The Fugitive Slave Who Wrote to the President

In 1825, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself became the first known fugitive-slave narrative in American history. Although earlier autobiographical accounts of slavery had been published in England, the genre wouldn’t fully flourish in the United States until the antislavery movement of the 1830s to 1860s, when such narratives became powerful tools of moral persuasion, exposing the brutality of bondage while asserting the writer’s humanity, intellect, and will. William Grimes wrote before that moment, introducing a distinctly American voice shaped by the horrors of enslavement in the South and the precariousness of freedom in the North. What he published was more than a memoir—it was an indictment of the contradictions that had been central to the American experiment since the Revolution itself.

For 30 years, I have been researching the life and legacy of Grimes, who was my third great-grandfather. In May 2024, during my final week as a research fellow at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I made a trip to the Boston Athenaeum to see a copy of his book that had been housed there since 1849 and remained unexamined by scholars for 175 years. This copy, I’d learned, had been addressed to President John Quincy Adams. I had no way of knowing whether the sixth president had read Grimes’s narrative. But discovering the fact that Grimes had wanted him to see it moved me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

Grimes’s story opens with bitter irony:

I was born in the year 1784 in J_____, County of King George, Virginia, in a land boasting its freedom and under a government whose motto is Liberty and Equality. I was yet born a slave.

“In all the Slave States,” Grimes wrote, “the children follow the condition of their mother.” Though his father, Benjamin Grymes Jr., was a wealthy white Virginia planter, William remained enslaved like his mother—legally the property of a man he calls Dr. Stuart, Grymes’s neighbor. He recalled carrying newspapers to his father, who would speak and laugh with him and send him to the kitchen for something to eat. Whatever endearment young William may have felt, Benjamin Grymes neither owned, purchased, nor freed his enslaved son.

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At 10 years old, William was sold by Dr. Stuart to Colonel William Thornton, his brother-in-law, and sent to a distant plantation in what is now Rappahannock County. He grew up, as he later wrote, friendless and motherless, shaped early by violence and hunger. Inside the house, the head servant and seamstress sabotaged him to advance her own child; in the fields, overseers beat him for the slightest offense. When he was 12 or 13, he ran away to escape a brutal overseer, hiding in a hollow log for three days until he gave himself up, deciding that he “might as well be whipped to death as to starve.” Hardened by slavery, he grew up defiant.

He later implied that he could not be governed in the way that slavery was intended, writing that he had “too much sense and feeling to be a slave.” He said that he carried “too much of the blood of my father,” a former “Life Guard” to George Washington, “whose spirit feared nothing.” Over time, Grimes passed through the hands of 10 enslavers—from Dr. Stuart to Colonel Thornton and two of his sons, then to six interconnected businessmen in Savannah, Georgia.

In 1815, opportunity—not planning—opened a path to freedom. Left to hire out his time while his enslaver vacationed in Bermuda, Grimes went to the Savannah harbor seeking work. With discreet help from Black “Yankee” sailors who befriended him, he hid among cotton bales in the hold of a brig called the Casket as it set course for Quarantine Ground, off Staten Island. Evading inspection, the sailors helped him reach a packet boat bound for New York City. From there, Grimes walked some 80 miles to New Haven, Connecticut.  

For nearly a decade, he lived in the shadows—always vigilant, always at risk, yet determined to build a life. He was a servant at Yale College; he cut hair, and eventually established a barbering business in Litchfield; bought property; married Clarissa Caesar; and started a family. Barbering—a Black man’s trade—gave him access to learned men: Yale students, legal minds at Tapping Reeve’s law school in Litchfield, and political leaders, including Connecticut Governor Oliver Wolcott Jr.

Grimes moved regularly through spaces where ideas circulated and power was shaped. All the while, he lived with the knowledge that his freedom could be revoked at any moment. In September 1823, that fear became reality when his former enslaver F. H. Welman, aided by Savannah business partners, located him. Facing the prospect of seizure and return to the South, Grimes offered his small, debt-burdened house—the extent of his property—to remain with his wife and children.

Negotiations stretched across Connecticut, Georgia, New York, and the District of Columbia. Welman valued Grimes at $800 but agreed to accept $500. Yet even that reduced sum was beyond Grimes’s immediate reach.

Letters preserved at the Litchfield Historical Society point to an initial arrangement born of necessity: a down payment, likely from the sale of his home, followed by installments extending nearly a year. The final terms under which Grimes succeeded in purchasing his own body remain unknown, although it is certain that he lost his home in the process. Until the final payment was made, his freedom was provisional; re-enslavement was an ever-present threat.

