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Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
Duke University Press
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7530-2
Publication date:
2015
Book Chapter
“Everybody’s Got a Little Light under the Sun”: The Making of the Book of Negroes
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Published:September 2015
Working with treaties, letters, government documents, maps, memoirs, and fugitive slave advertisements as primary source data, chapter 2 examines arbitration hearings that took place at Fraunces Tavern in New York City between fugitive slaves who sought to be included in the Book of Negroes and those who claimed them as escaped property at the end of the American Revolution. The Book of Negroes is an eighteenth-century ledger that lists three thousand self-emancipating former slaves who embarked mainly on British ships during the British evacuation of New York after the War of Independence. As such, this ledger serves as an important...
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