Location: 192 Camden Causeway (Hwy 158), Camden.
County: Camden
Original Date Cast: 2025
Moses Grandy was a skilled seaman and Black antislavery activist born into slavery around 1786 in Camden County, North Carolina. He changed hands between several enslavers working along the Albemarle Sound and Dismal Swamp until he bought his freedom, moved to Boston, and published an antislavery autobiography. Most of the details of Grandy's life are known only from his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America. Because Grandy could not read or write, he orated his autobiography to George Thompson, a London antislavery activist with ties to William Lloyd Garrison and the New England Anti-slavery Society, while on a trip to London. Although Grandy's narrative was published as antislavery propaganda, other accounts of slavery in North Carolina at the time verify its major points. He also hoped to purchase his family members' freedom with proceeds from the sale of his narrative, and his struggle for freedom and Narrative contributed to the push for the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century.
Moses Grandy was born in Camden County, North Carolina around 1786, although the exact date was unknown. He described his first enslaver, Billy Grandy, as a hard-drinking man who sold all of his siblings except Moses, when Moses' mother protested her children’s sale, she was flogged as punishment.
Young Moses often played with his enslaver's son, James Grandy, who was close to Moses in age. Billy Grandy promised to will Moses to James upon his death, and James subsequently inherited Moses around 1794. While James was young, Moses was hired out annually to various owners until he and James were twenty one years old. During this time, Moses endured varying levels of abuse at the hands of several enslavers. When James was twenty one, he repossessed Moses, and Moses went to work on canal boats for a man named Mr. Grice, the husband of James Grandy's sister. Noticing that Moses was hard-working, James made Moses pay him almost twice what Furley had.
Seeing that Moses was making money quickly and had become a captain on the canal boats, it was suggested that Moses try to buy himself, and persuaded James Grandy to allow Moses to purchase his freedom for six hundred dollars. Following payment by Moses for his freedom, James then sold him to Trewitt. Mr. Grice sued James in Moses's name, but the court ruled in James's favor. Trewitt agreed to allow Moses to buy his freedom with another six hundred dollars, and after two and a half years of work, Moses had saved the money. However, just before Moses could buy his freedom, Trewitt went into debt and sold him to a man described in the narrative as “Mr. Mews”, who may have been William T. Muse, an enslaver from Pasquotank County. Mews then sold him to Enoch Sawyer, under whose ownership Moses married.
Moses soon tried to buy his freedom a third time. A man named Minner, for whom Moses had worked in the canals, offered to buy Moses and let Moses pay him back for his freedom. Sawyer allowed Minner to buy Moses, who then worked on canal boats for three years to repay Minner. After gaining his freedom, Moses worked on boats traveling to New York and Philadelphia. When Minner died, Moses moved to Boston to avoid capture and re-enslavement, which was common in Southern states after the death of a former enslaver. In Boston, Moses continued to work on boats until he had saved three hundred dollars and bought his wife, who came to live with him there. Knowing many of his children remained enslaved, Moses worked and saved money to buy their freedom, too.
The narratives of enslaved people like Grandy's were used by the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements in the United States and Britain as testimony to the cruelty of slavery and the humanity of enslaved and freed Black people. Grandy’s straightforward account of the horrors he experienced on his path to freedom helped demonstrate to Americans the barbarity of slavery. Grandy’s narrative was first published in an 1843 edition and then published in three subsequent 1844 American editions. Although some of the details of narratives of enslaved people like Grandy have been called into question by contemporaries and twentieth-century historians, several of Grandy's statements can be verified by other sources. Little is known of Moses’s life outside of the details in his autobiography, including the years following its publication and his death.
References:
Grandy, Moses; Thompson, George. Narrative of the life of Moses Grandy : formerly a slave in the United States of America. Boston : O. Johnson. 1844. https://archive.org/details/narrativeoflifeo00gran (accessed May 12, 2014).
Jewett, Clayton E.; Allen, John O. 2004. Slavery in the South a state-by-state history. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press.
Ripley, C. Peter. 1985. The Black abolitionist papers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.