At the Athenaeum, I was led to a reading table and handed Tracts Volume IV—a bound collection of pamphlets once owned by President John Quincy Adams and donated to the library in 1849 by his son Charles Francis Adams. Inside were sermons, political tracts, and educational booklets. Then I saw it. A small handwritten note lay tucked inside Life of William Grimes, resting directly atop the title page. The penmanship was confident, self-assured; the signature unmistakable: Wm. Grimes. A dark inkblot marked the note—his hand on the page two centuries ago:

Relying on your Excellency’s generosity, the Author presents this pamphlet to the President of the United States, Stamford, CT; May 15, 1826. Wm. Grimes.

To understand the full weight of that ink, I needed to understand what had led up to this moment.

In 1824, the celebrated French aristocrat General Lafayette—a hero of the American Revolution—returned to the United States at President James Monroe’s invitation for a sweeping farewell tour designed to rekindle patriotic devotion in a new generation. Wherever Lafayette traveled, parades and speeches proclaimed the United States the world’s beacon of liberty. On August 12, the general was greeted in New Haven with patriotic fervor. Governor Wolcott was there to welcome him.

Whether or not Grimes, the governor’s barber, attended the festivities himself, he was close enough to the celebrations to feel the pride of liberty collide with his reality as he worked toward purchasing his own freedom. We cannot know precisely when he began writing, but his book’s preface is dated October 1, 1824, less than two months after Lafayette’s visit. By January 1825, Grimes had deposited the completed manuscript with the clerk of the District of Connecticut.  

Two months later, on March 4, 1825, the newly inaugurated President John Quincy Adams made reference to a national “jubilee” to mark the 50th anniversary of the formation of the United States. His speech read like a progress report on the republic’s first half century. Regarding slavery, however, Adams balanced his own antislavery convictions against the proslavery stance of his vice president, John C. Calhoun. The new president trod carefully, acknowledging only obliquely the legal end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808.

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Grimes surely would have read Adams’s inaugural speech. He understood well that the written word was power—that books and newspapers shaped public thought and conferred authority. His life reveals how charged literacy was in the world he navigated. As a teenager, he was brutally beaten for carving letters into an outdoor oven while the mortar was still wet. In Savannah, he was hired out to the family of P. D. Woolhopter, a co-founder of Savannah’s Columbian Museum, a Federalist newspaper. As a fugitive in New Haven, he boldly advertised his barbering business in the Connecticut Herald. And in early August 1825, he placed an ad for his book, addressed “To the Public,” in the Connecticut Journal, printing the gripping preface in full. His advertisement ended with a drumbeat: “For sale at the Bookstores in this city.” In 1825, for a formerly enslaved man to publicly claim authorship and sell his book in white-owned bookstores was to plant a flag of freedom in hostile ground. It declared: I am here. I will not be hidden or silenced.

In the context of the approaching national milestone—before parades, fireworks, and soaring speeches saluted the nation’s 50th anniversary—Grimes’s decision to send the book to Adams with a formal note seemed like a carefully aimed stone at the glass of America’s triumphal story. When I returned to the opening line of his narrative, I saw it differently—what once appeared to be a simple beginning now commanded deeper scrutiny: I was born in the year 1784 in J_____.

For years, I’d assumed the J stood for a place. But what if it meant January? On January 14, 1784, the Treaty of Paris was ratified—the nation’s first legal breath of freedom. Grimes later admitted that he could not tell his wife his true age; most enslaved people never knew their birth year, let alone their full date of birth. What if, by tying himself to the historic month of January 1784, he had been deliberately aligning his life with the birth of the republic? Was this part of the message he wanted the president to absorb?

The pages that followed Grimes’s polite presidential dedication—Relying on your Excellency’s generosity—shattered any veneer of civility, exposing the reality of Grimes’s life as an enslaved man from the South and the fragility of survival in the so-called free North. Grimes’s narrative is raw and unsparing, laying bare not only relentless physical violence but also psychological trauma with no time or refuge to heal. He closes his book with a passage that strips jubilee rhetoric of all deception:

If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious, happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave bind the charter of American Liberty!

If Adams read those words in 1826, he would have encountered a direct challenge to his own language of triumph. Adams, a man who believed in moral law but often deferred action, would have been forced to confront slavery not as a distant policy problem but as a constitutional failure written in human flesh. Perhaps, I imagined, Grimes’s words had managed, however fleetingly, to expose the gulf between the nation’s self-congratulation at 50 years and the violence required to sustain its freedom.

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Adams would later begin to challenge that contradiction more openly. By the late 1830s, freed from presidential constraint, he was battling the congressional gag rule that sought to silence any mention of slavery, and in 1841 he stood before the Supreme Court to defend the Amistad captives and insist on their right to freedom.

We will likely never know whether Adams read Grimes’s book. But it was not discarded. It was passed on to his son, and it was trimmed and bound, preserved. Something in it had mattered—and still does today.

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