At night, I lie awake thinking about someone I do not know. During the day, I comb through online archives and newspapers, trying to find her. Her name was Cretia, and she was a 14-year-old enslaved teenager, put up for sale in 1818 after the death of Ann Plume, her enslaver. Cretia’s life, her dreams, her humanity were seen as equal to the hay listed next to her in the newspaper advertisements. But this wasn’t the “slave” auction blocks of Charleston or somewhere in the Deep South. It was in Newark, New Jersey.
I discovered Cretia’s story while researching Black liberation at New Jersey’s Revolutionary War era sites. Like the millions of enslaved people who lived in the United States, Cretia is a part of America’s enduring legacy of slavery that we remember this month with the holiday Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is a holiday to celebrate freedom and to remember the deep injustice of slavery. On June 19, 1865, the last enslaved people in the South were freed when Union troops marched into Galveston, Texas — more than a year and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, freeing enslaved people in areas that remained under Confederate control. Often known as “Freedom Day,” June 19 became known as Juneteenth (combining “June” and “nineteenth”).
Although Juneteenth is generally seen as the end of slavery in the US, the reality is actually more complicated. Even after the first Juneteenth, there were still enslaved Black people in Northern states.
How is this possible? Modern descriptions often paint the North as slavery-free, abolitionist states, but this isn’t true. For most of America’s colonial history, enslaved Africans were trafficked, sold, and held in all 13 of the original colonies. Both free and enslaved African Americans lived in northern states.
Life for enslaved people in New Jersey
New Jersey had slave trafficking ports, including Perth Amboy and Camden. Many Black people were trafficked from the Caribbean by plantation owners resettling in New Jersey.
Enslaved and free African Americans in New Jersey lived in both rural and early urban areas. They worked on plantations, in houses, in taverns, and on ships as cooks, artisans, laborers, and carriage drivers. While we do not know the exact work people like Cretia performed, we do know they did it without consent or payment. Early New Jersey laws addressed both the caretaking and discipline of enslaved people in an attempt to prevent revolt and exert control. These laws were consistent throughout the region, though towns could create their own local statutes outside the colonial and later state legal structure.
New Jersey also witnessed racial violence, including the massacre of a community of Lenape people and the execution of Black men and women believed to be a part of a rebellion.
As the 19th century progressed, New Jersey laws segregated Black people in churches and required them to pay a membership fee to attend. But even in this oppressive system, there were spaces where enslaved people like Cretia might have found hope and strength through community. These gatherings were the foundation for burgeoning regional Black communities. Later, Black communities built churches, using their own funds and support from white donors. These community hubs became the earliest Black institutions in the North, even as slavery continued to control Black people.
Challenges to Northern slavery
While there were many Black, mixed-race, and white people in New Jersey who fought against slavery, most legislators refused to condemn the institution. Profits from slaveholding organizations had built and maintained the state’s major cities and regional centers like Newark and those in Bergen County.
After years of activism by abolitionists and resistance from enslaved peoples, New Jersey passed its Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act in 1804. Though it would eventually lead to the end of enslavement in New Jersey, it was not a swift end. Under the Act, the children of enslaved Black people born after July 4, 1804, could be freed only when women turned 21 or men, 25. Those in their families and communities born before that date would remain enslaved until they died or attained freedom.
As a 14-year-old in 1818, Cretia did not qualify for emancipation at the age of 21. Her age, listed in the advertisement for her sale, meant that her enslaver would have a “slave for life” and not just for 21 years, as the Gradual Abolition Act ordered. Even those who were eligible for gradual abolition were not always safe. For example, the Lost Souls Project, a history activist group, has found that 136 people were sold to the Deep South in violation of the Act, including a baby who was said to have given consent by crying.
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.
New Jersey didn’t end slavery with the Civil War
Many Northern Democrats, not just in New Jersey, were pro-slavery or at least tolerated it, believing it was the states’ right to choose. Economic factors also influenced this perspective, as Northern wealth depended on the Southern economy.
When the Civil War began in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln feared that some Northern states might also secede. To reduce the risk, Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed only those enslaved in "rebellious states," the mostly Southern states that had left the Union. The proclamation did not free those who were enslaved in any area that remained loyal to the Union, including New Jersey.
The number of enslaved people in New Jersey during the Civil War is still disputed. Many scholars believed that there were 18 enslaved people, according to the 1860 Census. However, new estimates put this number closer to 65. These people had to wait through the brutal Civil War before they were legally freed. And even after the war was over, full emancipation was not guaranteed.
Although Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States in January 1865, it still needed to be ratified by state legislatures. Many Democrats in the New Jersey General Assembly vehemently argued against the 13th Amendment. They claimed that Black men wouldn’t be able to vote effectively, spread fears about interracial marriage, and argued that the government did not have the right to legislate how enslavers should deal with their property, their “slaves.” Ultimately, the New Jersey State Senate would vote 12 against and 3 in favor of the amendment.
Despite New Jersey’s resistance, the 13th Amendment became law after it was ratified by a sufficient number of other states. As his first official act, Governor Marcus L. Ward of Newark signed a state constitutional amendment, roughly six months after the first Juneteenth, finally ending slavery in New Jersey once and for all.
I am still looking for Cretia among records in the South and New Jersey. Part of me imagines that perhaps she had the good fortune to escape, as thousands of other freedom-seekers around the country did. Nevertheless, I continue to search for a woman who might have been enslaved even after the date we celebrate the freedom of those in Galveston.
This article was produced with Made By Us, a coalition of more than 400 history museums working to connect with today's youth.
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