Anthropology Alumni Publishes Original Research on Slavery in New Jersey

Will Williams ’22 recently published a groundbreaking article documenting methods of enslavement in Bergen County. Williams used 19th-century records from the Dutch Reformed Church in Paramus, NJ, to show that enslavers shared the labor of enslaved men and women in a labor-management strategy at the turn of the 19th century. Ethnically Dutch families settled in areas of Bergen County. The human chattel of these families were recorded as accompanying them in church. The first names of the enslaved and the full names of their enslavers were documented in the church’s social record. This information was juxtaposed and contrasted against official tax and will data to illuminate irregular connections between the enslaved and the enslavers.

Family names analyzed in the paper, such as the Terhunes, Zabriskies, and Hoppers, maintained close intragroup business and family connections. One theory proposed by Williams suggests that enslaved individuals’ labor contributed to the families’ social and economic position by providing seasonal or temporary forced labor when community members required it. The white families’ mutual familiarity with the enslaved persons produced a surveillance network whose power model has similarities to the panopticon carceral system devised by Jeremy Bentham. The affective response to this power structure is possibly one factor limiting where emancipated African Americans established their homes.

The timing of the construction of two Jersey Dutch buildings along Dunkerhook Road – the location of Montclair State’s 2021 archaeological field school – and the building of a new Dutch community church in Paramus coincides with a temporary influx of enslaved labor exploited by the Zabriskie family, which is recorded in church documents. The article further speculates that the enslaved were not unskilled, and there is the possibility that some labor was used in community building projects. This perspective provides an alternate view of how enslaved persons were perceived and their roles in the early days of the American republic.

The article was published in the peer-reviewed journal, New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and can be downloaded here.

Williams is currently an Archaeology Ph.D. student (2029) at the CUNY Graduate Center.