William Grimes escaped slavery from Savannah aboard a merchant brig carrying cotton to New York. His method depended on an opportunity created by the work he was already doing at the waterfront: he helped load the vessel, became acquainted with sailors willing to assist him, and disappeared into a space they left among cotton bales lashed on deck.
The account survives in Grimes’s own 1825 autobiography, which makes this a rare early self-emancipation story in which the person who escaped described the preparation, concealment, voyage, landing, and continued danger in his own published words. The exact year is less secure than the mechanism. Modern institutional sources divide between 1814 and 1815; 1815 remains the conventional date.
From repeated sale to Savannah
Grimes was born enslaved in King George County, Virginia, in 1784. Over the next decades he was repeatedly sold, transferred, or hired out and was moved through Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia. By the early 1810s he was in Savannah, where his labor included driving, household work, and other tasks that brought him into contact with the commercial life of the city.
His final enslaver there was Francis Harvey Welman. Grimes wrote that when Welman travelled to Bermuda with his family, he left Grimes to find work for himself while requiring a payment of three dollars each week. That temporary mobility did not amount to freedom, but it gave Grimes an opportunity to work around the waterfront without Welman physically present.
During that period the brig Casket arrived from Boston. Grimes joined others loading the ship and became friendly with members of its crew. The vessel’s cargo was chiefly cotton. Once the hold was full, additional bales had to be secured on deck, and some of the sailors proposed leaving a space in the middle of those bales large enough for Grimes to hide with provisions.
That detail matters because later summaries often describe Grimes as hiding in the hold. His own account says otherwise: the hold had already been filled, and his hiding place was created among the cotton bales carried on deck.
Preparing to disappear
The evening before the Casket was to sail, Grimes went into Savannah with a Black sailor from the vessel to obtain food and water for the passage. They acquired bread, dried beef, water, and other necessities. Moving through the city at night posed its own danger because Savannah maintained patrols that scrutinized Black people who were away from authorized places or enslavers.
Grimes used the racial assumptions of the slave city against that system. He instructed the sailor to walk behind him in the manner of a servant so that guards would take Grimes for the man in authority. New Georgia Encyclopedia notes that Grimes could at times pass as white, and his autobiography records that the arrangement allowed the pair to secure the supplies and return to the vessel.
Grimes then entered the space among the bales. The Casket cast off from Savannah on a Saturday night, remained in the river until Monday morning, and then crossed the bar into the ocean. Once the ship was out of sight of land, the sailors signaled to Grimes that the immediate danger of Savannah had been left behind.
He was not sealed into one position for the entire journey. Grimes wrote that he stayed concealed as much as possible, but on some dark evenings he crawled out and lay among the sailors on deck. Because the crew included men of different complexions, he believed the captain could not readily distinguish him from the hands when looking over the deck at night. He nevertheless remained hidden from the captain, mate, and steward throughout the voyage north.
The escape was not over at New York
The Casket reached the quarantine ground in New York Harbor rather than proceeding directly to the city. Some members of the crew were sick, so movement from the quarantine area was subject to medical inspection. Grimes’s first-person account shows how close this final stage came to exposing him.
After leaving his hiding place one morning, he was changing clothes in the forecastle when the mate came below and recognized him. Grimes froze. The mate questioned the crew about how he had come aboard, then chose not to report him. Instead, he told sailors to put Grimes ashore on Staten Island and indicated that he preferred not to know more about the situation.
A sailor took him ashore and introduced him to another man who agreed to help him reach New York. Grimes still feared the doctor stationed at the wharf to record and examine people leaving the quarantine area. With assistance, he got onto a packet boat and reached the city.
Even there he was not secure. While walking along Broadway, Grimes unexpectedly saw Oliver Sturges, a man who had previously enslaved him in Savannah. Sturges recognized him. Grimes managed the encounter without being seized, but the experience made the danger of remaining in New York unmistakable. The next morning he bought bread and meat and started on foot toward New Haven, sometimes catching short rides behind stages or with teamsters.
Escape did not erase the slaveholder’s claim
Grimes built a life in Connecticut as a worker, barber, businessman, husband, and father. Yet self-emancipation and legally recognized freedom were not the same thing in the early nineteenth-century United States. The possibility that a former enslaver could pursue a claim against him remained part of his life in the North.
By 1824 that threat became concrete. Grimes faced the prospect of being taken back to slavery unless he paid for his legal freedom. He ultimately paid $500, a transaction that consumed the property and financial security he had struggled to build. New Georgia Encyclopedia describes the payment as leaving his family in severe financial distress.
The following year Grimes published Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. Unlike many later slave narratives produced with prominent white abolitionist editors or sponsors, Grimes published his own story. Yale’s Beinecke Library and Oxford University Press identify the 1825 book as the first book-length fugitive-slave narrative published in the United States.
That autobiography is also why the Casket escape can be reconstructed with unusual precision. Grimes did not leave readers only the fact that he “stowed away.” He described the labor that brought him aboard, the sailors who made room among the deck cargo, the provisions, the night concealment, the quarantine problem, his discovery by the mate, and the fear that followed him even after he had reached New York.
The result was a successful act of self-emancipation, but not a clean transition from slavery to security. Grimes crossed the geographic boundary that separated Savannah from the North years before he could force an end to the legal claim made against him. His escape story therefore belongs not only to the history of maritime flight from slavery, but also to the history of how precarious freedom could remain after an enslaved person had physically gotten away.
Evidence discipline
What the record supports
Status labels distinguish secure conclusions from uncertainty and rejected claims. Color is never the only signal.
DISPUTED
The escape occurred in 1815.
New Georgia Encyclopedia gives 1815, and a Beinecke Library program describes Grimes’s 1824 self-purchase correspondence as occurring nine years after his escape. Other UNC and Beinecke summaries give 1814. Grimes’s own 1825 escape passage does not supply the year.
Sources: SRC-002, SRC-003, SRC-004MYTH
Grimes hid in the ship’s hold among cotton bales.
Grimes’s own narrative says the hold had already been filled. Additional cotton bales were lashed on deck, and sailors left a concealed space among those deck bales for him. Some modern summaries compress this into hiding in the hold.
Sources: SRC-002, SRC-003MYTH
Northern arrival made Grimes legally secure as a free man.
Grimes lived for years under the threat of being claimed and returned to slavery. In 1824 he paid $500 for legal freedom after being threatened with re-enslavement.
Sources: SRC-003, SRC-004WELL-SUPPORTED
Grimes’s 1825 Life is the earliest book-length fugitive-slave narrative published in the United States.
Yale’s Beinecke Library and Oxford University Press identify the work as the first fugitive-slave narrative, or first book-length narrative by a person who escaped slavery, in American publishing history.
Sources: SRC-004, SRC-005