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In 1841, black residents of Paterson, New Jersey called the state legislature's "attention to the disabilities, privations, and sufferings under which the colored population of our state labor." They discussed slavery's continued presence in New Jersey and argued that "we cannot conceive of a reason, either legal, moral, or physical, why young people of African descent should not be" free at birth. The Paterson blacks decried the state's gradual abolition system because it provided children no effective education, leaving residents to "look upon the servants for years ... as slaves so long as they remain under age, slaves to all intents and purposes." They called for the manumission of all Jersey slaves and for the freedom of all children bom under the gradual abolition law because they believed slavery's continuation influenced "the unjust prejudice which exists in the white population against" all blacks.1
The Paterson group's complaints highlight the slowness of abolition in New Jersey. The 1804 Gradual Abolition Act, like similar laws in other states, granted freedom to children bom to slaves after July 4, 1804, once they served their mother's master for twenty-five years if male or twenty-one years if female. These children opened a fluid boundary between slavery and freedom that slaveholders exploited with little resistance. Therefore, instead of starting from a presumption of freedom, masters, slaves, free blacks, and the law itself understood that anyone bom to a slave after 1804 was a slave for a term2
This contention challenges recent scholarship by James Oakes and Paul Polgar, who have celebrated the progressive elements of gradual abolition in the North, illustrating the relative elasticity of colonial definitions of race that allowed African Americans to advocate for citizenship. Instead, my work aligns more closely to Joanne Pope Melish and others who have emphasized the sluggishness of abolition and how colonial definitions of race and slavery slowly changed in the early republic. I argue that in New Jersey, gradual abolition progressed even more slowly than in New England and was not complete until after the Civil War. Therefore, Jersey slaveholders still found slavery and bound labor important as the sectional crisis unfolded. This made New Jerseyans markedly different from the New Englanders examined by Melish. Those New Englanders hoped to disown their slave...