While the transition urban African Americans made from slavery to freedom in the North has been the subject of much scholarship, the experiences of their rural counterparts has remained largely hidden. Focusing on the development of a single African American community in eastern New Jersey, Professor Hodges examines the experience of slavery and freedom in the rural North. This unique social history addresses many long held assumptions about the experience of slavery and emancipation outside the plantation South. Hodges weaves an intricate pattern of life and death, work and worship, from the earliest settlement to the end of the Civil War.

Graham Russell Hodges is Professor of History at Colgate University in upstate New York. He is the editor of Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White, published by Madison House, and author of The New York City Cartmen, 1667-1850.