Embarkation, 1789 (pages 17 thru 22)
(page 17, par. 1, line 5) New Jersey ratified the U.S. Constitution, the third state to do so… In our American Founding document, enslaved blacks were counted as two thirds of a person for purposes of Federal taxes and two thirds for representation in the new Congress. In the Natchez district of Spanish West Florida, blacks would be 100% enslaved, proportionate representative government was not then at issue in Nuevo Espana's combined military and civil administration, and the only taxes in play were import duties levied by the Spanish on American down-river Mississippi River commerce. The Forman plantation entrepreneurs expected to become subjects of the King of Spain, and therefore would not be subject to such taxes or to ruinous intermittent closures of the Mississippi to U.S. citizen-owned commerce destined for New Orleans.
(page 17, par. 1, line 7) "day for Thanksgiving" George Washington Papers, Proclamation of October 4, 1789.
(page 18, par.4, lines 2-4) venom if not the scale reached a crescendo both in Monmouth County and on the faraway western frontier See Fowler, David J. "Egregarious Villains, Wood rangers, and London Traders: the pine robber phenomenon in New Jersey during the Revolutionary War" and Adelberg, Michael S. "An Evenly Balanced County: The Scope and Severity of Civil Warfare in Revolutionary Monmouth County, New Jersey." The Journal of Military History 73 (1):9-47, 2009.
(page 18, par. 5, line 2) added edge born of racism and class warfare Adelberg, Michael. The American Revolution in Monmouth County: The Theater of Spoil and Destruction, pp. 76-95.
(page 18, par. 5) A woman named Hagar had apparently escaped from enslavement on David Forman’s Monmouth farm around 1778. In 1783 she is listed living in British-occupied New York City as the wife of Anthony Loyal, a born African American free man. “Hagar made her mark” (implying that she was illiterate) in the Inspection Roll of Negroes (The Book of Negroes), In: Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789. The verbatim entry states: "Anthony Loyal, stout man, 36, M[ale] (Daniel Grandon). Born free at Monmouth, New Jersey, served his time with William Wyckoff, Monmouth County, GBC. Hagar his wife, 35, stout wench, (Daniel Grandon). Formerly slave to David Forman, Monmouth, New Jersey; left him 5 years ago. GBC."
(page 19, par. 1, lines 1-2) "assisted in kindling the fire in the bolting box to burn it down" Forman and Draper, Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi 1888, p. 7. Newspaper coverage of Loyalist raid on Middletown, NJ, despoiling Samuel S. Forman’s father’s property and killing several Patriot guards: New Jersey Gazette, April 1, 1778; and Pennsylvania Gazette, July 13, 1778.
(page 19, par. 2) slaves had the temerity to run away… Adelberg, Michael. Op. cit., p. 86. A woman had run away from Forman’s farm in 1778. See The Book of Negroes, In: Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, NARA, RG 390; and Hodges, Graham Russell, Susan Hawkes Cook, and Alan Edward Brown, eds. The Black Loyalist Directory, p. 495
(page 19, par. 2) African Americans from Monmouth County who fought with the British African-Americans in Monmouth County during the Age of the American Revolution, p. 17 "The proclamations of Dunmore and Clinton (1779) apparently appealed to many slaves from New Jersey because among those who fled to New York City were at least 31 from Monmouth County and about 100 from Bergen County."
(page 19, par. 2, lines 5-6) "New Jersey never permitted slaves to enlist" Lender, Mark Edward. "The Conscripted Line: The Draft in Revolutionary New Jersey" New Jersey History 1985: Vol. 103 (1&2) (Spring/Summer): pp. 35-38. Also see Grundset, Eric G., Brianna L. Diaz, Hollis L. Gentry, and Jean D. Strahan, eds. Forgotten Patriots – African American and American Indian Patriots of the Revolutionary War – A Guide to Service, Sources and Studies, p. 376. The rolls of New Jersey veterans of color of the Revolutionary War are remarkably short. Some 5,000 people of color, both free and enslaved, hailing for other states, served honorably during the struggle for American Independence. As many as 20,000 enlisted on the British side. Vermuele, Cornelius C. "Service of the New Jersey Militia in the Revolutionary War." Proceedings of the NJ Historical Society IX, (July 1924), p.235. Vermuele provided estimates of New Jersey militia population eligibles and the paucity of slaves "Total population 135,000 -140,000 of whom 19,000 free men are estimated as eligible for military service. Not included are 6,000 Quakers, over 1,000 Loyalists, 1,000 exempts, and 7,600 slaves."
