The Ragged Road to Abolition. James J. Gigantino II

negotiations between masters and slaves. Slaves took advantage of revolutionary rhetoric and abolitionist agitation to argue for their own benefit. In this way, the nature of slavery slowly began to change as masters understood the limits of slavery in the early republic. These changes cushioned gradual abolition’s eventual blow as masters continually sought ways to sustain slavery within the institution’s changing framework.⁶⁹

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      By 1800, Jersey slavery had grown despite assaults from abolitionists, fears of slave rebellion, and the constant ring of revolutionary freedom. New Jersey stood alone as the only northern state without a gradual abolition law, separating white New Jerseyans from other northerners who had begun to think seriously about slavery’s place in the developing nation. An 1803 pamphlet concerning the death of a slave from Saint-Domingue confirmed this difference as the author noted that New Jersey law “authorized his master to remove him as he would a piece of furniture” unlike the rest of the North.⁷⁰ New Englanders especially used slavery as a way to contrast a free “North” against a slave “South,” with New Jersey fitting into neither region. As historian Matthew Mason claims, “the North was proud to denominate itself as the ‘free states’ in an ideological world that proscribed bondage as immoral.” White New Englanders saw themselves as fundamentally superior to southerners; their identity was based on the embrace of revolutionary freedom which, in their minds, proved their superiority. As New Jersey had yet to abandon slavery, it could not join this imagined morally superior “free” community, nor did many in the state desire to. Slavery still remained an important institution.⁷¹

      The fascination with a “free” North began at the Constitutional Convention when regional distrust and differences based on slavery became readily apparent. James Madison famously claimed that the states diverged on issues “not by their difference of size . . . but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.” Madison believed the main problem in forming a new government lay not in a debate over large versus small states but “between the Northern and Southern” as the “institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination” between the two regions. Of course, differences of scale had always existed between the South’s slave societies and the North’s societies with slaves. But since Massachusetts had outlawed slavery and Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all passed gradual abolition laws before the convention, the development of “free soil” led southerners to believe that New York and New Jersey would soon follow suit and the idea of a homogenous North opposed to slavery was born.⁷²

      Northerners at the convention did not make it difficult for southerners to see the North as a distinctively free region since northern delegates identified slavery as the root of the new nation’s evil. Rufus King, an adamant Massachusetts abolitionist, claimed that “the people of the Northern States could never be reconciled to” the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade. Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris made the comparison even starker when he claimed that slavery “was a nefarious institution . . . the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” Morris boldly challenged southerners to “compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves.” Morris’s language harkened back to the colonial ideal that the Middle Colonies, Pennsylvania in particular, had always been “the best poor man’s country.” There, “noble cultivation” and hard work could make everyone successful, in stark contrast to the South, where slavery had corrupted whites and divorced them from productive labor.⁷³

      Though Morris acknowledged, at least tacitly, the Mid-Atlantic’s ties to slavery, he made sure to highlight that northern slavery was not as harsh as the southern institution. He claimed that when crossing into “New York, the effects of the institution become visible. Passing through the Jerseys and entering Pennsylvania every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed south and every step you take through the great region of slaves” extenuates the dissimilarities between North and South. Morris believed that southern slavery was “so nefarious a practice” that it could never be equivalent with the institution in the North.⁷⁴

      Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman likewise argued that slavery in the North was intrinsically different by highlighting that abolition had commenced and “that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it.” Fellow Connecticut delegate Oliver Elsworth latched onto the idea of “good sense” and argued that “slavery in time will not be a speck in our country. Provision is already made in Connecticut for abolishing it and the abolition has already taken place in Massachusetts.” Elsworth also believed that free labor would expand and replace slavery, further strengthening the North’s economic strength and separating it from the South’s dependence on slave labor.⁷⁵

      Even as northerners tried to separate themselves from southerners, both shared a common belief in black inferiority. New Jersey’s William Paterson offered that he “could regard negro slaves in no light but as property. They are no free agents, have no personal liberty.” Likewise, Morris contended that “the people of Pennsylvania would revolt at the idea of being put on a footing with slaves.” These arguments, while underscoring the hypocrisy of making slaves both persons and property during the three-fifths compromise debate, represented the widespread view that blacks were not equal to whites.⁷⁶

      The combination of sectional differences in the convention and abolition’s success in New England and Pennsylvania convinced many Jersey abolitionists that slavery’s days in New Jersey were numbered. Joseph Bloomfield linked abolition to economic opportunity in an attempt to persuade New Jerseyans that slave labor actually hurt the economy. He claimed that New Englanders “by their enlightened” abolition policy and their employment of “the labor of freeman instead of slaves are daily obtaining advantages over the southern states.” The South, in their maintenance of the “injustice and immobility of their citizens in the unnatural and cruel treatment of their fellow men,” prevents them from an adequate “competition” with “the freeman.”⁷⁷