Harriet Tubman Museum of New Jersey

632 Lafayette Street

Cape May, NJ 08204

Open: Sunday 2:00pm-4:00pm/Monday-Tuesday Closed/Wednesday-Saturday 11:00am-4:00pm (Check the website for the seasons)

My Review on TripAdvisor:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g46341-d23550005-Reviews-Harriet_Tubman_Museum-Cape_May_Cape_May_County_New_Jersey.html

The entrance to the Harriet Tubman Museum of New Jersey

The History of the Museum and House it is located in:

(From the Museum website):

Lafayette street and Franklin Street: the center of abolitionist activism in Cape May

The Harriet Tubman Museum building is located on a block that anti-slavery activists called home in Cape May. Lafayette Street and Franklin Street became a center of abolitionist activity centered around three important buildings developed in 1846.

The Stephen Smith House stands at 645 Lafayette Street, across from the site of the Harriet Tubman Museum, where Stephen Smith built his summer home in 1846. Smith was a founder of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

The Banneker House was next to the Stephen Smith House. The Banneker House became a first-class hotel and one of the only summer resorts for free Black people in the country and was developed by James Harding, a friend of Stephen Smith.

The white Baptist Church was located directly across the street from the Stephen Smith House and Joseph Leach frequently preached there. Leach was a political leader and editor of the Ocean Wave newspaper, where he often wrote accounts of enslaved people that fled to Cape May. The congregation of the church issued a strong condemnation of slavery.

The sign that welcomes you

The Museum at Christmas time

Santa greets you at the door

Cape May: A nexus between North and South

(from the museum website):

Cape May played a pivotal role in the fight to end slavery. Several historic figures critical to the fight against slavery spent their summers in Cape May.

The children’s dolls at the entrance

I visited the Harriet Tubman Museum when I was in Cape May and this small museum tells two different stories. It tells of Harriet Tubman’s time living in Cape May as a cook before her return down South and about the Free Black community in Cape May that built their own Society within the community. Their businesses catered to both Black and White residents of Cape May.

The museum tackles several different topics including the life of Harriet Tubman in Cape May when she lived here as a cook, earning money and probably developing a strategy for helping enslaved people reach their freedom through the Underground Railroad. It discusses the success many Black residents found as business owners in Cape May and the surrounding towns.

The last topic the museum discusses in the affects of Integration and Segregation on society in general and its causes and results. There is no one solution to this as we as a society cause this by our own actions.

The History of Business’s owned by Blacks in that era of Cape May

The freed black population settled in the Cape May area and opened many businesses that contributed to the whole population. This developed into many successfully run businesses by Free Slaves and residents of New Jersey.

The history of Harriet Tubman in Cape May

(From the museum website):

Harriet Tubman’s life and work in Cape May

Harriet Tubman lived in Cape May in the early 1850s, working to help fund her missions to guide enslaved people to freedom. After her initial journeys conducting freedom seekers to Canada, her friend and abolitionist leader Franklin Sanborn wrote, “She returned to the states, and as usual earned money by working in hotels and families as a cook. From Cape May, in the fall of 1852, she went back once more to Maryland, and brought away nine more fugitives.” The New Jersey Historical Commission says she spent two other summers in Cape May.

Life of Charles Sumner in Cape May, NJ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sumner

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Sumner

The history of Abolitionists in Cape May and in New Jersey. Being so close to the border, New Jersey was a big part of the Slavery Underground. Even during the Civil War, Delaware was a more neutral state of the South.

The story of the Abolitionist Movement and William Furness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Furness

History of the war years and the people who shaped it

The progressions of Blacks in that era

The affects of Segregation and Integration in a society that does not always see eye to eye. This attitude unfortunately still survives into today. There is the history of Harriet Tubman’s life as a child into adulthood.

The stories of Integration and Segregation in that era

Harriet Tubman, Activist and Transporter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tubman

Many voices told at the museum

The museum offers many voices and stories about life before, during and after slavery and its part in the shaping of New Jersey. Since New Jersey was the last Northern state to abolish slavery on January 23rd, 1866.

The History and End of Slavery in New Jersey:

(From the website of the New Jersey Department of State-Historical Commission website)

New Jersey, The Last Northern State to End Slavery

Image collage: Peter Lee who may have been illegally enslaved as a young man by the Stevens Family in Hoboken, NJ, and Lockey White’s 1860 census entry indicating that she was a “slave for life.”

By Noelle Lorraine Williams,
Director, African American History Program
The New Jersey Historical Commission

This year forty-seven states including New Jersey will observe Juneteenth (also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day) as a state holiday—a holiday that commemorates when enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas learned that they were, in fact, freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation two and half years earlier. The date was June 19, 1865. Juneteenth then is a holiday of celebration and a mournful remembrance of deep injustice and loss. It reveals the injustice of slavery and the legal repression of African American freedom, extending beyond the nineteenth century.

But we must remember that there were still enslaved Black men and women in New Jersey even after Juneteenth. Imagine, New Jersey’s death grip on slavery meant that until December 1865, six months after enslaved men, women, and children in Texas found out they were cheated of their freedom, approximately 16 African Americans were still technically enslaved in New Jersey.

But Why and How?

While there were many Black, mixed-race, and white people in New Jersey who fought against slavery, most legislators refused to condemn the institution. Profits from slaveholding organizations had built and maintained the state’s major cities and regional centers like Newark and those in Bergen County.

Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not free enslaved African Americans in the Northern States; it freed only those in the mostly southern “rebellious states.” Two years later, New Jersey bitterly refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, the United States Constitutional Amendment that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude across the country.

Slavery’s final legal death in New Jersey occurred on January 23, 1866, when in his first official act as governor, Marcus L. Ward of Newark signed a state Constitutional Amendment that brought about an absolute end to slavery in the state. In other words, the institution of slavery in New Jersey survived for months following the declaration of freedom in Texas.

To understand this historical development, one needs to take a step back to 1804 when New Jersey passed its Gradual Abolition of Slavery law—an act that delayed the end of slavery in the state for decades. It allowed for the children of enslaved Blacks born after July 4, 1804 to be free, only after they attained the age of 21 years for women and 25 for men. Their family and everyone else near and dear to them, however, remained enslaved until they died or attained freedom by running away or waiting to be freed.

In a period when the average life expectancy was 40 years old, the 1804 law essentially took more than half of these people’s lives to satisfy the economic and political demands of New Jersey enslavers.

In essence, Juneteenth, not only marks the day African Americans in Texas realized that they had been robbed of two years of their freedom, following the Emancipation Proclamation. It also commemorates all of our ancestors here in New Jersey who were the last Blacks in the North to be ensnared in that bloody institution.

The New Jersey Historical Commission (NJHC), a division of the New Jersey Department of State, is a state agency dedicated to the advancement of public knowledge and preservation of New Jersey history.

The creation of the Harriet Tubman Museum