Slavery in New Jersey began in the early 17th century, when the Dutch trafficked African slaves for labor to develop the colony of New Netherland. After the English took control of the colony in 1664, they continued the importation of slaves from Africa. They also imported "seasoned" slaves from their colonies in the West Indies and enslaved Native Americans from the Carolinas.
Most Dutch and English settlers entered the colony as indentured servants, who worked for a fixed number of years to repay their passage. As conditions in England improved and the number of indentured laborers declined, slave-trading companies imported more Africans for needed labor. To promote increasing the number of laborers and settlers in order to develop the colony, the colonial government awarded settlers headrights of of land for each person transported to the colony. In 1704, after East Jersey and West Jersey were unified, the royal colony of the province passed a slave code prohibiting slaves and free Blacks from owning property, further restricting Africans and African-Americans.
During the American Revolution, enslaved people fought on both sides. The Patriots banned the importation of new slaves, as they were largely transported to the region on British slave ships, and the New Jersey Legislature later freed any slave imported after 1776. The British promised freedom to slaves who would leave Patriot masters and fight for them. The number of Blacks in Manhattan increased to 10,000, as thousands of enslaved Africans escaped to the British for the promise of freedom.
Bergen County, which until 1840 included all of Hudson County, developed as the largest slaveholding county in the state,"Bergen County Slavery" , Bergen County, accessed 13 July 2012 in part because many enslaved Africans were used as laborers in its ports and cities. At its peak Bergen County enslaved 3,000 Africans in 1800, constituting nearly 20% of its total population.Secret History of a Northern Slave State Retrieved March 28, 2020 After the Revolutionary War, many northern states rapidly passed laws to abolish slavery, but New Jersey did not abolish it until 1804, and then in a process of gradual emancipation similar to that of New York. However, in New Jersey, some Blacks were still held in bondage as late as 1865. (In New York, they were all freed by 1827.) The law declared that children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1804, would be free at birth, but it required those children to serve lengthy apprenticeships as a type of indentured servant until early adulthood for the masters of their mothers kept in bondage. The law made no provision for the emancipation of enslaved people born before this date. New Jersey was the last of the Northern states to abolish slavery completely. The 1860 census listed at least 43 people in New Jersey as slaves, the youngest being 11 and oldest being 95. Thirty-eight of these people were enslaved for life. This calculation is almost certainly an underestimate, given that slaves were not meant to be recorded on regular census schedules. Dedicated slave schedules, as recorded throughout the South in the 1850 and 1860 censuses, were indeed not used in New Jersey. The 16 enslaved people who remained in New Jersey in December 1865 were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment."Interview: James Oliver Horton: Exhibit Reveals History of Slavery in New York City" , PBS Newshour, 25 January 2007, accessed 11 February 2012
The Underground Railroad had several routes crossing the state, four of which ended in Jersey City, where fugitive slaves could cross the Hudson River. New Brunswick, 'Hub City', was a main location where runaways would travel during the days of the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, African Americans served in several all-black Union Army regiments from New Jersey.
In 2008, the legislature of New Jersey passed a resolution of official apology for slavery, becoming the third state to do so. Rutgers, the State University moved to rectify its past wrongs and connections to slavery during its 250th anniversary celebration in 2016. Princeton University, the oldest college in the state of New Jersey, released the findings of its Princeton & Slavery Project in 2017.
In 2019, the Durand-Hedden House & Garden in Maplewood, New Jersey, created an extensive exhibit on the history of slavery in New Jersey.
Colonial period Before the Dutch West India Company, formed in 1621, become a permanent fixture in North America, its "colonies" were more outposts used for seasonal trading, only intermittently occupied. Constructed c. 1623/24, its first fort, Fort Nassau, in South Jersey on the banks of the Delaware at the intersection of modern Gloucester and Camden Counties, is considered by historians to have been constructed (at least in part) by slave labor.
The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the trafficking of eleven African slaves to New Amsterdam, capital of the nascent province of New Netherland. They worked as farmers, fur traders, and builders. It later expanded across the North River (Hudson River) to Pavonia and Communipaw, eventually becoming Bergen, where these men worked the company plantation. Settlers to the area later enslaved men privately, often using them as domestic servants and laborers. Although enslaved, the Africans had a few basic rights and families were usually kept intact. They were admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church and married by its ministers, who also baptized their children. While enslaved Africans could be admitted to the Church, the church itself did not prohibit their enslavement, which it not find sinful. The enslaved could testify in court, sign legal documents, and bring civil actions against whites. Some were permitted to work after hours, when they earned wages equal to those paid to white workers. When the colony fell, the company relinquished enslavement, establishing early on a nucleus of free negros.
