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.Livingston regarded slavery as utterly inconsistent, both with the principlesof Christianity & humanity; & in Americ[a]ns who have almost idolize[ed]liberty. Not only did the legislature disagree, but the law fi nally passed inFebruary 1786 set fi nes for importation so low that violators regarded thepenalty as a minor nuisance.Nor did the act liberate bondpeople illegallybrought into the state.The law did, however, ban African Americans freed inother states from entering New Jersey.58For the next eighteen years, abolitionists and proslavery advocates arguedtheir respective cases from the pulpit, the printing press, and in the state snewspapers.Quaker David Cooper penned a vitriolic pamphlet, A SeriousAddress to the Rulers of America, on the Inconsistency of Their Conduct Respect-ing Slavery, which accused New Jersey slaveholders of committing treason against the American ideal of natural rights.When that failed to advance hiscause, he led a procession of eleven other Quakers into the assembly to pre-sent a widely circulated petition signed by the most respectable names inthe State. The New Jersey Gazette championed reform and routinely carriedletters and editorials demanding emancipation.But the conservative NewJersey Journal just as routinely fi red back.One writer, adopting the ironicpseudonym Impartial, insisted that the state constitution protected prop-erty rights in humans just as it upheld other forms of chattel ownership.Adopting a view commonly heard across the southern states over the nexteighty years, Impartial therefore maintained that only individual masters,and not the state, could emancipate the slaves.Any gradualist attempts toend the system, he added, should await a feasible plan to resettle emancipatedbondpeople in a separate region. 59Masters, of course, looked even less favorably on any scheme for the colo-nization of freed blacks, who constituted their agricultural labor force, thanthey did on proposals for gradual emancipation.Finally in the spring of1804 proslavery forces gave way.Enough Republicans joined the solid blockof Federalists to adopt what had become the traditional gradualist statute.Bondmen born after July 4, 1804, were to become free upon reaching theage of twenty-fi ve; for female African Americans the age of liberation wastwenty-one.As elsewhere across the North, bondpeople born before that datewere damned to remain slaves for life unless New Jersey saw fit to later pass asecond law liberating them (and it never did).Since the act was copied fromNew York s statute as well as from the much earlier law of Pennsylvania,masters might abandon black children to the overseers of the poor.So manydid so that within four years, fully $12,000 (roughly one-third of the state sbudget) went to fund abandonment programs.Worse yet, the 1804 actquok walker s suit | 119 allowed whites to sell their chattel beyond state boundaries, and most issuesof the Journal s pages carried advertisements for the sale of young blacks.Among those listed for sale was twenty-six-year-old Bett, listed as a slave forlife, as she was born in 1788, well before the passage of the gradual emanci-pation act.As late as 1861, as the young men of New Jersey marched off tofi ght in the Civil War, whites held eighteen African Americans as appren-tices for life. Less enamored of polite euphemisms, census takers categorizedthem as slaves. 60As luckless bondwomen such as Bett understood all too well, the seriesof gradualist laws set in motion twenty-four years before in Pennsylvaniawas just the beginning of what would be a lengthy struggle for equality andhuman rights.Quok Walker and other black activists across the North mightdemand an immediate end to slavery, but all too often their white allies werewilling to accept the sort of lingering compromises they never would haveagreed to had those provisions applied to their own spouses or children.JohnAdams saw no contradiction in bragging that he always employed freemen,both as domestics and laborers, while insisting that the abolition of slaverymust be gradual and accomplished with much caution and circumspection. Within the span of just over two decades, reform-minded white politicianssucceeded in setting unfree labor on the road to extinction in every statenorth of New Jersey.But far fewer whites advocated political rights or fullcitizenship for former slaves.Having freed young black men and women,elite reformers typically believed their task to be done.All too often, thedecline of slavery in the North was caused by an influx of cheap white labor,as was the case in New Jersey, or the sale of healthy young bondmen intoGeorgia or South Carolina.According to the census of 1810 put anotherway, thirty-fi ve years after Lemuel Haynes risked his life at Lexington andConcord there remained some 27,000 slaves in the North, compared toabout 50,000 free blacks.As historian Alfred F.Young has aptly written: Itwas a grudging emancipation. 61Nor did the demise of slavery mark a change in the way that white north-erners viewed their black neighbors.The egalitarian spirit of the Revolu-tion helped to eliminate unfree labor, but that hardly meant that most whitePatriots embraced the dream of a more racially egalitarian society.Even manyreformers who supported black demands for liberty wanted little to do withAfrican Americans after those initial goals were achieved
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