When the Dutch and English began to settle in present-day New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, they enacted territorial policies that disrupted and displaced indigenous Lenape communities. One of the most consequential of these policies, the Treaty of Easton (1758), resulted in the loss of the last of Lenape land in New Jersey.

Ongoing tensions between the French, their Indigenous allies, and the British during the French and Indian War (1754-63) led to the convening of indigenous leaders and British colonial officials in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1758. They agreed on a treaty which asserted that, in exchange for Lenape lands in New Jersey and the end of their alliance with the French, Anglo-American settlers would no longer be permitted to settle west of the Alleghenies. While the Lenape upheld their commitment to cease supporting the French in the war, settlers continued to colonize indigenous lands in western Pennsylvania, often displacing Lenape communities.

In New Jersey, the Treaty of Easton forced the Lenape people out of their land, pushing them north to New York or west to Pennsylvania. A small group of Lenape, mostly Christian converts, remained in New Jersey and moved to the newly established Brotherton Reservation in modern-day Indian Mills, Burlington County. About 200 Lenape lived at the reservation, led by missionary Reverend John Brainerd. After Brainerd left in 1777, Brotherton residents struggled to maintain control over the land in the face of white settlers who had leased land on the reservation. In 1780, the Indigenous residents of Brotherton released a statement asserting that they would no longer accept white settlers on their land: “Be it known by this, that it has been in our consideration of late about settling of White People on the Indian Lands, And we have concluded that it is a thing which ought not to be, & a thing that will not be allowed by us…We have come upon those resolutions we hope for our better living in friendship among one another, it may be that there is some which does not like white people for their Neighbours, for fear of their not agreeing as they ought to do.”

In the aftermath of forced displacement, and amidst poor living conditions on the Brotherton reservation, the remaining Lenape in New Jersey affirmed their right to what was left of their land and community. Though they would ultimately sell the land in 1802 and move westward to establish the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe in Wisconsin, their commitment to the land despite efforts at removal illuminates the history of Indigenous resistance to Anglo-American colonization.

By the end of the 18th century, enslavement was widespread in New Jersey. Dutch and English settlers in the 1700s built significant plantations in the eastern part of the state, where Bergen, Monmouth, Somerset, and Middlesex counties held the highest concentrations of enslaved people. Enslaved people on New Jersey plantations were forced to labor in a variety of different types of work, including iron and copper mining, domestic labor, and cultivating crops such as wheat, corn, and rye. In this eastern region, proximity to large slave trade markets at ports in New York and Perth Amboy enabled the growth of slavery through the turn of the century.

At the same time, abolitionist sentiment was growing in New Jersey and across the nation. In the less densely-populated western region of the state, Quakers formed the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery in Burlington in 1793. The group organized campaigns to petition for abolition and secure further rights for enslaved people, but were met with backlash from enslavers in the eastern part of the state.

The New Jersey legislature responded to these tensions with the 1804 Gradual Abolition Act, which stipulated that: “every child born of a slave within this state, after the fourth day of July next [July 4, 1804] shall be free; but shall remain the servant of the owner of his or her mother, and the executors, administrators or assigns of such owner, in the same manner as if such child had been bound to service by the trustees or overseers of the poor, and shall continue in such service, if a male, until the age of twenty-five years, and if a female until the age of twenty-one years.”

The act did not emancipate any enslaved people. Rather, it maintained the property rights of slaveholders and allowed them to continue to exploit the labor of those they enslaved prior to 1804 and hold their children in “apprenticeships” until they became of age. While on the surface the law purported to end enslavement in New Jersey, these apprenticeships enabled slavery to continue under a different name until the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865 and its ratification in New Jersey in 1866. New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish slavery.

Antislavery activism and legislative steps towards abolition emboldened New Jersey enslavers to find loopholes in the law that would allow them to continue to profit from slavery. In 1812, the Gradual Abolition Act was amended to limit the domestic slave trade and afford some additional rights to the enslaved, stating that “no negro or slave or servant of colour for life, or years, shall hereafter be removed out of this State with the design or intention that the place of residence of such slave or servant shall be thereby altered or changed without his or her consent.” Moreover, it stipulated that emigration required the consent of the enslaved as documented by two local officials.

In 1818, Middlesex County Judge Jacob Charles Van Wickle organized an interstate slave trading ring to transport enslaved people in New Jersey to Louisiana, where they could be sold at a higher profit. To circumvent the 1812 law, Van Wickle recruited the help of three other Middlesex County judges—James Skinner, John Smith, and V.W.F Outcault— to certify the consent of the enslaved. Certification of consent was dubious at best—individuals were coerced, deceived, and in some cases, kidnapped into the trading ring.

On March 11, 1818, the brig Mary Ann departed from the port at Perth Amboy, illegally transporting thirty-nine enslaved people southward to New Orleans, including several children, one an infant (Rozena) just six weeks old. Two months later, the Thorn carried another thirty-nine people from Perth Amboy to New Orleans. Over a period of eight months, over 137 enslaved people were forcibly trafficked from New Jersey to Louisiana by Van Wickle’s trading ring.

Public outrage in November 1818 led the New Jersey state legislature to pass an additional law—An Act to prohibit the exportation of slaves or servants of color— to outlaw the sale or transfer of slaves out of state or to non-resident. This law also introduced penalties to punish those who violated the law, ultimately forcing the trading ring to dismantle. Some involved in the trading ring were indicted, but Van Wickle himself was never punished for orchestrating the slave trading ring.

Today, the Lost Souls Memorial Project, based in East Brunswick, seeks to memorialize the individuals whose freedom was stolen by Van Wickle and his slave trading ring. Through public programming, educational workshops, and name recitation events, the Lost Souls Memorial Project continues to spread awareness about New Jersey’s involvement in the domestic slave trade.