New Jersey was divided politically and socially on the question of the status of African Americans and enslavement. The work of Howard University professor Marion M. Thompson Wright (1903-1963), a native of New Jersey and historian of African American history of her home state, stated: “New Jersey is a state in which are found, so far as Negroes are concerned, practices that many people believe to exist only in the southern area of the country.” Her articles published in the Journal of Negro History in the 1940s describe the conflict over progress for African Americans from the colonial period onward. Historian James Gigantino notes in his 2015 book, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865, that two major groups of settlers influenced the history of enslavement in the state, members of the Society of Friends, called the Quakers and planters from the Caribbean who settled in New Jersey, bringing their enslaved property with them.
The tense reaction of the white population of New Jersey after a rebellion of enslaved people in nearby New York City in April 1712 illustrated the growing reliance on enslaved labor. A series of laws tightening restrictions on the Black population, restricting the enslaved, the free and the ability to transition to freedom were put in place. When the 1804 Gradual Manumission Act was enacted in New Jersey, a process was set in place to put the existing enslaved population in a status of bound laborer and children born after July 4,1804 in a path to freedom that would take twenty-five years of service to the enslaver of their mother. There were sixteen people identified as enslaved in the New Jersey Census of 1860, out of a total black population of over 25,000. Abraham Lincoln did not win the popular vote in New Jersey in either 1860 or 1864. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1865 but without New Jersey’s support. New Jersey State Legislature passed the 13th Amendment in 1866.