Slavery was “baked into” New Jersey from its very beginnings. In the 1664-1665, Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea, or New Jersey, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret granted prospective colonists 75 acres of land “for every weaker servant, or slave, male or female, exceeding the age of fourteen years, which anyone shall send or carry, arriving there.”; meant to jump start a new agricultural community, this provision of one of New Jersey’s founding documents nonetheless made chattel slavery foundational.

Lecturer and historian Rick Geffken presents a broad range of historical resources in this illustrated talk on enslavement in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in a variety of small communities in New Jersey.

This event is made possible with grant funds provided by the New Jersey Council of the Humanities.
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