The Flexibility of Freedom: Slavery and Servitude in Early Ohio

For many antebellum slaves, the sight of the Ohio River brought with it jubilation and the realization that they might finally have a chance at freedom. Thousands of runaways, like the fictional Eliza, the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, saw the river as the border of slavery, where it “lay like Jordan [with] the Canaan of liberty on the other side.” Although the Ohio River had become a potent symbol of African American freedom in the mid-nineteenth century, the territory north of the Ohio did not always represent such a stark contrast to the slave South.¹

The idea that the North rested upon freedom has been enshrined in the historical master narrative over the last fifty years. Consensus historians of the 1950s began the process of equating American history with a universal march of liberal freedom while subsequent scholars writing on the disappearance of slavery in the Northeast and the rise of the Republican Party in the decade before the Civil War showed the resolve and power that free labor and free men could have on historiography.² In contrast with that narrative, early Ohio, from its territorial period onward, was rife with debates over the continuation of slavery and other servile relationships. Instead of steadfastly embracing freedom, these debates led many white Ohioans to advocate for a continued bound role for blacks in the new state.³

Just as white society across the United States remained in a state of flux after the Revolution, flexible definitions of slavery and freedom prevailed in both early Ohio and the northern states that had enacted gradual abolition laws.⁴ This article concentrates on the connection between early Ohio and the Northeast, specifically early national New Jersey, through an analysis of slave transfer documents housed at Rutgers University Library’s Archives and Special Collections (reproduced below). These legal documents gave permission to Joseph Hagaman, a respected physician and farmer from Princeton, to relocate from the Garden State to Cincinnati in 1812, along with his three enslaved African Americans—fourteen-year-old Mary, thirteen-year-old Bob, and eight-year-old Anthony. In the context of the debates over slavery in Ohio, these documents illustrate that although slavery ended in the new state, flexible forms of unfree African American labor endured here, as they did in many other midwestern locales.⁵

In February 1804, the New Jersey legislature passed the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which declared that children born to slave mothers after July 4, 1804, “shall be free, but shall remain the servant of the owner of his or her mother . . . and shall continue in such service, if a male, until the age of twenty-five years, and if a female until the age of twenty-one years.”⁶ Most northern states that abolished slavery included this requirement of service; Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire were the exceptions, as they eliminated slavery through judicial decisions, constitutions, or by simple attrition. Gradual abolitionists utilized these service requirements as they reduced the monetary loss slaveholders suffered allowed masters to continue to reap the benefits of both the bound labor of those slaves born before July 4, 1804, and their children born afterward. The treatment these children experienced—hard work, physical punishments, and separation from family by sale—made them indistinguishable from those who remained in legal bondage. Indeed, Hagaman described Anthony, a child born after 1804, as “living in the condition of a slave.” In this sense, all children born to slaves after July 4, 1804 became slaves for a term.⁷

With abolition under way, New Jersey’s slaveholders continued to hold their slaves for a term in bondage as well as transport them out of state for continued service or sell them despite their future free status.⁸ New Jersey slaveholders thus participated in the growing internal slave trade caused by both the 1808 closing of the Atlantic slave trade and Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. In the most notorious slave trading scheme in New...