The Cranbury Inn sits on Main Street in the historic village of Cranbury.
It does not look like a train station – there are no railroad tracks in front of the white, two-story building – but it was a stop on the Underground Railroad that took enslaved people to freedom.
Historian Rick Geffken outlined the history of slavery in the American colonies and the steps that enslaved people took to flee the “peculiar institution” – as it was known in the South – from the 1680s until they were freed after the Civil War in 1865.
The Dutch introduced slavery into New Jersey and New York for economic reasons, said Geffken, who spoke at the Lawrence Historical Society’s annual meeting Feb. 23. He delivered the annual Ruth Barringer Lecture at the session.
The Dutch West India Company, which was chartered in 1621, initially steered away from slavery. But when the Dutch looked across the Hudson River to New York – or New Amsterdam, as they called it – they saw great swaths of land that could be developed.
To entice development, the Dutch West India Company advertised in Holland that settlers would be given land and slaves, Geffken said. The first African American slaves had arrived in present-day Jersey City in 1626.
The English had also begun their own settlements in the New World. They conquered New Amsterdam in 1664, unifying their holdings from Maine to Virginia. They left the Dutch and slavery intact, Geffken said.
The Duke of York, meanwhile, had started the Royal African Company in 1660. The company traded English goods to Africans in exchange for slaves – people that the Africans themselves had enslaved.
Between the early 1500s to the middle 1800s, about 12 million African slaves were shipped to North America, South America and the Caribbean. Each slave ship held about 300 slaves. If only 275 of them survived, it did not matter because they were not considered to be people, Geffken said.
A 1737 census of Hunterdon County, which included modern-day Mercer County, showed 5,300 white inhabitants and 219 slaves. They constituted 4% of the county’s population, he said.
The need for slaves in New Jersey, which was an agricultural state, grew after the Revolutionary War, Geffken said. The price of grain had increased, and the slaves were needed to grow more crops. By 1800, slaves accounted for about 10% of the state’s population.
Some slaveholders wanted to free their slaves, but laws were enacted to discourage it, he said. A slaveholder would have had to pay 200 pounds (about $35,000 in today’s money), plus 20 pounds annually to support the former slave for life.
It was assumed that if a slave were to be freed, the slave would be on the public dole. But many slaves had skills they could have used to support themselves, Geffken said.
Some slaves did not wait to be freed and fled on their own. Slaveholders placed advertisements in the newspapers describing the runaway slave, including the clothing he or she was wearing in order to identify the slave.
Slaves on the run often had help from people who opposed slavery, by means of the Underground Railroad. Although it is mostly associated with the years before the Civil War, the Underground Railroad dates to the late 1700s.
The Underground Railroad was not really a railroad. It had no tracks. It was a series of safe houses, stretching from the Southern states to the Northern states, where runaway slaves would stay on their way to freedom.
“The Underground Railroad was everywhere,” Geffken said.
The official start of the Underground Railroad in New Jersey happened in the 1850s, Geffken said. William Still, whose family had been slaves, was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and chairman of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.
Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery and escaped, also was an important figure in the Underground Railroad in New Jersey, he said. She went on many excursions and led about 300 slaves from Maryland to freedom.
There were many routes on the Underground Railroad in New Jersey. A runaway slave would stay at a safe house and then move on to the next stop. The destination was New York City.
One of the routes ran from Camden to Burlington, following the Delaware River. Another route ran from Salem through Woodbury, Mount Laurel and Burlington to Princeton.
The slaves stayed off the main roads to avoid slave-catchers, Geffken said. They walked at night or were hidden in a wagon. Sometimes, they were put on a coal barge that was to be shipped to Canada.
The Enoch Middleton House on Old York Road in the Crosswicks section of Hamilton Township was a stop on the Underground Railroad, he said. Middleton was a Quaker. As a conductor, he guided slaves to Allentown and Cranbury.
In Cranbury, it was the Cranbury Inn that served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The runaway slaves went to New Brunswick on the way to their ultimate destination of New York City.
“No matter what you think about slavery, it is evil,” Geffken said of slaveholders. “Just because you did not beat your slave, it does not mean you were good.”
