Is There a Lesson Here?

I wonder if this discussion of slavery and property in antebellum New Jersey might have become a model for how slavery could have been slowly and peacefully ended over time. That is, without a Civil War. New Jersey was half a Northern and half a quasi-Southern state at the time -- a good place for a laboratory experiment, perhaps. As a child in New Jersey during WW II I remember that Asbury Park's beach was racially segregated -- another sign of New Jersey's mixed tradition. I wonder if many Princetonians knew this. I simply remember it and like to point it out to people, without any judgment about the practice being good or bad.