Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave: Annotated Edition

INTRODUCTION

] INTRODUCTION [ The fugitive who arrived at Emmor Kimber’s home on Christmas Day 1837 seemed different from the numerous enslaved people the wealthy old Quaker had helped along the Underground Railroad over the years. Like many, James Williams arrived alone, tired, poorly clothed, and afraid of capture. But as he rested and talked about his years in slavery, he impressed Kimber not only with the story of his adventures but also with his forthright manner, his impressive memory, and, as other abolitionists described him, his “expressive countenance shadowing forth ‘sorrow rather than anger’—a symmetrical figure , graceful in its movements—an intelligence that seemed to be the result of acquaintance with the style and usages of the best society in the South.”1 Close to thirty, he stood about five foot ten, slightly taller than average, with a complexion that showed the influence of the wealthy white man he claimed as his grandfather. Even his Alabama owner had grudgingly called him a “likely fellow” in a runaway notice.2 Williams described his life as a body servant to a kind master in Virginia, the horrors of slavery he had witnessed in Alabama, and finally his escape alone on foot a thousand miles, to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Quaker families had passed him eastward from there, until now he had arrived here at Emmor Kimber’s in Kimberton, outside of Philadelphia. Kimber was the richest of the Quakers who had aided him as well as the most educated. Besides owning substantial property in the town that bore his name, Kimber and his family ran a respectable boarding school, training girls to become teachers. He had written a few books on educational and religious topics, so he could recognize a natural-born narrator when he met one, and Williams intrigued him.3 The immediate problem, however, was securing Williams’s safety. Some fugitives ended their journey in the Quaker communities around Philadelphia, but Williams’s horror at the prospect of being recaptured made clear he would need to be transported farther. The ports of New York City opened up numerous directions for flight—Boston, Canada, England—but sending Williams to New York also suggested another possibility to Kimber. x introduction Earlier in the year he had attended the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Convention in Harrisburg, where Lewis Tappan, representing the New York–based American Anti-Slavery Society, spoke about the efforts of his organization. The quantity of antislavery publications emanating from the New York offices was impressive: seventy agents were hawking four different papers, resulting in twenty-eight thousand copies going out each month, publicizing the evils of slavery and recruiting for the cause of abolition. Tappan had ended with a plea for donations and support to continue the publishing campaign.4 Kimber decided to write him in New York, explaining that he had a fugitive he needed to send there for safety. But he also must have realized the power that Williams ’s eyewitness testimony could have in one of Tappan’s publications—if it proved to be true. The reality behind memoirs of enslaved people has intrigued scholars to this day, but until now most have considered the authenticity of Williams’s story resolved. Basing their opinions mainly on an investigation in 1838 by an Alabama newspaper editor, historians have generally concluded it to be the fanciful tale of an imposter who perhaps was never even a slave or, if he was, not under the circumstances he described. This annotated edition provides independent evidence for the first time that confirms Williams was an actual enslaved man in Virginia and Alabama and that most of the slaveholders he mentioned existed, with the names he used or close phonetic variations. It also identifies his owners in both states, explains how he altered his story to throw investigators off the track, points out where he inserted fictional elements, and includes other extensive details of his life not in the narrative, including some adventures as exciting as anything he told but which he chose not to reveal. Rather than being a free conman or a puppet of the abolitionists, as many have suspected, Williams was a genuine freedom seeker and a skilled narrator, able to shape his own real life into a cohesive, romanticized story. rejected as a fraud When John W. Blassingame, Gilbert Osofsky, and other historians began to look anew at slave narratives in the late twentieth century, they discarded Williams’s without further investigation. Blassingame explained, “Alabama whites proved [it...