Cato (Enslaved, Elizabethtown)

Among the hundreds of enslaved people who lived in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, during the American Revolution, the man recorded in surviving documents simply as Cato represents a vast population whose stories were systematically excluded from the historical record. No birth date, no parentage, no account of his childhood survives — not because these details did not exist, but because the white community that controlled the written record did not consider them worth preserving. What is known is that Cato lived in a town deeply enmeshed in the patriot cause, a community whose leading families — signers of founding documents, governors, Continental Congress delegates — built their political lives on the rhetoric of liberty while holding human beings as property. New Jersey was a slaveholding colony, and Elizabethtown was no exception. Enslaved people there worked as domestic servants, farm laborers, and skilled artisans, their labor sustaining the very households that organized resistance to British tyranny. The 1790 census would record hundreds of enslaved individuals in Essex County alone, confirming that Cato was not an anomaly but part of a deeply embedded institution that shaped every aspect of daily life in the community.

Elizabethtown during the Revolution was a dangerous and volatile place, and enslaved people like Cato navigated its upheavals with no power to choose their own allegiance. British raids struck the town repeatedly, and enslaved residents endured the same violence, disruption, and scarcity that afflicted free inhabitants — yet without any stake in the political outcome that their labor was helping to determine. Some enslaved people in the area performed work for the Continental Army, carrying messages, building fortifications, and maintaining the infrastructure of resistance, either voluntarily or under compulsion from their enslavers. Others looked across the Arthur Kill to British-held Staten Island, where Lord Dunmore's Proclamation of 1775 and General Henry Clinton's Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779 promised freedom to enslaved people who escaped patriot masters. That narrow waterway represented one of the most consequential boundaries in the lives of Elizabethtown's enslaved population — a border between bondage and the possibility, however uncertain, of freedom. Whether Cato attempted such a crossing, served the patriot cause, or simply endured the war's chaos while laboring for an enslaver is not recorded. The silence is the record.

The human stakes for enslaved people in wartime Elizabethtown were of a fundamentally different order than those faced by their white neighbors. A patriot farmer risked his property and his life for political self-determination; an enslaved person like Cato risked everything simply by existing in a war zone where he had no legal autonomy. Attempting escape to British lines meant crossing patrolled waters, risking recapture and brutal punishment, and gambling on the sincerity of a foreign army's promises. Remaining in place meant continued bondage, compulsory labor that might benefit a cause proclaiming rights that explicitly did not extend to him, and exposure to the same military violence that threatened the town. Enslaved people attended Elizabethtown's churches in segregated sections, lived in close quarters with their enslavers, and possessed intimate knowledge of the community's geography, resources, and social networks — knowledge that made them valuable to both sides and vulnerable to both as well. Cato's survival through the Revolutionary period, in whatever form it took, required a kind of strategic endurance that rarely appears in conventional narratives of patriotism and sacrifice, but which deserves recognition as its own form of navigating an impossible landscape.

Today, Cato's significance lies precisely in the incompleteness of his record, which forces us to confront what American communities chose to remember and what they chose to erase. Elizabethtown produced towering figures of the founding era — men whose names adorn streets, buildings, and monuments — and it simultaneously produced a system that denied fundamental humanity to people like Cato. New Jersey was the last Northern state to pass a gradual emancipation law, not doing so until 1804, and the institution persisted in various legal forms until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Recognizing Cato does not diminish the achievements of Elizabethtown's patriots; it completes a story that has been told partially for too long. His presence in the historical record, fragmentary as it is, testifies to the labor, resilience, and humanity of the Black population that sustained the community through its most celebrated chapter. To tell the story of the American Revolution in Elizabeth without telling the story of its enslaved people is to replicate the very erasure that made enslavement possible — the refusal to see certain people as fully present in the places they inhabited, the work they performed, and the history they helped create.

WHY CATO (ENSLAVED, ELIZABETHTOWN) MATTERS TO ELIZABETH

Cato's story challenges visitors and students to hold two truths simultaneously: that Elizabethtown was a cradle of American liberty and that it was a place where human beings were held in bondage by the very people who championed that liberty. Walking the same streets where patriots organized resistance to British rule means walking streets where enslaved people labored without freedom, worshipped in segregated pews, and weighed impossible choices about escape, survival, and allegiance. Cato represents the thousands of enslaved and free Black residents whose presence shaped Elizabethtown but whose names were rarely recorded. His story makes the Revolution's promises both more powerful and more painful — a reminder that the work of fulfilling those promises extended far beyond the battlefield and far beyond 1783.

TIMELINE

• 1664: English colonial rule establishes legal framework for slavery in New Jersey
• 1665: Elizabethtown founded; enslaved labor present from the settlement's earliest years
• 1775: Lord Dunmore's Proclamation offers freedom to enslaved people who escape patriot masters and join British forces
• 1776–1783: Cato lives as an enslaved person in Elizabethtown during the Revolutionary War, enduring British raids and wartime upheaval
• 1779: General Henry Clinton issues the Philipsburg Proclamation, broadening British promises of freedom to enslaved people behind patriot lines
• 1780: Major British raids strike Elizabethtown and surrounding communities, disrupting lives of all residents, enslaved and free
• 1790: First federal census records hundreds of enslaved individuals in Essex County, New Jersey
• 1804: New Jersey becomes the last Northern state to pass a gradual emancipation act
• 1865: Thirteenth Amendment finally ends all slavery in New Jersey

SOURCES

• Gigantino, James J. II. The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
• Hodges, Graham Russell. Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865. Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
• Hatfield, Edwin F. History of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Carlton and Lanahan, 1868.
• Hodges, Graham Russell, and Alan Edward Brown, eds. "Pretends to Be Free": Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey. Fordham University Press, 2019.