had any idea of my coming away with them or not, I cannot say,” wrote Grimes, “but this I can say safely, a place was left.” He slipped ashore in the evening with a colored seaman to buy some “bread and dried beef” for the journey; then he lay low among the cotton bales while the brig edged slowly out of the harbor. As it passed the lighthouse, “the sailors gave three hearty cheers” and Grimes realized he was on the way to being a free man.
The voyage itself was uneventful:
During my passage, I lay concealed as much as possible; some evenings, I would crawl out and go and lie down with the sailors on deck; the night being dark, the captain could not distinguish me from the hands, having a number on board of different complexions… . When there was something to be done some one would come on deck and call forward, “there, boys!” “Aye, aye, sir,” was the reply; then they would be immediately at their posts, I remaining on the floor not perceived by them.
There was a tense moment for Grimes, however, as the brig neared the quarantine station in New York Harbor. Standing in the forecastle, he felt hopeful as he saw the dark outline of the city becoming clearer through the sea mist. But when the captain approached and questioned him about his status aboard, he just stood there, wordless and tense. “Poor fellow, he stole aboard,” said the captain with a knowing stare. And he gave orders that Grimes was to be put ashore safely.
Another tense moment awaited him as, accompanied by a Negro sailor, he was herded toward a line of seamen who were being examined by a doctor on the wharf. Then, he confessed, “I felt as if my heart were in my mouth, or in other words, very much afraid that I should be compelled to give my name, together with an account of where I came from, and where I was going and in what manner I came there.” But his guide stepped up and spoke quietly to the doctor, who simply gave the order “Push off.” Grimes “rejoiced heartily,” thanking his companion a number of times before they parted.
Now he was on his own in a crowded, friendless city. New York was dangerous too for men in Grimes’ position, for among its colored population were some who “for a few dollars” would betray fugitives to Southern slave-catchers.2 Not knowing of this peril, he approached a colored girl and asked her to “walk with him a little ways, in order to see the town,” explaining that he was “a stranger there, and was afraid of being lost.” So they walked “for some time,” after which he found a lodging for the night.
Grimes did not feel comfortable in New York, however. Early the next morning he bought “a loaf of bread and a small piece of meat” and set out on foot toward the northeast, with no particular destination in mind. Trudging mile after mile over dirt roads, he crossed the Connecticut line at Greenwich. At first he fancied he was pursued by every “carriage or person” behind him; often he ducked off the road to lie down until those in the rear had passed. But soon he realized that his money would not carry him far, and he resolved to be more temperate, more prudent, and more courageous. Thus he persuaded a teamster to give him a ride for a short distance, and he bought some apples from a couple of boys he met on the road. At length, with just seventy-five cents in his pocket, he reached New Haven, where he paid for one night’s lodging in a boarding house “kept by a certain Mrs. W.”
Now he needed work, and he found it the very next day with Abel Lanson, who kept a livery stable. “He set me to work in a ledge of rocks,” wrote Grimes, “getting out stone for buildings. This I found to be the hardest work I had ever done, and began to repent that I had ever come away from Savannah to this hard cold country. After I had worked at this for about three months, I got employment taking care of a sick person, who called his name Carr, who had been a servant to Judge Clay, of Kentucky; he was then driving for Mr. Lanson,”
This job ended suddenly when Grimes was recognized by a friend of his master, who was apparently visiting in New Haven. The fugitive’s first thought was to “inform his friends”; his second, to leave town. He went to Southington, where he stayed a few weeks picking apples on Captain Potter’s farm; then back to New Haven; to Norwich, where he worked as a barber for Christopher Starr; to New London; and to Stonington, where he had been told that a barber might do well.
But Grimes found it difficult to make a living in eastern Connecticut, so he returned to New Haven. There he found work at Yale College, shaving, barbering, “waiting on the scholars in their rooms,” and doing odd jobs for other employers on the side. Six or eight months later he heard that a barber was needed at the Litchfield Law School—Tapping Reeve’s famous establishment—and there he went in the year 1808. He became a general servant to the students and was also active as a barber, earning fifty or sixty dollars per month. “For some time,” he said, “I made money very fast; but at length, trading horses a number of times, the horse jockies would cheat me, and to get restitution, I was compelled to sue them; I would sometimes win the case; but the lawyers alone would reap the benefit of it. At other times, I lost my case, fiddle and all, besides paying my attorney… . Let it not be imagined that the poor and friendless are entirely free from oppression where slavery does not exist; this would be fully illustrated if I should give all the particulars of my life, since I have been in Connecticut.”
Back in New Haven in the year 1812 or 1813, Grimes met and soon married Clarissa Caesar, a colored girl whom he called “the lovely and all accomplished.” She was also a “lady of education,” teaching him all the reading and writing he ever knew. Because his situation was not entirely safe—he was still a runaway slave and still, before the law, his master’s property—Grimes and his bride returned to “the back country” of Litchfield, where they bought a house and settled down. And just as he had feared, his owner eventually learned of his whereabouts and sent an emissary, a brisk and rude fellow called Thompson, to reclaim him. This man confronted the fugitive with a plain choice: he could buy his freedom, or Thompson would “put him in irons and send him down to New York, and then on to Savannah.” Grimes described his state of mind and his subsequent actions as follows:
To be put in irons and dragged back to a state of slavery, and either leave my wife and children in the street, or take them into servitude, was a situation in which my soul now shudders at the thought of having been placed… . I may give my life for the good or the safety of others, but no law, no consequences, not the lives of millions, can authorize them to take my life or liberty from me while innocent of any crime. I have to thank my master, however, that he took what I had, and freed me. I gave a deed of my house to a gentleman in Litchfield. He paid the money for it to Mr. Thompson, who then gave me my free papers. Oh! how my heart did rejoice and thank God.
Thus William Grimes became a free man, to live out the rest of his long life as his own man in a free state. Yet, as he came to set down his memoirs in later years, he viewed the condition of slavery and the condition of freedom in a somewhat ambivalent light:
To say that a man is better fed, and has less care [in slavery] than in the other, is false. It is true, if you regard him as a brute, as destitute of the feelings of human nature. But I will not speak on the subject more. Those slaves who have kind masters are perhaps as happy as the generality of mankind. They are not aware what their condition can be except by their own exertions. I would advise no slave to leave his master. If he runs away, he is most sure to be taken. If he is not, he will ever be in the apprehension of it; and I do think there is no inducement for a slave to leave his master and be set free in the Northern States. I have had to work hard; I have often been cheated, insulted, abused and injured; yet a black man, if he will be industrious and honest, can get along here as well as any one who is poor and in a situation to be imposed on. I have been very fortunate in life in this respect. Notwithstanding all my struggles and sufferings and injuries, I have been an honest man.
William Grimes, escaping in the first decade of the nineteenth century, found only chance friends to help him. A quarter-century later, when Daniel Fisher came out of Virginia and took the name Billy Winters, the Underground Railroad was already partially organized, as his own story shows:3
I was born in Westmoreland County, Virgina, about the year of 1808. I had five brothers and two sisters and was known as Daniel Fisher. Our master’s name was Henry Cox. When I was about twenty years of age my master was obliged, on account of heavy losses, to sell me, and I was sent to Richmond to be sold on the block to the highest