Second of two parts; read part 1
Not every slave master in Moses Grandy’s life was cruel. Some actively worked with Grandy to help him buy his freedom.
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There was “Richard Furley, who … gave me a pass to work for myself.”
The agreement between Furley and Grandy was simple.
“I obtained work by the piece where I could, and paid him out of my earnings what we had agreed on; I maintained myself on the rest, and saved what I could…He paid seventy, eighty, or ninety dollars a year for me, and I paid him twenty or thirty dollars a year more than that.”
Sometime around 1813 or 1814 Grandy noted “the English blockaded the Chesapeake, which made it necessary to send merchandize from Norfolk to Elizabeth city by the Grand Canal, so that it might get to sea by Pamlico Sound and Ocracock Inlet…”
A skilled waterman by this time, he “took some canal boats on shares; Mr. Grice … was the owner of them.”
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Most likely that is Mr. Charles Grice, described in a National Register of Historic Places survey of Elizabeth City as “the leading merchant in Elizabeth City’s early years.”
Grandy’s arrangement with Grice gives an indication of how valuable and trusted Grandy was. “I gave him one-half of all I received for freight: out of the other half, I had to victual and man the boats, and all over that expense was my own profit,” he described as the business arrangement.
It was during this time, when visiting “my brother Benjamin returned from the West Indies,” that how cruel and capricious life was for an enslaved person becomes clear.
Grandy was in one room and in another room “heard the heavy blows of a hammer…went to see what was going on. I looked into the store, and saw my brother lying on his back on the floor, and Mr. Williams, who had bought him, driving staples over his wrists and ankles; an iron bar was afterwards put across his breast, which was also held down by staples.”
His brother had done nothing wrong, he was told, “but that his master had failed, and he was sold towards paying the debts.”
Grandy Tries to Buy His Freedom
Although increasingly independent, Moses Grandy was still owned by James Grandy and at the suggestion of Grice, Moses asked how much would it cost to buy his freedom.
After considerable negotiation, $600 was the agreed price.
“I then went heartily to work, and whenever I paid him (James) for my time, I paid him something also towards my freedom, for which he gave me receipts,” Grandy recalled.
When $600 was reached, Moses went to his master and “he tore up all the receipts: I told him he ought not to have done so; he replied it did not signify, for as soon as court-day came, he should give me my free papers.”
Read the first part: Enslaved in Camden County, Moses Grandy knew its cruelty
When the court date came, James “was playing at billiards, and would not go with me.”
Concerned his chance for freedom would be lost, Moses went to the Grices and asked for help. Mrs. Grice sent for James who “cursed her, and went out of the house.”
Mr. Grice then met with James and he agreed to go to court and sign the papers. Instead “he rode away, and kept away till court was over” and sold Moses for $600 to a Mr. Trewitt.
It was the first of three attempts by Grandy to buy his freedom.
Trewitt, agreed to the same arrangement Grandy had had with Grice and that $600 would buy his freedom.
After two and a half years, Grandy had paid the full $600. Trewitt on Christmas Eve asked him, though, to take a letter to a Mr. Mews on Newbegun Creek, a small tributary to the Pasquotank River, in Weeksville.
When he delivered the letter, Mews read it “and looking up at me said, ‘Well, you belong to me.’”
Trewitt had used Grandy as security on a loan and failed in his payments.
“‘Mews’ was almost assuredly William T. Muse, a Pasquotank land speculator who owned slaves and more than twenty thousand acres of swamp forest. Muse, who had not really wanted Grandy, sold him back to Sawyer,” Cecelski wrote.
Initially his time with Sawyer went well. His second wife was owned by Sawyer, and Grandy’s maritime skills afforded him a better life and more freedom than most other enslaved people.
“I got into a fair way of buying myself again; for I undertook the lightering of the shingles or boards out of the Dismal Swamp …” Grandy said.
But Sawyer had gone into business with “his two sons-in-law at Norfolk, who failed; in consequence of which, he sold eighteen coloured people, his share of the Swamp (lightering), and two plantations.”
