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1783 at Rockingham: Black Refugees and the Crisis of Freedom

co-presented by Franklin 250

The conversation begun in the autumn of 1783 is one America has never finished having.

The Revolution did not end at Yorktown. In the extraordinary months of 1783, the Confederation Congress met at Nassau Hall in Princeton, the definitive Treaty of Paris was signed, and George Washington kept his final wartime headquarters at Rockingham, the Berrien farm overlooking the Millstone River Valley in Franklin Township. That same treaty carried Article VII, which barred the departing British from "carrying away any Negroes or other Property," and forced the new nation to confront whether Black men, women, and children were persons entitled to liberty or property subject to return. Tens of thousands had already claimed their own freedom by crossing into British lines during the war, and Britain refused to return them.

Historian Timothy Messer-Kruse argues that the constitutional crisis that followed became one of the forces that led the founders to abandon the Articles of Confederation and draft a stronger federal Constitution. The conversation begun in the autumn of 1783 is one America has never finished having.

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a historian and professor at the School of Cultural and Critical Studies of Bowling Green State University. His work sits at the intersection of labor, law, and the long unfinished business of American emancipation. He is the author of Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024), a reappraisal of how the architecture of American law bent around the movement of self-emancipated people in the wake of the Revolution.

Mary Tsaltas-Ottomanelli is the executive director of the Hendrick I. Lott House, a Dutch colonial farmstead whose grounds include a documented stop on the Underground Railroad in Brooklyn. Formerly of Fraunces Tavern Museum, she curated programming on the occupation and evacuation of New York and the lives shaped by both.

Copies of Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution will be available for sale.

Registration is appreciated. For questions regarding this or any library program, please call 732-873-8700 x 111. 

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