While Yombo's combative temperament speaks dramatically to the heroism of enslaved males, more bondmen perhaps chose Quamino's method of diffusing white people's endless scrutiny of their allegedly dangerous physical (sexual) presence. At first glance, the Memoir of Quamino Buccau appears to be a rather uninspiring account of Quamino's life in slavery and freedom. Yet, upon closer examination, the Memoir, which author William Allinson composed as a romantic racialist tract, powerfully elucidates the tenuous existence of enslaved males in the eighteenth-century rural North, and how their religiosity helped to promote their day-to-day survival. Specifically, Quamino's exploitation of and receptivity to Christianity demonstrates how the religiosity of bondmen could help them fashion identities that were agreeable to the white population, while also serving as a vital means of strength, support, and resistance for the enslaved themselves.

Liberated in September 1806, Quamino lived most of his life in bondage in the rural Somerset County area, which, by 1790, had emerged as a major center of slaves in the Middle Colonies. The 1790 federal census reported 1,810 slaves in Somerset, 22 percent of the 8,196 total slaves in East Jersey. Somerset had the second largest enslaved population in the region as well as in the state. In the 1770s, Quamino also experienced bondage as a rented or hired slave in the Hudson River Valley of New York—that is, in Poughkeepsie Township, Dutchess County. Although, by 1771, there were 19,883 “Blacks” in New York (which constituted the largest enslaved population north of Maryland), more than one-third of this black population (12,383 total people) was located in the Hudson River Valley, with Dutchess accounting for 1,360 people, or 10.9 percent of it. This figure nearly approximates the county's 1790 enslaved population of 1,856, indicating that the majority of blacks in 1771 were held in bondage. In short, Quamino labored and, more importantly, survived as a bondman in areas where slavery was highly valued, and where bondpeople were regarded as subhuman and thus dangerous.

What role did religion play in Quamino's life in a region where whites intensely feared and brutally treated enslaved blacks? Around age eighteen and seemingly cognizant of what his maturing (male) body signaled to whites in the rural and socially turbulent revolutionary North—circumstances that inspired numerous captives to liberate themselves—Quamino viewed Christianity as a means of presenting himself to his Patriot owners as an agreeable or “good” slave.