author
Isaac Allen
A Loyalist officer turned New Brunswick judge, he stood near the center of the upheaval that followed the American Revolution. His life links war, migration, and the early legal history of what became Canada.
1 Audiobook
Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?
by Isaac Allen
About the author
Born in 1741 and dying in 1806, Isaac Allen is remembered as a jurist in New Brunswick and as a Loyalist officer during the American Revolutionary War. By the end of the war he had reached the rank of colonel and commanded the 2nd battalion of the New Jersey Volunteers before relocating with other Loyalists to British North America.
After the war, he settled in New Brunswick, where he received a large land grant near Fredericton and became one of the province’s early judges. Later historical sources also connect him to important and troubling parts of the colony’s past, including the 1799 legal fight over slavery in New Brunswick and a major land purchase at Ekwpahak.
Allen is not a widely documented literary figure, so surviving biographical details are fairly limited. What does stand out is the way his life reflects the tangled politics of empire, loyalty, settlement, and law in the late eighteenth century.