History / New Jersey Slavery Term Paper

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By March 2, 1785, it was clear that New Jersey had begun to try to ban slavery, as the legislature enacted a law banning "foreign slave trade in the state" (p. 115). And in 1786, the New Jersey Society for the Abolition of Slavery was founded, although the citizens of Monmouth "were deeply divided" over whether or not slavery should be banned from the state.

Meantime, during the 1790s, several "gradual emancipation" bills were voted down in the New Jersey legislature, albeit (p. 124) "popular opinion and party newspapers cautiously shifted" towards an anti-slavery position. The citizens were clearly divided on the issue, as the author points out on page 125: Quakers opposed to slavery were accused by proslavery interests of "harboring pro-British attitudes" and were accused of "poisoning the minds of our slaves." Other extremists in the proslavery ranks pushed the notion that the Quakers antislavery movement was just a "plot to give more blacks the vote and control the state..."

The Civil War and New Jersey

The author points out (p. 192) that New Jersey "showed a grudging loyalty to the Union" - and in that context, New Jersey politicians, while indeed supporting the Union, "...remained warm to the Southern cause..." throughout the Civil War. There were motions passed in the New Jersey state legislature that clearly signaled support for slavery: one, a motion passed in "recognition of southern property rights over slaves; another, unqualified support for the "repressive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850," and further, there were laws passed in New Jersey "attempting to hinder any movement of black freed people into the state."

Also on 192 Hodges writes that the very year the Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect, 1863, the powers that be in New Jersey "worried about a massive slave insurrection" in the aftermath of the proclamation, and passed "infamous 'Peace Resolutions' which denied Lincoln's ability to emancipate the slaves by proclamation.

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The history of this time period in New Jersey is made more interesting by the fact that despite how terribly the African slaves had been treated, a number of male slaves enlisted in the Union Army. "At least 156 blacks" from Monmouth, New Jersey, joined the Union Army in the two years between 1863 and 1865. Interestingly, too, some white New Jersey citizens were paid money to locate blacks who were willing to serve, and other whites actually hired blacks to "substitute for them" in the army.

After the war, despite the heroism that many black soldiers displayed in defeating the South, "New Jersey's white population remained hostile" to the idea of giving blacks full citizen rights (p. 194). The author, in his Epilogue, explains why it was not easy to rid New Jersey of slavery notwithstanding federal law that demanded the end of slavery: he writes that slavery in Monmouth was not a "fad" which could be easily "forgotten," but to the contrary, it was "a custom two centuries in the making" (p. 203).

And it is also worth mentioning that not all slaves were brutally beaten and shackled by their masters; some slaves in Monmouth "were often considered part of the extended household," and were treaded as such. That is because (p. 204), some slaves had been "integrated into the routines of family life - particularly when they had acted as surrogate parent to a new generation of masters..."

And even after the end of legal slavery, for a century after the Civil War, "whenever African-Americans worked for whites on isolated farms..." some "vestiges of the "paternalistic cottager system" indeed still were present, and may be present today….....

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