Caesar, who was born 17th of November 1762, is included in Lyme’s birth records with four other enslaved children in John McCurdy’s household. Their parents are not named, but Humphrey, whom McCurdy emancipated in 1778 after the children were grown, could well have been their father. Caesar was 11 in 1773 when his owner placed an advertisement in the Connecticut Courant seeking a “Cargo of Dutch Mill Horses” for shipment to St. Kitts. With his older brother Jordan, Caesar likely provided labor on McCurdy’s horse farm, and he may have worked later as a deckhand on one of the ships that McCurdy commissioned.
At age 22 Caesar fled. A notice posted in the Connecticut Gazette on September 17, 1784, announced that a Mulatto named Caesar had run away from John McCurdy of Lyme. The runaway notice states that Caesar had been to sea, that he resided at some time on Long Island, and that he was a frequent runaway. It describes him as mulatto, suggesting that his mother or grandmother was Native American. Whether Caesar ever returned to Lyme is not known.
