Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 by James J. Gigantino II (review)

James Gigantino II has written what will probably long remain the definitive book on the abolition of slavery in New Jersey. He frames his work in opposition to “the rather simplistic notion that slavery was easily vanquished” in the North, and “disputes the contention that a monolithic ‘free’ North stood in opposition to a ‘slave’ South” (215). Indeed, New Jersey was the last state to pass a gradual abolition law and voted against Abraham Lincoln in both 1860 and 1864.

Gigantino persuasively shows that during and after the War for Independence, many white New Jerseyans embraced slavery and opposed emancipation in order to rebuild the economy and reestablish the social order. But in 1803, with both Republicans and Federalists claiming to be the true inheritors of the American Revolution, emancipation became a political issue. In order to demonstrate their commitment to the principles of 1776, Republicans advocated abolition. Federalists followed suit and a bill passed with large bipartisan support in 1804. Thus emancipation resulted from partisan posturing rather than the inevitable outcome of the Revolution or economic change.

Under the abolition law, Jersey slaves born before 1804 remained enslaved for life and their children would remain in bondage until the ages of twenty-one for females or twenty-five for males. Black freedom came slowly in other state as well, as demonstrated by scholars such as Gary B. Nash and Jean Soderland in Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath (1991) and Shane White in Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (1991), but Gigantino argues that African Americans were even worse off in the Garden State. New Jersey lacked an antislavery organization of the prestige or activity of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society or the New York Manumission Society, so Jersey blacks had fewer allies. Gigantino is probably too quick, however, to dismiss New Jersey’s existing abolitionists as “patently racist” (98), conflating their criticism of slavery’s degrading influence on African Americans with notions of biological difference. Nonetheless, some slaveholders took advantage of general public apathy to circumvent gradual abolition laws by illegally selling slaves and their free children out of the state into hereditary bondage.

The Ragged Road is best when recognizing change over time and contradictory tendencies. By 1818 the illegal sale of term slaves had gained enough attention that New Jersey politicians called for federal regulation of the domestic slave trade, and in 1819 New Jerseyans rallied in support of restricting slavery in Missouri and the remaining federal territories. Yet although white New Jerseyans increasingly opposed the domestic slave trade and the territorial expansion of slavery, few demanded the abolition of southern slavery. Racism and the persistence of unfree labor within the state encouraged white New Jerseyans to sympathize with southern slaveholders who claimed they could not safely abolish slavery. Schemes of African colonization attracted considerably more support than antislavery societies. Some black New Jerseyans viewed emigration to Africa as the best of many bad options, but Gigantino emphasizes that the majority strove to establish better lives within the state. Their individual struggles were buttressed by collective efforts to petition for suffrage and other rights in the 1830s and 1840s, achieving limited reforms. On the eve of the Civil War, New Jersey was still home to eighteen slaves and several hundred African Americans held in temporary bondage, and slavery did not fully end in the state until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Gigantino’s book deserves a place among the best monographs on state-based gradual emancipation, but he misses an opportunity to move beyond a focus on gradualism’s limitations, which has been the dominant theme in this literature since the early 1990s. In light of what we have learned from this rich scholarship, New Jersey’s “failure…to ensure a timely and painless movement from servitude to legal freedom” (110) is hardly surprising. Ironically, Gigantino’s continued...