Many may be surprised at the revelation that New Jersey, in 1866, was the last northern state to abolish slavery. Dutch and English settlers brought the first enslaved people to New Jersey in the seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolutionary War, slavery was an established practice on labor-intensive farms throughout what became known as the Garden State.

Historian and author Rick Geffken reveals many largely unheard stories from New Jersey’s dark history of slavery in his book, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey. St. Peter's University alumnus Geffken begins his book in the Dutch Village of Bergen, the first chartered municipality in what became New Jersey, now a part of Jersey City.

Dr. Walter Greason writes in his Introduction: "Rick Geffken synthesizes a broad range of historical resources to reconstruct the processes of enslavement in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in a variety of small communities in New Jersey. His analysis emerges from a decade of digital resources that were not easily available before the expansion of online collections. Conversations on listserves, websites like Garden State History, and collections of editorials about sites like Lewis Morris's Tinton Falls Mill all contribute to the rich tapestry presented here. The results? A detailed examination of slavery as it evolved in places that show that tobacco, cotton, and sugar were not the only systems that dehumanized African-Americans."