In the last census before the Civil War, New jersey was the only state with enslaved black Americans north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In 1865, New Jersey refused to ratify the Thirteen Amendment, the amendment that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude across the country but with an “exception” for punishment for a crime. But, finally on January 23, 1866, New Jersey ratified the 13th amendment. It was the last of the Northern States to ratify.
Quakers in southern and western NJ were abolitionists, but slaveholders in northeastern counties powerful. Early 1790s, Quakers formed the NJ Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (SPAS). Lawyers sued to prevent free blacks from being kidnapped and sold. Enslaved people negotiated with owners for freedom. Or ran away.
In 1804, New Jersey passed a Gradual Abolition of Slavery law that created category of “slaves for a term.” It allowed children of enslaved Black people born after July 4, 1804, to be free only after they reached the age of 21 years for women and 25 for men. Other family members remained enslaved. In this period, the average life expectancy was 40 years old, so the 1804 law essentially took more than half the eligible people’s lives before granting freedom.
Bergen County was largest slaveholding county; at its peak in 1800 20% of the population was enslaved.
In 1846 a New Jersey law claimed to abolish slavery but it merely reclassified enslaved people as “apprentices for life.” In 1849, the legislature passed a joint resolution stating – with no irony – that “the people of NJ, believing the institution of human slavery to be a great moral and political evil…”
In 2008, the legislature passed a resolution of official apology for slavery making it the first northern state to express official regret for role in “perpetuating the institution of slavery “ 2008.
https://www.npr.org/2008/01/08/17925822/new-jersey-apologizes-for-slavery)
However, through coerced labor in New Jersey’s prisons, slavery/involuntary servitude persist.
The campaign to unequivocally prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude in New Jersey’s constitution would finally right this moral wrong.
For more on New Jersey’s history of slavery, see:
https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/legislating-slavery-in-new-jersey