29 Lives
Twenty-nine named people and an infant from central New Jersey sailed from New York as free people in 1783. Most had escaped slavery. The British register recorded their names. (1775 to 1792)
The short version
- Twenty-nine people and an infant from towns around Franklin Township reached British lines.
- In 1783 a British register wrote down each of their names, and they sailed from New York as free people.
- Most went to Nova Scotia; some went on to Sierra Leone.
Where they came from
· the register of 1783 on a map of 1777The twenty-nine
· names and ages as the clerks wrote themPhillis Sparrow, Nannis, Sukey, and John
Phillis Sparrow escaped slavery in New Brunswick in 1776, “by proclamation,” with two small daughters, before any British offer formally covered New Jersey. In 1783, at 28, she boarded the London with Nannis, 11, Sukey, 9, and John, 3. The British register recorded their names. John had been born behind British lines; the clerk entered him as born free.
Why we know their names
In 1783 British officers in New York wrote down every Black passenger’s name, age, description, and former enslaver, and the ship that carried each one, so that Britain could answer American claims later. A record made to settle claims of ownership is now the record of 3,000 people who claimed their freedom.
The British offers
· 1775 to 1779“I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear arms”
“I do promise to every NEGROE who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full Security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper”
The first offer was for men who would fight; the second reached anyone who left a rebel owner. Tens of thousands took the chance; historians’ estimates vary widely, from about 20,000 (Cassandra Pybus) to more than 80,000 (Gary Nash; Mount Vernon).
In the winter of 1776 to 1777, when the British held Princeton and New Brunswick, people from this part of New Jersey went too. Most had been enslaved. A few, like Richard Sloane of Rocky Hill, were already free and left anyway.
A neighbor’s view, Princeton, 1776 to 1777
Robert Lawrence of Princeton listed what British and Hessian soldiers took from his neighbors that winter: “two Wagons three Horses and a Negro man… one wagon one horse, and a Negro man… one Negro lad.”
He wrote it as theft. The register, six years later, records people from the same towns as choosing freedom. Whether the men Lawrence saw are among them is not known.
Where they went
· Nova Scotia, 1783 to 1792About half of the twenty-nine, fourteen people and the infant, sailed for Port Roseway, now Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and its Black settlement at Birchtown. Seven sailed for Port Mouton, two for Annapolis Royal, and six for the Saint John River, in what became New Brunswick. Four can be followed further: Richard Sloane of Rocky Hill and John Dunn of Bound Brook are in the Birchtown muster of 1784; Phillis Farmer of New Brunswick heads a family there; Peter Pharo of Millstone applied for land near Birchtown in 1787. Phillis Sparrow and her children have not been found after the London sailed.
Free in law, the settlers got poor land late. In 1792 more than a thousand Black Nova Scotians left again, for Sierra Leone.
A note on words. The British clerks titled their register the “Book of Negroes.” That word, and the treaty’s “property,” appear on this site only inside quotation marks, as the documents wrote them.
Different paths to freedom
These records preserve different paths to freedom. The next chapter follows American leaders’ efforts to recover people who had escaped slavery.