Grandy was again in the fields, but this time may have been the worst.
“The overseer was a bad one, his name was Brooks,” Grandy said.
Working in the field, if a worker did not put in sufficient effort, “One black man is kept on purpose to whip the others in the field; if he does not flog with sufficient severity, he is flogged himself: he whips severely, to keep the whip from his own back.”
Grandy witnessed Brooks kill “a girl named Mary” and “also killed a boy about twelve years old. He had no punishment, or even trial, for either.”
After years working as a waterman, the hard labor of field work was wearing him down and Grandy told Sawyer that he had “not been used to it for a long time; that his overseer was the worst that had ever been on the plantation, and that I could not stand it.”
Grandy pointed to how little food the field hands were given, Sawyer agreed to provide more food. The slaves working in the field “much rejoiced that I got this additional allowance for them. But I was not satisfied; I wanted liberty.”
A payment of $230 had already been made to Sawyer, and Grandy again began negotiations for his freedom.
Sawyer agreed to sell Grandy for the $600 he paid for him plus the $230 already given him. Grandy, “hired an old horse and started for Norfolk.” At Deep Creek he went to the house of “Captain Edward Minner … in former days I had done much business for him.”
Minner agreed to pay the $600 for Grandy’s freedom with the understanding that he would be repaid. At first Sawyer refused to sell his property, but Minner “shewed him the paper he had given me, saying, ‘Mr. Sawyer, is not this your handwriting?’”
Unlike everyone else who had purchased him, Minner was adamant that he would not own another human being.
“Mind, gentlemen, I do not want him for a slave; I want to buy him for freedom. He will repay me the money, and I shall not charge him a cent of interest for it. I would not have a coloured person to drag me down to hell, for all the money in the world,” Moses recalled Minner telling Sawyer.
By 1828, Grandy had repaid Minner and he had his “free papers, so that my freedom was quite secure, my feelings were greatly excited. I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers.”
He moved north, first to Providence, Rhode Island, then to Boston, Massachusetts. He traveled the world as sailor, telling of trips to “St. John’s in Porto Rico…(and) several other voyages, and particularly two to the Mediterranean. The last was to the East Indies.”
He had now saved enough to purchase the freedom of his wife. “I sent it to Virginia…She came to me at Boston. I dared not go myself to fetch her, lest I should be again deprived of my liberty, as often happens to free coloured people,” Grandy said.
He was also able to buy his son’s freedom as well and learned that at least two of his six daughters had purchased their freedom.
Grandy, now a free man, found life in the northern states troubling.
“Although I was free as to the law, I was made to feel severely the difference between persons of different colours. No black man was admitted to the same seats in churches with the whites, nor to the inside of public conveyances, nor into street coaches or cabs …” he said, adding however, “the abolitionists boldly stood up for us, and through them things are much changed for the better.”
Grandy was particularly harsh in his criticism of the American Colonization Society, the organization that was founded to send Black and enslaved people back to Africa.
“As to the settlement of Liberia on the coast of Africa, the free coloured people of America do not willingly go to it. America is their home: if their forefathers lived in Africa, they themselves know nothing of that country,” he indicated.
Enoch Sawyer was a vice president of the Camden County American Colonization Society the Raleigh Register, and North-Carolina State Gazette recorded in 1825.
Although illiterate Grandy was a keen observer of events and the personalities of the people he met along his journey. There were slave owners, as he noted, that did treat their human property well, at least by the standards of many slave owners.
But overall “The proprietors, though they live in luxury, generally die in debt: their negroes are so hardly treated, that no profit is made by their labour. Many of them are great gamblers. At the death of a proprietor, it commonly happens that his coloured people are sold towards paying his debts. So it must and will be with the masters, while slavery continues: when freedom is established, I believe they will begin to prosper greatly.”
The concept of freedom and its importance to the individual is an idea Grandy returns to a number of times throughout “Late a Slave in America.”
“Slavery,” he observed, “will teach any man to be glad when he gets freedom.”
