Freedom in the Neutral Ground: Enslaved People and the Revolution in Bergen County

The patriots of Bergen County invoked the language of liberty with passion and conviction. They spoke of natural rights, of the tyranny of taxation without representation, of the duty of free men to resist oppression. They organized committees, drilled militia, and pledged their lives and fortunes to the cause of independence. And many of them owned human beings.

This is the contradiction that sits at the center of the Revolution in Bergen County, and it is a contradiction that the historical record has been slow to confront. Bergen County, settled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, incorporated slavery into its economic and social fabric from the earliest decades of colonization. By the 1770s, enslaved people of African descent made up a significant portion of the county's population. They worked the farms that produced the grain and livestock that both armies fought over. They maintained the households of the prominent families — Zabriskies, Hoppers, Demarests — whose political choices shaped the course of the war. They were present at every significant moment of the Revolution in Bergen County, though they were rarely acknowledged in the accounts written by the people who owned them.

The war, however, created possibilities that peacetime had foreclosed. When Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued his proclamation in November 1775 offering freedom to enslaved people who escaped to British lines, the news traveled along networks that slaveholders could not control. Bergen County's proximity to British-held New York City — just across the river, close enough to reach in a single night's journey — made the promise of freedom geographically accessible in a way that it was not for enslaved people in more remote regions.

They went. Throughout the war, enslaved men and women from the Hackensack Valley crossed into British territory, joining the growing community of Black Loyalists behind British lines. They went at enormous risk — recapture meant punishment, sale, or worse — and they went knowing that the British promise of freedom was contingent, partial, and uncertain. The British did not free enslaved people out of moral conviction; they freed them to deprive the rebels of labor and to swell their own ranks. But for an enslaved person in Bergen County, the distinction between principled and strategic emancipation mattered less than the fact of freedom itself.

Others stayed and negotiated. Some enslaved men served with patriot militia or the Continental Army, sometimes with explicit promises of manumission, sometimes on the tacit understanding that military service might lead to freedom after the war. These promises were kept inconsistently. Some veterans were freed; others were returned to bondage when the fighting stopped. The revolutionary government that had proclaimed the inalienable right to liberty did not extend that right to the people who had helped secure it.

The records are fragmentary. Enslaved people in Bergen County were recorded in church registers, tax lists, wills, and runaway advertisements, but their own voices — their accounts of what the war meant to them, how they made the decision to flee or to stay, what they hoped for and feared — were not preserved. We know their names only when they appeared in documents created by the people who held power over them. The full scope of their experience can be inferred but not fully recovered.

What the records do show is that the Revolution did not end slavery in Bergen County. New Jersey was the last northern state to pass a gradual emancipation act, finally doing so in 1804 — nearly three decades after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal. Even then, the emancipation was gradual: children born to enslaved mothers after 1804 were required to serve their mothers' enslavers for decades before gaining their freedom. Enslaved people remained in Bergen County well into the nineteenth century, a living refutation of the Revolution's founding rhetoric.

Today, the story of the Revolution in Bergen County is increasingly being told in a way that includes the people who were denied its promises. The names that appear in runaway advertisements, church records, and estate inventories are being recovered and recognized as participants in the revolutionary drama — people who understood the meaning of liberty at least as well as the men who wrote it into law and then withheld it from them. Their story is not separate from the Revolution; it is central to it. Any account of Hackensack's revolutionary experience that omits the enslaved population is not merely incomplete — it is inaccurate.

The contradiction is uncomfortable, and it should be. The Revolution was a genuine achievement — a successful assertion of self-governance and individual rights that changed the course of world history. But it was also a profoundly incomplete achievement, and the people it left behind knew that from the beginning. Bergen County's enslaved population did not need Thomas Paine to explain the meaning of liberty. They lived its absence every day.