Born in 1765 in Guilford to Flora, a daughter of Montros and Phillis, Cesar was enslaved by members of the Hill family. Sadly, Flora died when Cesar was just six. In 1777, Nathaniel Hill, Cesar’s enslaver, also died. At some point, Cesar appears to have moved into the household of Rev. Jonathan Todd, the minister of the Congregational Church in what is now Madison. Todd enslaved several people, including a woman named Tamar, who may have acted as Cesar’s surrogate mother. Historical accounts describe Cesar as a fiddler, whose musical talents attracted neighbors to social gatherings at the Todd’s house. When Rev. Todd manumitted everyone he enslaved in his 1791 will, Cesar’s name was not on the list. He later can be seen living with members of the Hill family again, lending credence to a notion that he may have been indentured but was not enslaved by Todd. In  1800, Cesar was manumitted by members of the Hill family. Two years after that, his name appears alongside his aunts and uncles as a recipient of proceeds from the sale of his grandfather Montros’s property. 

A church suggests Cesar married a woman named Beck Hill. Church records also lend credence to the notion that Flora was Cesar’s mother and Tamar his mother figure after Flora’s death; on the list of baptisms at the Congregational Church in East Guilford (now Madison), are the following individuals, identified as “children of Cesar”:  Flora Candace, Linus Peter, Abel, and Clarinda Tamar. At some point Cesar took on the surname Rogers, leading researchers to speculate that his father was Sharper Rogers, a Revolutionary War soldier with local ties. In the 1810s, Cesar Rogers can be seen working at Guilford’s Congregational Church, where, like his uncle Moses before him, he was paid to tend the clock and ring the church bells. A book of death records in Guilford show that Cesar died on April 27, 1817. However, his name surfaces in official Guilford records again in 1828 when his aunt Candace willed that “the whole of my property be given in equal shares to the three children of my Nephew Cesar Rogers late of Guilford Dec’d [deceased] to wit Abel, Flora & Clarinda to them and their heirs forever.”