(page 19, par. 3, line 4) a place friendlier to the institution of slavery Spanish practices with respect to chattel slavery in colonial Florida and Louisiana have been conceived as generally less onerous than British plantation slavery as practiced in the Atlantic world, or that practiced by American plantation successors in the South. This contrast comes into sharp focus when considering the Spanish experience in East Florida. From their largest city in St. Augustine, Spanish colonials, encouraged plantation slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas to escape, fight the English in the course of intermittent colonial wars, in exchange for freedom. The dynamic came into sharp relief during the 1740 Stono slave rebellion in South Carolina, where armed slaves revolted, violently threw off their shackles, and rampaged southward toward refuge in Spanish Florida. No such dynamic characterized Spanish West Florida and the Natchez territory. There Spanish colonials grandfathered earlier English plantation owners, and encouraged newly arrived American expats like the Forman pioneers, to establish and enforce plantation practices on the Anglo Atlantic World models. Spanish colonial plantation practices in Natchez District were indistinguishable, so far as black slaves' avenues to freedom or to a less harsh experience, than practically anywhere else in the late 18th century American Southern states. The Code Noire afforded slaves a right to trial in New Orleans under certain circumstances, and limits to the harshness of punishment. It remains debatable the extent to which these measures were carried out in Natchez District, where a pragmatic melding of earlier British practices is evident in court proceedings. The Forman enslaved may not have known the specifics of these dynamics, but they may have had a general sense that they were going to a place more conducive to maintaining, indeed depending upon, racialized enslaved condition. Fischer, David Hackett. "Louisiana: Afro-European Diversity, American Creativity: French, Spanish & American Rulers: Bamana, Benin & Congo Slaves" In Africa's Gifts, in preparation 2019.
(page 19, par. 4, line 2) family units,…unattached youngsters and elderly See Appendix II, Enslaved Emigrants from New Jersey to Natchez in Spanish West Florida.
(page 20, par. 6, line 2) larger group by almost tenfold than was typical for Monmouth County plantations There were 60 or more slaves comprising the emigrant group, according to Samuel S. Forman’s account. This number for a single farm in Monmouth County, or most anywhere else in New Jersey or the Northern States, of that matter, was up to tenfold higher for a single farm than recent scholarly literature on the subject suggests. I am indebted to Michael Adelberg, author of several works on Monmouth County during the Revolutionary era, for alerting me to this discrepancy. It has implications for basic understanding the Forman emigrant experience.
Tax Ratables for Monmouth County, 1779-1792. Trenton: New Jersey State Archives. Photostats at Monmouth County HS library. Tax ratables suggest that the General’s acquisition was lopsided in favor of augmenting his ten slaves, as taxed in the summer of 1789, with the additional fifty. Other Forman relatives in Monmouth County owned only one each prior to the emigration and none afterward. Estate records from the mid-1790s of a large David Forman-owned dairy farm in Maryland show no remaining slaves.
Tax ratables for General David Forman in Monmouth County show that he owned between five and ten slaves in the eleven years leading up to the November 1789 expedition. Forman relatives each owned much fewer. The first tax enumeration of the 1790s decade lists General David Forman with only one remaining slave, and none for his property-owning Forman relatives in the area.
I conclude that David Forman acquired some 50 slaves specifically for the expedition. Yet they were not random slaves. The estate inventory reveals that 77% of the enslaved sixty, at departure from New Jersey, comprised family units.
This appears to be an unusual situation, one involving a significant portion of the county’s entire black population, emigrating as a single group. General David Forman was not dealing in slaves in the most egregious manner we associate with the antebellum period. These were not miscellaneous slaves explicitly purchased for resale, chained together into a coffle, to be sold "down river" under horrendous conditions. In contrast, this group was anchored on his own farm's enslaved workers, deliberately including a majority within intact family units.
They all traversed the frontier, along with their masters and overseer, as a shared experience. The enslaved African Americans were never intended to be sold for profit. Rather, they were the designated captive labor pool for the creation of a Forman family-owned enterprise in Spanish West Florida.
