1807, at https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/2/STATUTE-2-Pg426.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
[8] “An act supplemental to the act entitled ‘An act respecting slaves,’” at https://www.nj.gov/state/darm/WebCatalogPDF/VanWickle/1812_An%20Act%20Supplemental%20to%20the%20Act%20entitled%20An%20Act%20Respecting%20Slaves_29%20January%201812.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
[9] As reported in the Philadelphia Franklin Gazette, May 22, 1818.
[10] Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 158.
[11] It is possible that this was due to his practice of attributing ownership of the enslaved Blacks held on his property to his family members rather than to himself. It is also possible that he was not indicted simply because he was a sitting judge and such an indictment would have tarnished the reputation of the justice system generally. But he also turned on his fellow conspirators and testified against Charles Morgan and others in the ring in the trial, all the while publicly claiming that nothing illegal had been done. See Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 160. Van Wickle’s public letter to this effect was published in the New Brunswick Freedonian on August 13, 1818.
[12] “An act to prohibit the exportation of slaves or people of color out of this State,” November 4, 1818, at https://www.nj.gov/state/darm/WebCatalogPDF/VanWickle/1818_An%20act%20to%20prohibit%20the%20exportation%20of%20slaves%20or%20servants%20of%20color%20out%20of%20this%20State_5%20November%201818.pdf, accessed September 26, 2023.
[13] According to the documentation of The Lost Souls Memorial Project.
[14] Beyond of course the record of his infant baptism on June 24, 1770 (less than two months after birth); See L. Irving Reichner, “Nicasius de Sille Bible,” Publications of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, 7.2 (1919): 128.
[15] Today he would be considered a minor (sixteen or seventeen) at the age when he began to serve on the vestry of St. Peter’s. Beatrice Grace, History of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Spotswood, New Jersey (Spotswood, NJ: St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 1956), 78.
[16] He was the first clerk listed in the vestry minutes according to Grace, History of St. Peter’s, 12. At the close of the eighteenth century, the church had also purchased a home from Evert to be used as the rectory; Grace, History of St. Peter’s, 14.
[17] According to Macy’s notes on the parish register in Harry Macy, Jr., “The Van Wicklen/Van Wickle Family: Including its Frisian Origin and Connections to Minnerly and Kranchheyt,” The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 128.4 (1997): 241-51.
[18] Grace, History of St. Peter’s, 73.
[19] Grace, History of St. Peter’s, 20.
[20] Macy, “The Van Wicklen/Van Wickle Family,” 241-51.
[21] According to the flawed transcription reported in John Van Wicklin’s “Family of Jacob^5 Charles Van Wickle,” (https://facultysites.houghton.edu/JohnVanWicklin/Home%20page/Genealogy/FamPages/jacob^5charles.htm, accessed September 24, 2023), the parish register entry reads per nultos annos sacrorum oustordem in aedem sacram but this cannot be entirely correct. It is unlikely that the priest knew enough Latin to make the note but mistakenly wrote “nultos” for what should clearly be multos. The text “oustordem” may be a correct transcription but should probably be understood as ustor dem and could indicate a variant spelling used by the priest.
[22] Including in The True American (Trenton, NJ), the Trenton Federalist (Trenton, NJ), The Fredonian (New Brunswick, NJ), and The Times and New-Brunswick General Advertiser (New Brunswick, NJ).
[23] Grace, History of St. Peter’s, 75.
[24] The Fredonian, New Brunswick, NJ, August 13, 1818.
[25] That is, the aforementioned Justice of the Peace.
[26] Grace, History of St. Peter’s, 76.
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