By 1800 New Jersey boasted the second largest enslaved population in the northeastern United States. Yet, because of the paucity of useful published sources in which African Americans discuss their lives under New Jersey bondage—an undeniably brutal, as well as important economic and social system—former enslaved blacks there are virtually mute. Consequently, when Silvia Dubois (1788/89–1889), a former central New Jersey slave, was asked by a certain white man, in 1883, if he could publish her life story, which was part of local legend, the free black woman bluntly retorted, “Most of folks think that niggers ain't no account, but if you think what I tell you is worth publishing, I will be glad if you do it. 'T won't do me no good, but maybe 't will somebody else. I've lived a good while, and have seen a good deal, and if I should tell you all I've seen, it would make the hair stand up all over your head.”

Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three of Dubois's male slave compatriots, and brings greater intellectual and historical clarity to the muted lives of enslaved peoples in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Jersey, where blacks were held in bondage for roughly two centuries. This study contributes to the evolving body of historical scholarship that argues that the lives of the enslaved in America were shaped not only by the powerful forces of racial oppression, but also by these people's own notions of gender—of what constituted a man and a woman. In addition, the present work uses previously understudied, white-authored nineteenth-century literature about New Jersey slaves as a point of departure. Reading beyond the racist assumptions of the authors, it contends that the precarious day-to-day existence of the three protagonists—Yombo Melick, Dick Melick, and Quamino Buccau (Smock)—reveals the various elements of “slave manhood” that gave real meaning to their oppressed lives. Manhood Enslaved connects the gendered lives of eighteenth-century enslaved Northern peoples to Northern white thought over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revealing shared assumptions and divergent views regarding race and gender in the new nation.

Out of fear of creating discontent among enslaved blacks, Southern whites deliberately denied most of them literacy by enacting stringent state laws and local ordinances that forbade their instruction in reading and writing. Many Northern whites, lacking such legislative weaponry but equally aware that literacy stimulated black ambition, also deprived the enslaved of education.