For classrooms

For Teachers

Primary sources from New Jersey, the Revolution, and the Constitution, ready for middle and high school classes.

Three big ideas

Black New Jerseyans acted. People from towns around Franklin Township left slavery during the Revolution, and some sailed from New York as free people in 1783.
Leaders protected slavery on purpose. From the Yorktown orders of 1781 to the Treaty of Paris and the Constitution, American leaders wrote the return of people who escaped slavery into law.
This history is local. It runs through Rockingham, a house in Franklin Township, and the families and laws of New Jersey to 1866.

Essential questions

What did freedom mean to Phillis Sparrow in 1776, and to George Washington in 1783?
How did a record made to settle claims of ownership become a record of people who claimed their freedom?
How did a clause in a peace treaty become a clause in the Constitution?
What should a historic house like Rockingham tell visitors about everyone who lived there?

New Jersey’s Amistad requirement

New Jersey law requires schools to teach African American history as part of American history. Every document here is from a public archive, transcribed in plain type, and tied to New Jersey places.

Before you teach

Read How we write about people. Students meet the documents’ own words, such as “Negroes” and “property.” Set the expectation that those words are quoted, not used, and talk about why the people who made the records chose them.

Read the register

· one class period

Documents: the register pages, the Voyages map, the roll of the twenty-nine.

Task: Each student or pair chooses one person. From the record, they find the person’s age, town, ship, and destination, and what the clerk wrote about them. Then they list what the record does not tell us, and why.

Discuss: Who made this record, and for what purpose? What did the people in it gain by being written down?

Two readings of one sentence

· one class period

Documents: Article VII of the treaty, Hugh Walker’s letter, the American claim and the British answer.

Task: Students read the clause “without causing any Destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other Property.” Half argue the American reading, half the British. Then they read Walker’s report that he could not take anyone “without their own consent.”

Discuss: Whose reading won at New York, and why? Who is missing from both readings?

Trace the clause

· one or two class periods

Documents: the Yorktown After Orders, 1781, Madison’s motion, 1782, Article VII (1783), the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 2 (1787), the 1793 Act, and Jack’s case (1822 to 1833), all on One House.

Task: Students build a timeline card for each document: who wrote it, what it required, and who it affected. They end with the 1850 vote of John Macpherson Berrien, born at Rockingham.

Discuss: Timothy Messer-Kruse argues the treaty’s failure led the framers to write the fugitive clause. What evidence here supports or complicates that argument?

A house history

· one class period, or a field trip to Rockingham

Documents: the 1784 tax list, Samuel Berrien’s 1805 advertisement, the People page.

Task: Students write the label a historic house should have about the people it held, using only what the records show, and marking what is not known.

Words to know

Freedom seeker: A person who escaped slavery. Used instead of the documents’ “runaway” or “fugitive.”
Enslaved person, enslaver: Words that name slavery as something done to people, not who they were.
Black Loyalist: A Black person who joined or was protected by the British during the Revolution, many of whom left with the British in 1783.
Proclamation: An official announcement. Dunmore (1775) and Clinton (1779) offered freedom to people who left rebel enslavers.
Register: The British list of every Black passenger leaving New York in 1783, titled by its clerks the “Book of Negroes.”
Manumission: An enslaver’s legal act freeing a person.
Gradual abolition: A law, like New Jersey’s of 1804, that ended slavery slowly and only for people born after a set date.
Fugitive clause: Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution, requiring that people escaping slavery be “delivered up.”

Further reading for teachers: Learning for Justice, Teaching Hard History; New Jersey Amistad Commission; the Princeton & Slavery Project; Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught (Young Readers edition also available).