History of Slavery in New Jersey - Abolition of Slavery

Abolition of Slavery

Following the Revolutionary War, New Jersey banned the importation of slaves in 1788, but at the same time forbade free blacks from elsewhere from settling in the state. In the first two decades after the war, many northern states rapidly abolished slavery, and some slaveholders independently manumitted their slaves. Some people of color left the areas where they had been enslaved and moved to more frontier areas. Since slaves were widely used in agriculture, as well as the ports, the New Jersey state legislature was the last in the North to abolish slavery, passing a law in 1804 for its gradual abolition. The 1804 statute and subsequent laws freed children born after the law was passed. African Americans born to slave mothers after July 4, 1804 had to serve lengthy apprenticeships to the owners of their mothers. Women were freed at 21, but men were not emancipated until the age of 25. Slaves who had been born before these laws were passed were considered, after 1846, as indentured servants who were "apprenticed for life."

Although at first New Jersey allowed free people of color to vote, the legislature disfranchised them in 1807, an exclusion that lasted until 1875. By 1830 two-thirds of the slaves remaining in the North were held by masters in New Jersey, as New York had freed the last of its slaves in 1824 under gradual abolition. It was not until 1846 that New Jersey abolished slavery, but it qualified it by redefining former slaves as apprentices who were "apprenticed for life" to their masters. Slavery did not truly end in the state until it was ended nationally in 1865 after the American Civil War and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Communities of free negros and freedmen formed at Dunkerhook in Paramus and at the New York state line at Skunk Hollow, also called The Mountain. A founding African-American settler bought land there in 1806, and later bought more. Other families joined him, and the community continued into the twentieth century. According to the historian David S. Cohen in The Ramapo Mountain People (1974), free people of color migrated from Manhattan into other parts of the frontier of northeastern New Jersey, where some intermarried and became ancestors of the Ramapo Mountain Indians.