Ensuring that enslaved Africans could work the settlers' land for free became an incentive to attract permanent New Netherland settlement under the Dutch patroon system. One example of this is in 1630, when director Michael Pauw decreed the West India Company to source 50 enslaved Africans from Pernambuco (a major slave hub in Brazil, freshly taken over by the Dutch just months prior) to Pavonia. Patroons were then promised a supply of Africans from the WIC for lease or for permanent assignment to their land.
English traders continued to traffic African slaves after they took over the colony from the Dutch in 1664 and established a proprietorship. Eager to attract more settlers and laborers to develop the colony, the proprietorship encouraged the trafficking of slaves for labor by offering settlers headrights, an award of allocations of land based on the number of workers, slaves or indentured servants, trafficked to the colony. The first African slaves to appear in English records were owned by Colonel Lewis Morris in Shrewsbury. In an early attempt to encourage European settlement, the New Jersey legislature enacted a prohibitive tariff against trafficked slaves to encourage European indentured servitude. When this act expired in 1721, however, Governor William Burnet countered attempts to renew it, since the slave trade had become a lucrative enterprise.
The liberties of the enslaved peoples of New Jersey were formally curtailed under a law passed in 1704, a so-called 'slave code'. This code prohibited the owning of property by slaves and by free African Americans as well. In addition, it made certain actions illegal for African Americans, like staying out past curfew, that were not illegal for European Americans.
According to one researcher, Oak Ridge Park in Union County may contain New Jersey's only known ruins of slave dwellings.In 1995, apparent ruins of slave quarters were reported in a wooded area located approximately seventy yards southeast of the third green. These apparent ruins, according to the writer, are only discernible by the linear placement of individual foundation stones that would have held up small wooden shacks. There was reportedly an apparent built-up rubble ledge at the site that might indicate the presence of a firebox, hearth, privy or root cellar.
While not confirmed by archaeological study, there is some historical evidence of slave presence on the site. Sale records from June 1717 show that the owner of the farm sold a Black woman named Phebe to a Samuel Smith of Woodbridge for fifty pounds in silver currency.
The Fagan family, who were tenant farmers renting from the owners, with a cottage to the southwest of the main house, wrote a history of the site that indicates the presence. The Fagan history notes that a burial ground of enslaved African-Americans was located across Oak Ridge Road from Homestead Farm at Oak Ridge, but that it had been lost to a housing development in the 1970s.
The Fagan tenant farmer family history also notes that the Oak Ridge slave quarters ruins could be distinguished from stone discarded from farm operations by the deliberate lined arrangement of fieldstones on the ground. Additionally, the location of the presumed ruins—in the woods to the rear of the property, between the main house and the tenant farmer house—are possibly indicative of the presence of enslaved people. The ruins are similar to those found in what was the free African-American Skunk Hollow community in Alpine, New Jersey. If confirmed, it would be the first confirmed slave quarters site in New Jersey. With
Camden was a center for the importation of slaves, its ferry docks on the Delaware River across from Philadelphia acting as auction sites for the plantations in the Delaware Valley, of which Pomona Hall was one.
As a free port, Perth Amboy was a harbor friendly to slaving vessels. "Perth Amboy was the distributing center and slave vessels landed there." Early History of Atlantic County, New Jersey: Record of the First Year's Work of Atlantic County's Historical Society. United States, Press of the Kutztown publishing Company, 1915. pg 58 "Barracks of considerable size once stood in Perth Amboy, near the junction of Smith and Water streets, in which the slaves were [kept confined] as imported."Whitehead, William Adee. Contributions to the Early History of Perth Amboy and Adjoining Country: With Sketches of Men and Events in New Jersey During the Provincial Era. United States, D. Appleton, 1856.
In 2016 Rutgers University published a report Scarlet and Black recording the university's relationship with slavery. In 2017 Princeton University made public the findings of the Princeton & Slavery Project, which is ongoing.
Post-American Revolution
African-American slaves fought on both sides in the War for Independence. The British Crown promised slaves freedom for leaving their rebel masters to join their cause. The number of Blacks in New York rose to 10,000 as slaves escaped there from both northern and southern masters after the British occupied the city. The British kept their promise and evacuated thousands of freedmen from New York, resettling 3,500 Black Loyalists in its colony of Nova Scotia and others in the Caribbean islands.Nancy Shakir, "Slavery in New Jersey" , Slavery in America, Accessed 24 January 2007 Colonel Tye, also known as Titus Cornelius (c. 1753–1780),"Colonel Tye", Africans in America, PBSJonathan D. Sutherland, African Americans at War, ABC-CLIO, 2003, accessed 4 May 2010 was a slave of African descent who achieved notability during the war by his leadership and fighting skills, and was one of the most effective guerrilla leaders opposing the American rebel forces in Central Jersey.