The Case of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave

Abstract

E VERY schoolboy knows, even if in sketchy outlines, the political history of the conflict over slavery. Accounts of the trade abound, and a beginning has been made in the study of plantation society. But scholars and historians have until recently virtually neglected the life and behavior of one important segment of that society-the himself. All too often the discussion of slavery has been carried on in terms of stereotypes about the Negro that had no existence outside of the minds of white men. What did it mean to be a slave, to be a marketable chattel, to suffer inescapable caste status, to work without wages, to be driven often without mercy and forced to accept the appearance, the idea of inferiority? How did it feel? What hopes and fears stirred in the minds of these illiterate and brutalized men? What feelings lay behind their murderous and abortive revolts? When they were forced into submission and disingenuous cooperation what was the nature of their tenuous adjustment to slavery? Or having fled the plantation, what had slavery done to their personality and behavior? These are questions that only the himself could directly answer. To discover the answers to them is to see in human terms what slavery entailed. Happily, there are many biographies and autobiographies of slaves extant.' These accounts, (called slave narratives) whether dictated, ghosted or written by the subjects themselves, are noteworthy for the facts they reveal in regard to both the plantation system and the personalities of the slaves molded by the system.