Daniel Isaac Browne Bergen County’s Unlikely Records Hero
Todd W. Braisted
At 4:00 AM on 23 March 1780, some 300 British and German troops suddenly appeared in in Hackensack. Their principal target was the courthouse, where Captain Abraham Haring and some twenty-three of his men lay dozing, guarding the just collected tax-receipts of Harrington Township. This was stop one on the expedition, as it would continue on, joiningother British forces attacking a Continental Army post at Paramus. While in Hackensack, the troops plundered a number of items, burned two houses, and most notably, torched the courthouse itself. It became a legitimate military target due to housing Haring’s militiamen, in effect becoming a barracks.
The crackling embers of the 1734 structure should have contained the ashes of all manner of legal documents common to then and now: deeds, licenses, the full spectrum of legal and local government records, stretching back decades. Aside from perhaps the last few years of the war, however, that was not the case. The records were not there. Where were they and why?
When the war reached Bergen County in the autumn of 1776, attorney Daniel Isaac Browne was living in a two-story stone house in Hackensack, on 12¼ acres of fenced in land with a barn. Born in 1739 or 1740, he was the son of the Reverend Isaac Browne, the Loyalist rector of Trinity Church in Newark. In addition to his private practice as an attorney, which he claimed earned him some £ 450 annually, Browne held several government appointments, including “Surrogate of the Eastern Division of the province of New Jersey.” However, the local offices he held would be the ones that proved most valuable, if not the most financially profitable to him, namely “Office of Clerk of the Courts, and Keeper of the records of Bergen County.”
People who did not know where Browne stood politically in the troubles with Britain had the question answered for them when the British arrived in Hackensack on November 21st, 1776. Browne at that point was commissioned the first major of the newly raised 4th Battalion, New Jersey Volunteers, commanded by Bergen County’s leading Loyalist, Abraham Van Buskirk of New Bridge. While the battalion was recruiting hundreds of men from the surrounding countryside, it occupied both Hackensack and New Bridge until the British contracted the lines in late December 1776. After this time, the battalion, as well as some of the others that made up the six that comprised the New Jersey Volunteers occupied Bergen Point (modern Bayonne) as well as northern Staten Island.
Browne does not appear to have possessed a great military mind. He is only recorded as leading one raid in his career, that in April 1777, in which he took all of two prisoners. Over the course of the unit’s first seventeen months of existence, hundreds of men had either died, deserted were discharged, or taken prisoners. In April 1778, the ten companies that comprised the unit were reduced to just five. The surplus officers would be seconded and more or less retired on half pay. While the battalion would henceforth only have one major, surprisingly it would be neither of those who had been with the unit since its raising, with both Browne and Robert Timpany of New Bridge retired. Browne’s active-duty career would be over.
Occasionally supplying the British with intelligence from friends in the countryside, the sidelined former major explored the possibility of raising his own corps, a second battalion to the well-appointed Volunteers of Ireland, but this scheme went nowhere. By 1783, with the British involved in evacuating New York City, Browne determined to start a new life with thousands of other Loyalists and settle in Nova Scotia, specifically in the beautiful area of Annapolis Royal. There was never a question of returning to Hackensack. In September 1778, Browne was found guilty of joining the British by an inquisition of his former neighbors, which conviction forfeited all his real and personal property. On 23 April 1779, his Hackensack home and land was auctioned off for a little over £ 1280. There would be no going home, as there was no home to return to. There would however be one final act to play before setting sail for the Bay of Fundy.
Sir Guy Carleton, the final British Commander-in-Chief in America, wished for a smooth transition of power in the New York area. He also realized that the citizens of the new country, which would include thousands of me, women and children who remained loyal to the British but chose to remain, if possible, had been through enough upheaval the past decade. Therefore, in 1783, Carleton issued an order that anyone in possession of local government records should relinquish them to the new government for the sake of good order. And what did the British care at that point about a deed for land in Paramus or Ramapo? Enter Daniel Isaac Browne. The reason the county records did not burn in the courthouse on that March morning in 1780 was because Browne had them. It would appear, when he and the British left Hackensack in December 1776, he removed all the records and kept them with his own baggage. As he perhaps proudly reported after the war when he enumerated his considerable property and professional losses, “He preserved and brought to New York the Records of Bergen County (at some expence and considerable danger and difficulty) and pursuant to General Orders, delivered them to Sir Guy Carleton’s Secretary.” From there, they were returned to Hackensack.
The next time you review an 18th Century legal document in the Bergen County Clerk’s office, or perhaps now in the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, you will know who to thank for giving you that opportunity.