1783 at RockinghamBlack Refugees and the Crisis of American Freedom Search

How we know

Sources and Methods

Where each statement comes from, how the twenty-nine were identified, and what is still being checked.

Methods

The twenty-nine. The British register of 1783 gives, for most entries, the place a person came from. The twenty-nine named people and the infant are those whose entries give a place in central New Jersey: New Brunswick, Millstone, Rocky Hill, Somerset County, Princeton, Piscataway, Amboy, Woodbridge, Raritan Landing, Bound Brook, Old Bridge, and Trenton. Names and ages are given as the clerks wrote them.

Following them to Nova Scotia. Four of the twenty-nine can be matched to later Nova Scotia records: the Birchtown muster of 1784 and the Shelburne land warrants of 1787. The others have not yet been found.

Rockingham in 1783. No record found in this research names the enslaved people of the Berrien farm in 1783. The 1784 tax list is the nearest evidence. Later Berrien records (1791 to 1830) are about the family, not the house in 1783, and the site says so.

Arguments, not facts. Where a historian makes an argument, the site attributes it: Timothy Messer-Kruse on the treaty’s failure and the fugitive clause; Zara Anishanslin on the identification of William Lee.

How we write about people

People first. We name people wherever the records do and put their names in headings. Where a record counts a person without a name, as the 1784 tax list does, we say so rather than leave them out.

“Enslaved people,” not “slaves.” Slavery was something done to people, not who they were. We write “enslaved people,” “enslaver,” and “freedom seeker” or “escaped slavery” rather than “runaway.”

The documents’ words stay in quotation marks. When a clerk wrote “Negroes,” “property,” or described Phillis Sparrow as “sizable Molatto,” we keep the words exactly, in quotation marks, so readers can see how the records were made and by whom.

Enslavers in the documents. Document images show every name as written. In our own text we name enslavers when their actions are the story (Washington, the Berriens, Caleb Johnson) and do not retype others’ names, so that the people who sought freedom stay at the center.

Uncertainty is stated. Where a later record is a name match rather than a proven identity, we say so.

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. Elsewhere the site says “enslaved people” and “enslaver,” and names people first. Document images show names as they were written; the site’s own text does not name every enslaver.

Still being checked

These points are being confirmed against the original records:

  • The exact wording of the Dunmore and Clinton proclamations as quoted.
  • John Witherspoon’s description on Board 2.
  • Berrien’s 1850 votes, against the Senate Journal.
  • The dates of Rockingham’s moves.
  • The “1 in 4” count of taxpayers holding enslaved people in 1784.
  • The register entries for the twenty-nine.
  • The Birchtown matches.
  • The figure of more than a thousand Black Nova Scotians who left for Sierra Leone in 1792.
  • The ages of service under New Jersey’s 1804 act (25 and 21).
  • The 1860 census count of 18 enslaved people in New Jersey, and the date New Jersey ratified the Thirteenth Amendment (January 1866).

Sources by chapter

29 Lives

The Clause

One House