Enslaved People Seek Freedom During the Revolution

# Enslaved People Seek Freedom During the Revolution

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Bergen County, New Jersey, was home to one of the largest enslaved populations in the northern colonies. Unlike the vast plantations of the South, slavery in Bergen County was woven into the fabric of smaller farms and households, where Dutch and English families relied on enslaved labor to work the fertile lands of the Hackensack Valley. By the 1770s, hundreds of Black men, women, and children lived in bondage across the county, their daily existence defined by the will of those who claimed ownership over them. When the rhetoric of liberty and natural rights began to sweep through the colonies, the profound contradiction between revolutionary ideals and the reality of human bondage was nowhere more visible than in communities like Hackensack, where enslaved people heard the same words about freedom that inspired their enslavers to take up arms against the British Crown.

The upheaval of war created both grave danger and unprecedented opportunity for those held in slavery. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that offered freedom to enslaved people belonging to rebel owners who were willing to escape and serve the British cause. While Dunmore's Proclamation was issued far to the south, its implications rippled through every slaveholding community in the colonies, including Bergen County. The message was clear: the British Empire was willing to use the institution of slavery as a weapon against the rebellion, and enslaved people who could reach British lines might secure their liberty. Four years later, Sir Henry Clinton extended this promise through the Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779, which broadened the offer of freedom to any enslaved person who fled a patriot owner, regardless of whether they took up arms.

For enslaved people in the Hackensack Valley, geography made these promises more than abstract hope. Bergen County sat in close proximity to British-held New York City, separated by a landscape of rivers, marshes, and contested borderlands. Throughout the war, the region served as a no-man's-land between patriot and loyalist forces, and the constant movement of armies and militias created chaos that enslaved people could exploit. Individuals like Sam of Hackensack were among those who seized the moment, seeking freedom during the wartime upheaval that disrupted the normal mechanisms of control and surveillance that had kept enslaved people in bondage. Some fled alone under cover of darkness, navigating dangerous terrain and risking recapture or worse. Others escaped in small groups, making their way toward British lines in New York City, where thousands of formerly enslaved people gathered in refugee communities during the course of the war.

Not all paths to freedom led through British territory. Some enslaved people in Bergen County negotiated for their liberty by serving alongside patriot forces, joining local militia units or enlisting in the Continental Army. Their service exposed yet another layer of contradiction in the revolutionary cause, as men fought for a nation founded on principles of liberty while their own freedom remained conditional, uncertain, and often unfulfilled even after years of military service.

The movement of enslaved people during the Revolution laid bare the moral fault line at the heart of the American experiment. A war fought in the name of inalienable rights and self-governance was being waged by a society that sanctioned the ownership of human beings. In Bergen County and across the new nation, the end of the war did not bring a reckoning with this contradiction. When the British evacuated New York City in 1783, thousands of formerly enslaved people departed with them, many resettling in Nova Scotia, while those who remained in New Jersey found that the promise of revolutionary liberty did not extend to them. New Jersey proved to be the last northern state to address the institution of slavery through legislation, not passing a gradual emancipation act until 1804 — nearly three decades after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men were created equal. The story of enslaved people in Bergen County during the Revolution is a reminder that the fight for freedom in America was never a single story, and that for many, the revolution's promise remained unfulfilled long after the last shots were fired.