Caesar Nero Paul

A victim of the Atlantic slave trade as a young child, he became a free man after the French and Indian War; married a white woman and founded a family in Exeter, New Hampshire; and lived to see his children attain important positions in the free Black community of the early United States.

There he was held enslaved by Major John Gilman and called "Caesar Nero" following the Colonial fashion for giving slaves Classical names.

His enslaver, scion of the locally powerful Gilman family, was called to fight in the French and Indian Wars, taking the fourteen year old Caesar Nero along with him.

Later freed, Caesar Nero chose the family name Paul for himself and married Lovey Rollins, a white woman and daughter of a lawyer from nearby Stratham.

She celebrated the Paul brothers in speeches and writings and brought attention to the role Black Americans played in the founding of the country.