Open Questions
The move to Virginia raises interesting issues, some of which I mentioned above, but they deserve more attention.
Though only a couple hundred miles from New Jersey, Virginia was culturally, politically and economically quite different from its neighbor to the north. Settled primarily by the English, its society was dominated by Anglicans who saw religion in very different terms than Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Quakers-- the two groups William had spent the most time with in New Jersey. In addition, the deism that evolved in the area as part of the Enlightenment would have been even more objectionable to the Allens than Anglicanism. (As evidence of how seriously Presbyterians took their faith, we can look at brother David's will. In it he left money to the "Congregation of Mount Bethel, so long as they continue to adopt & maintain the Doctrines as at Present taught by [the synod?] at New York & Philadelphia." In addition, money was to go to "Indigent Students in Divinity at Nassau Hall or Prince Town College, so long as there be any there studying the Same." He was obviously very committed to a particular way of looking at the world. The evidence is strong that many Presbyterians felt much the same way.)
According to Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia , Anglicans had a strong hold on the legal apparatus of Virginia until after the Revolution--even though the population was by then about two-thirds dissenters. Even when he wrote the Notes in 1781, the transition to total religious freedom was not yet complete. I would suspect that, even though, legally and economically, William would have been better off in Virginia than in Ireland, in some ways his move to that colony would have felt like a step backward into the old social milieu. That this was tolerable to him was probably due to the relative isolation of life on the farms of the time and the presence of many others of like mind in the vicinity.
Revolutionary politics in Virginia were probably more to William's liking. Virginia's House of Burgesses was one of the more democratic institutions in the colonies. It took the lead (along with Boston) in challenging British efforts to expand control over the colonies in the 1763-1776 period. The Presbyterian Church, much more than the Anglican, was a fount of democratic thought. Since its inception in the mid 1500s, power within the church was derived from "the people"--the congregation. Those who held leadership positions did so at the behest of those lower in the church hierarchy, no matter at what level. That Virginia would have evolved a strong democratic tradition, even though continuously under pressure from the royal governor, would have warmed the heart of William and his family.
Economically, Virginia was agricultural, with fewer towns and cities than other colonies. Much of its wealth derived from exporting tobacco as a cash crop to England. Tobacco farming was supported by slavery and, while not every Virginia farmer owned slaves, those who were well off tended to get that way by relying on forced labor. William Allen (and most of his relations and friends) lived within that strata of Virginia society that occasionally owned a slave or two, but did not depend on them for large scale cultivation of tobacco.
There are three pieces of evidence that indicate that the Allens, at various times, owned at least one slave:
This evidence is sufficient to confirm that William Allen wasn't so averse to the practice of slavery that he wouldn't purchase one. But the record is spotty at best. It does not seem to have been a consistent practice for him. Indeed, in the Loudoun tithable list for 1777, he is not listed as having one. That list would have been put together within a few months of his purchase of the "wench" from Skillman's estate. It is quite possible that the ownership was a temporary thing, perhaps to facilitate Fox's trying to clear property out of the estate. Furthermore, no slaves were mentioned in William's 1796 will.
The same cannot be said of his children. All three who survived him (David, Joseph, and James) disposed of numerous slaves in their wills. And we know that Robert Wright, father-in-law to David and Joseph, gave away fourteen slaves in his will of 1803. Fannie and Elizabeth Allen were given negroes already "in their possession."
It begins to look like slave-owning came gradually to these families. Robert Wright and his wife Margaret, before their move to Hampshire County around 1789, do not appear to have owned any slaves--with the exception one named Patience, who shows up on the 1785 tithable list. How he came to have fourteen of them eighteen years later is a matter of speculation. Robert and William are not a good sample to generalize from, but one possibility is that slavery became acceptable to them as their children grew up and left home. Both seem to have come to the practice only in their sixties and seventies. The next generation, however, was not so slow to engage in it--a lesson in ways corruptive influences can eat away at the most religious of temperaments.
There is one final question that has occurred to me, totally unrelated to the above. That is the fact that none of William's sons was given the name Robert. Convention at the time was to use grandparents' names for the first and second children--sometimes maternal first, sometimes paternal first. The Allen family generally followed this practice: Janet, David, William, Jr., Elizabeth, Thomas, and Ann were all named for grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. But there was no Robert among William's thirteen children. Did this indicate some falling out with his father? And could this have had something to do with his migration in the first place? And does it add to the case that he and brother David came over using an indenture contract (i.e., without his father's support)? The name came back in the next generation--both Joseph and James named their fourth sons Robert--but the gap is tantalizing, if not conclusively significant.
(I suppose we should consider one other possibility: that way back in 1737 or so, Alice Berry died giving birth to William's first son, who also died. This boy could have been named Robert after William's father--but if he did not survive to be baptised, we would never know it.)