“The Whole North Is Not Abolitionized”: Defending the Slow Death of Slavery in New Jersey, 1840–61

This paper explores the process by which New Jerseyans defended the continued operation of the state’s slave system in the decades after gradual abolition began slavery’s demise.  I argue that the presence of southern fugitive slaves, slave catchers, and national debates over fugitive slave rights in the 1830s and 1840s motivated Jersey whites to reconsider the state’s historic gradual approach to abolition.  However, this reevaluation resulted in an effort by white New Jerseyans to consistently portray their state as different from the rest of the North, a non-abolitionized locale where rights of all slaveholders would be respected.  In opposition to New Englanders who created a regional identity that eliminated their historical association with slavery, the Mid-Atlantic in the 1840s and 1850s embraced their slave past and integrated it into debates over larger national issues over slavery. 

This paper specifically examines how New Jersey politicians, abolitionists, free blacks, and slaves responded to the debate over the state’s 1846 abolition law which took place at the same time sectional tensions grew increasingly frayed over the annexation of Texas and the War with Mexico.  In that context, I use the 1846 law, which abolished slavery but reclassified all slaves as “apprentices for life,” as a case study to argue for a reinterpretation of the process of African American freedom in the North.  Gradual abolition did not, as others have contended, cause slavery to “die hard” and be erased from historical memory.  Instead, slavery never died as the racial framework that it created continued to be used as a way to limit the economic and political power of African Americans.  Whites rejected its wholesale destruction in an effort to continue the state’s racial system, defend property rights, and distance themselves from the growing apprehensions of sectionalism.