One House
Enslaved people lived on the Berrien farm before and after Washington’s 1783 stay. Their stories run from the Constitution’s fugitive clause to the 1850 act a senator born here voted for. (1772 to 1865)
The short version
- Washington rented Rockingham, the Berrien farmhouse, in 1783; the tax list a year later shows an enslaved person in the household.
- Isabella, Harriet, and Ess, held by the judge’s son, escaped together in 1805.
- Jack, born to the Berrien estate, was seized under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act.
- John Macpherson Berrien, born in the house, voted for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
Why here
· the Berrien farm, Aug. 23 to Nov. 10, 1783Rockingham
Rockingham was the Berrien family farm, in what became Franklin Township. Judge John Berrien died in 1772, leaving his estate to his widow Margaret and six children. In August 1783 Margaret rented the house to Washington while Congress met at Princeton. Here, on October 30, Washington received word that the peace treaty had been signed.
Who was in the house?
· enslaved people on the farm and in Washington’s partyNo record found in this research names the enslaved people of the Berrien farm in 1783. The nearest evidence is the tax list of the following summer.
The guest’s household
Washington’s party included enslaved servants. William Lee, his enslaved horseman, had ridden with him through the war. In his 1799 will Washington wrote: “To my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom.” The other 123 people he owned were to be freed after Martha Washington’s death; 153 more, held by the Custis estate, he could not free.
Isabella, Harriet, and Ess
· later Berrien records, 1791 to 1805Isabella, Harriet, and Ess left Samuel Berrien’s farm together on the first night of February 1805.
Born in the mid-1780s, they were held by Samuel Berrien, the judge’s son, who had been a boy of seventeen in this house in 1783, on his own farm near Allentown, twenty miles away. Seven months after they left, he was still advertising for them: thirty dollars for all three or ten for any one, with no description of them at all. In July 1805 he and his wife had signed a certificate freeing another woman they held, Martha Richards.
These later records do not show who was in the house in 1783. Jack, born about 1791 to “the estate of John Berrien,” appears in the next section.
Written into the Constitution
· 1783 to 1850“…without causing any Destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other Property…”
“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State… escaping into another… shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”
Congress passed, and President Washington signed, the first Fugitive Slave Act: an owner may “seize or arrest such fugitive from labor” in any state and carry the person back on a magistrate’s certificate.
Ona Judge, 1796
Three years after signing the Act, Washington pursued a freedom seeker from his own household. Ona Judge escaped from the President’s House in Philadelphia in May 1796. Washington tried for years to have her returned. She lived free in New Hampshire until her death in 1848.
The treaty went unenforced; in 1786 John Jay called the 1783 evacuation “unquestionably … an infraction of the 7th. article.” In Slavery’s Fugitives (2024), Timothy Messer-Kruse argues that this failure drove the framers to write the return of fugitives into the Constitution.
The framers deliberately protected slavery in several provisions without once using the word “slave”:
“…adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
“The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight…”
No amendment made before 1808 could touch the slave-trade clause.
Congress may provide “for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
Jack claimed his freedom
At thirty Jack claimed that the judge’s will had freed him, left New Jersey, and worked on a Quaker farm in Pennsylvania. New Jersey’s gradual abolition act of 1804 did not apply to him: it freed only children born after July 4 of that year, and only after years of service, to age 25 for boys and 21 for girls.
In October 1822 Caleb Johnson of Princeton and three armed men seized him under the Act of 1793; neighbors, Black and white, stoned the carriage, but Jack was carried back. In 1833 Justice Henry Baldwin told a federal jury that “the foundations of the government are laid, and rest on the rights of property in slaves,” and the jury awarded Johnson $4,000. By then Johnson had recorded Jack’s manumission, as John Skillman, on December 29, 1830.
- About 1791
Jack is born to “the estate of John Berrien.”
- 1804
New Jersey’s gradual abolition act frees only children born after July 4, 1804, after years of service.
- About 1821
At thirty, Jack claims his freedom and goes to Pennsylvania.
- October 1822
Caleb Johnson and three armed men seize him under the Act of 1793.
- December 29, 1830
Johnson records his manumission, as John Skillman.
- 1833
Johnson v. Tompkins: a federal jury awards Johnson $4,000.
1850 · Born in this house
John Macpherson Berrien, born here on August 23, 1781, defended the fugitive clause as a senator from Georgia: the Constitution’s slavery provisions were terms “without which, the inhabitants of the slaveholding States would never have come into the Union.”
On August 23, 1850, he voted with the majority that advanced the new Fugitive Slave Act to final reading, and against a jury trial for those it seized.
How the Senate votes went
On August 22 and 23, 1850, the Senate took a series of roll calls on the bill, S. 23 (votes 237 to 246). Berrien voted no on amendments that would have given a person claimed as a fugitive a jury trial or habeas corpus, and yes on the vote to engross the bill for its third reading, the vote that decided its passage in the Senate.
Slavery’s long end in New Jersey
· 1804 to 1866- 1804
The gradual abolition act frees no one then enslaved. Children born after July 4 serve to age 25 (boys) or 21 (girls).
- 1822 to 1833
Jack is seized under the federal Act of 1793 and carried back from Pennsylvania.
- 1846
“An Act to Abolish Slavery” turns the people still enslaved into “apprentices for life,” bound to their enslavers.
- 1850
John Macpherson Berrien, born at Rockingham, votes for the new Fugitive Slave Act.
- 1860
The federal census still counts 18 enslaved people in New Jersey.
- 1865 to 1866
The Thirteenth Amendment ends slavery in December 1865. New Jersey ratifies it in January 1866, after it has already taken effect.
Claiming freedom, securing slavery
Phillis Sparrow sailed free with her children. Isabella, Harriet, and Ess left together. Jack claimed his freedom.
The treaty of 1783 barred the British from carrying away “Negroes or other Property.” The Constitution of 1787 required that people escaping slavery be “delivered up,” and in 1850 a senator born in this house voted for a harsher Fugitive Slave Act. Only in 1865 did the Thirteenth Amendment abolish slavery across the nation, except as punishment for a crime after conviction.