The North's Last Slave State: NJ Didn't Ban Slavery Until After Juneteenth

NEW JERSEY — Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, marking the day the Union Army proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas — the last state of the Confederacy with chattel slavery. But lesser known is the fact that during that seminal moment on June 19, 1865, slavery remained legal in the constitution of New Jersey — the last Northern state to end the institutional practice.

Chattel slavery's legal death in New Jersey came on Jan. 23, 1866, when Governor Marcus L. Ward signed a state Constitutional Amendment bringing it to an absolute end — three years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after 80,000 New Jerseyans fought for the Union forces that won the Civil War, there remained a bitter fight to abolish slavery in New Jersey.

Slavery on New Jersey land began in 1625, when Dutch settlers trafficked enslaved Africans to develop the colony of New Netherland. After England took control of the colony in 1665, its colonists continued to traffic enslaved people from Africa, the West Indies and Native Americans from the Carolinas.

New Jersey banned the importation of enslaved people in 1788. But the state also prohibited free Black people from coming to the state and settling here. At that time, abolition in New Jersey met resistance from leaders, who said slavery was necessary for rebuilding the economy after the Revolutionary War.

The State Legislature passed a gradual-abolition law in 1804, becoming the last Northern state to begin the process of ending chattel slavery within its borders. The act stated that children of enslaved people born after July 4, 1804, would become free — at age 21 for women and 15 for boys. But those born before didn't have that option, and by 1830, two-thirds of the North's enslaved people were held in New Jersey.

To address protests from enslavers who claimed they'd have to support children of enslaved people who would eventually become free, New Jersey authorized them to break families apart and abandon children of enslaved people to the state when they were at least 1 year old. Those children worked as "apprentices" — often to the same enslaver who abandoned them, while the state paid for the maintenance of each child.

"In a period when the average life expectancy was 40 years old, the 1804 law essentially took more than half of these people's lives to satisfy the economic and political demands of New Jersey enslavers," Noelle Lorraine Williams wrote for the New Jersey Historical Commission.

For perspective, New York passed a gradual-abolition law in 1799, with the last of the state's enslaved person becoming free in 1827. But New Jersey continued to fight against total abolition until the bitter end of chattel slavery.

The New Jersey Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the practice. In 1804, the high court upheld the sale of a 13-year-old Black girl, despite language in the gradual-abolition law that an apprentice was subject to assignment but not sale. The state Supreme Court continued to permit the sale of Black children as "apprentices" as late as 1827.

By the 1830s, slavery declined in New Jersey. Starting in 1846, enslaved people born before the 1804 law became considered indentured servants who were "apprenticed for life."

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation Jan. 1, 1863, declaring "that all persons held as slaves" in the rebellious states "are, and henceforth shall be free." But New Jersey wasn't a rebellious state, and it refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a criminal conviction.

About 16 people remained enslaved in New Jersey until December 1865 — six months after the seminal Juneteenth moment in which enslaved people in Texas found out they were cheated of their freedom.

Fast forward to 2008, when New Jersey became the first Northern state to express official regret for the wrongs slavery inflicted. Then-Assemblymember William D. Payne, who sponsored the resolution, said that the resolution would help educate people about the fact that there were 13,000 enslaved Africans in New Jersey during the early 1800s.

"I think this resolution, for number one, serves to enlighten people, open up their eyes and let them realize that there needs to be a lot more done about addressing the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation," Payne told NPR in 2008. "It still exists in our state."

Juneteenth became a state holiday in September 2020 and a federal holiday last year. The day celebrates an important milestone, while also bringing awareness to what it took to end chattel slavery in states that held onto the institution, including New Jersey.

"In essence, Juneteenth, not only marks the day African Americans in Texas realized that they had been robbed of two years of their freedom, following the Emancipation Proclamation," Williams wrote. "It also commemorates all of our ancestors here in New Jersey who were the last Blacks in the North to be ensnared in that bloody institution."