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made good money keeping the expanding metropolis fed, and they used some of that money to buy slaves. West Jersey had fewer slaves because its farms were smaller and more isolated and the need for labor was less pressing. Generally, though, whites in both sections of New Jersey displayed little reluctance to acquire slaves when they had the means to do so. They did not welcome the creation of a significant free black population. In their minds, freedmen and women posed a continual threat to white authority. New Jersey lawmakers responded to that unease created by the presence of free blacks by placing restrictions on the securing of freedom very similar to those in force in New York.
    Those blacks in New Jersey who succeeded in extricating themselves from slavery faced a daily battle simply to survive. By law, they could not own land. It was impossible, though, to prevent them from trying to find some small patch on which they could plant crops and raise livestock, even if they had to resort to squatting on land that no one else seemed to want. In coastal areas and along the rivers they fished. Away from the water they hunted small game. Those who had trades tried to practice them. Generally, however, they were condemned to poverty, and they confronted the unpalatable truth that whites assumed they were slaves unless they could prove otherwise. New Jersey had one of the harshest slave codes of any of the northern colonies for the simple reason that it had so many slaves—almost 12 percent of its overall population by the 1770s. Free people lived on the margins in colonial New Jersey, literally and figuratively. One false step and they could find themselves back in bondage.
    To the south of New Jersey, most of Pennsylvania’s Quaker colonists had no misgivings whatsoever about importing Africans and profiting from their unpaid labor. The colony’s founder, William Penn, was at first perturbed about the morality of slave ownership. However, he soon gave way, and even acquired several slaves himself. In 1684, just three years after Pennsylvania received its royal charter, the slaver Isabella docked in the Delaware River with 150 Africans on board, and white settlers vied with one another to buy them. Further shipments soon followed. Within a generation, black slaves were a common sight on the streets of Philadelphia. Although a few whites condemned human bondage as a sin, most were happy to purchase a slave or two. Slaves did almost every conceivable type of labor. In the countryside they worked on farms, in homes, and in all kinds of rural industries, most notably the iron foundries that sprang up to exploit Pennsylvania’s mineral wealth. Slaves moved back and forth between the countryside and the city. Philadelphia newspapers often carried advertisements describing a particular woman or man as “fit for all manner of Town or Country Work.” 5 Pennsylvania’s slaves were expected to be versatile, and many of them were.
    Pennsylvania did not lag far behind her sister colonies when it came to regulating the status of free blacks—and over the years some slaves did succeed in becoming free, most through self-purchase. The colony’s “black codes” told those people with whom they could trade and whom they could welcome into their homes. Aiding a suspected runaway, buying goods from a slave (which he or she was presumed to have stolen), or selling alcohol to a slave could put a free person’s own liberty in jeopardy. Most white Pennsylvanians wished the colony did not have a single free black inhabitant. They believed they were, in the words of the preamble to a 1751 law, an “idle and slothful people.” There were too many of them, and they had a worrisome tendency to congregate in Philadelphia, where (so lawmakers alleged) they rented small hovels and shacks and generally annoyed white people by their presence. 6 Whatever whites thought and feared, though, there were only