(page 20, par. 6, line 3) "General Forman purchased some more [African Americans]" Forman and Draper, Op. cit
., p. 20. It remains unclear how David Forman raised the capital to purchase slaves augmenting the ten he already owned. However he did it, his title was clear according to New Jersey laws of the time. Subsequent complex estate litigation and settlement issues’ neither questioned David Forman's ownership of the enslaved, nor made claims for non-payment of notes potentially taken on for the purchase of enslaved blacks.
The large group comprised 3% of the entire black population of Monmouth County Hodges, Slavery, and Freedom in the Rural North, Op. cit., p. 32. The black population of Monmouth County in 1790 was 1,949 of whom 363 were free. The total population of the county was 16,918. By comparison, Blacks in all the Northern states in 1790 numbered 60,435.
I verified Samuel S. Forman's recollection of 60 enslaved emigrants, or a few more on arrival, from Spanish port of entry records of the immigrant band at Natchez for April 1790; and from Ezekiel Forman's estate inventory of 1795, where the immigrant slaves of 1790 were enumerated and very much at issue in the litigation.
(page 20, par. 7, line 2) "all well fed and well clothed" Forman and Draper, Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi 1888, p. 20.
(page 20, par. 7) "the best set of blacks I ever saw together" Forman and Draper, Op. cit., p. 20. Samuel S. Forman further asserted that he "he knew the most of them" Ibid, pp. 19-20.
(page 21, par. 1, line 1) Six wagons lurched forward Five were recalled in Cantwell's Forman Autobiography, Historical Magazine 1869 version of the Forman travels. Six are enumerated in the Forman and Draper 1888 edited book version. The numbers are not mutually exclusive. Samuel S. might have considered Ezekiel Forman’s chaise as distinct from the five farm type wagons, totaling six horse drawn vehicles in all. I employ six in this modern re-telling. Ezekiel and his family, in their chaise, departed separately from Philadelphia. Ezekiel planned to catch up to Samuel S. Forman and Benajah Osman and the wagon train of the enslaved on the road across Pennsylvania toward Pittsburgh.
(page 21, par. 2, lines 2-3) utilitarian affairs, fashioned from New Jersey white aspens They were likely to have been Jersey wagons, indistinguishable from working wagons built for regional commerce in other states. The exact types of wagons are not specified in Samuel S. Forman's 1888 Narrative. My description is inferential and based on the most frequently used conveyances for travel involving people and goods over distances. Despite our romanticized view of pioneer settlers gliding in their prairie schooners off into the setting sun in graceful Conestoga wagons, the latter heavy freight wagons were unlikely to have been employed by the Forman pioneers. Conestogas were mostly produced in and around Lancaster, and were already in use in the latter 18th century. Conestogas were the 18-wheeler tractor trailers of their day. Capable of carrying loads of 11 tons, they plied the Lancaster Road in two-way commerce between central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. Perhaps a few ventured further west over the Forbes Road to Fort Pitt, though it would have been a herculean task to get them over the Alleghenies given the poor condition of roads west of Lancaster at the time.
Conestogas were more expensive than the simpler farmers' boxes on wheels. The Formans were setting out on a one-way trip. I infer that they would not have splurged on the grand Conestogas, because their resale value at Fort Pitt was uncertain. Other reasons made Conestogas the least preferred choice, despite how modern set designers will choose to portray the pioneers for the Hollywood film version of this history. The state of the Forbes Road west of Carlisle would have made it extremely difficult for an inexperienced pioneer party, without the benefit of expert teamsters, to muscle the huge Conestogas over Allegheny mountain passes. Heavy Conestogas would be rare in New Jersey as their great bulk might sink too often along the sandy lanes of that state.
(page 21, par. 4, line 1) "Cranberry" [New Jersey] Forman and Draper, Op. cit., p. 20. The town has been known as Cranbury, New Jersey, since the mid-19th century.
(page 21, par. 4, line 5) The elements made a mockery of their plan In: Joseph Price Papers 1783-1828 Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania. There was a heavy downpour close to Lancaster during the day on November 26, 1789. That same or similar weather front caught Samuel S. Forman and Benajah Osman unawares that evening.
(page 21, par. 5, line 3) "shrinkage rendered them very uncomfortable to wear" Forman and Draper, Op. cit., p. 21