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Chapter 4. Enlightenment, Republicanism, and Executions, 1785-1800
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156 Chapter Three American children and risen to a position of high regard among his Philadelphia neighbors—he was thus every slave master’s worst nightmare: an irrefutable counterargument to white supremacists everywhere.32 In 1787 Bustill addressed a gathering of slaves in Philadelphia. In comparison to Lemuel Haynes and other black abolitionists’ devastating prophecies of retribution at the hands of a vengeful God, Bustill’s approach might initially have reassured slave masters. For Bustill suggests that “you being in bondage in Particular, I would that ye take heed that afend [offend] not with your toungue, be ye wise as Serpants and harmless as Doves. . . . Other ways you Cannot Exspect him to side with you nor to Soport your Cause.” Following this advice, however, Bustill notes that “Sappose they [slave masters] Do not See it, the Great Master will See it.” God’s eventual judgment was thus implied, although not expressly characterized in the terrifying eschatological detail offered by Haynes. Above all, Bustill argued that one must not allow slavery to degrade his or her dignity. “Let us keep our hearts, with all the Diligence that in us Lays,” he implores, “Let us endeavour to walk worthy . . . [and] love the Lord our God. . . . Let us endeavour, by a Frugil Steady indostry to Procure an honst Living for Ourselves And Familys.” This long string of encouragements—including another nod to the Franklinesque trope of being frugal—ends in a phrase that would eventually become central to African American abolitionists: “Let us conduct ourselves as Men.” Bustill concludes his speech by assuring his listeners that if they are righteous and law-abiding, then they will “see Him so engaged on our behalf to Deliver from the bond of Slavery.” Knowing that blacks from Jersey now residing in Philadelphia were organizing to conduct themselves and their neighbors as men—which no one could have mistaken as anything less than fighting for political justice—would have been more than enough evidence to slaveholding New Jerseyans that free blacks and their Quaker allies were plotting great evil. In fact, Johnstone and his Quaker allies worried in the Address that “if one negro was befriended, it was feared to be setting a bad example to the others” (34)—even simple human kindness among outcasts would be interpreted in post-Revolutionary New Jersey, the authors are warning us, as either criminal, revolutionary, or both. There is no way to prove that Bustill’s successes in Philadelphia or the founding of New Jersey’s Abolition Society in 1793 caused Johnstone ’s execution, yet surely the men who hanged Johnstone had such “bad examples” in mind when they killed their black neighbor.33 The Hanging of Abraham Johnstone 157 Indeed, the fear of successful free blacks was intense in New Jersey and, as argued above, was accelerating throughout the nation because of fears related to the Haitian revolution. Although hard-and-fast notions of North and South would not coalesce until well into the antebellum period , even in the late Revolutionary era it was well known that southern plantation slavery was more brutal than the versions practiced in northern states such as New Jersey. Even though the state allowed slavery until 1846, most historians agree that because of the efforts of the area’s Quakers and its hard-to-farm soil, west and south Jersey’s relationship with slavery was tenuous at best. This meant that Pennsylvania, which gradually abolished slavery beginning with a complicated 1780 bill, and New Jersey, especially its Quaker-rich western and southern parts, constituted a borderland between slavery and freedom, South and North, even life and death for fleeing runaways. Hence, because of its liminal, borderland circumstances, 673 runaway servants and 189 runaway slaves are known to have passed through west Jersey between 1704 and 1779; we may safely suspect that many more runaways made it through the region without detection. The prevalence of runaways clearly cast a pall over the status of free blacks such as Johnstone, whom many neighbors no doubt suspected of being—and as I have shown here technically was—an absconding slave claiming to have been legally freed. But while Johnstone could be rhetorically conflated downward in class, and hence lumped together with the sins of runaways and petty thieves, I have also wondered here if he might have been conflated upward as well, and hence lumped together with the sins of successful black leaders like Bustill. If this suspicion is correct, then Johnstone’s case illustrates...