Peace presented Jeffrey Brace with opportunities.
Having served in America’s Continental Army for more than five years during the Revolution, he was discharged at war’s end in 1783. That left him with a decision to make: Where to live? As an enslaved person, he had never been able to choose before, but he traded military service during the war for his freedom after it.
After the war, Brace spent some months in Connecticut, a place he was familiar with, but the next year, “(h)earing flattering accounts of the new state of Vermont,” he decided to head north. Those “flattering accounts” undoubtedly related to the state being the first to outlaw adult slavery in its constitution. (Loopholes in the 1777 document and lax enforcement meant that slavery wasn’t instantly and entirely eradicated but instead gradually died out over the coming decades.)
Despite Vermont’s reputation for acceptance, Brace found himself confronted by racist and greedy neighbors who tried to deprive him of his land, his animals and even his children. Oddly, however, the four decades that Brace lived in Vermont might have been the freest and happiest part of his adult life, which speaks to the brutal realities he had already faced.
We only know his story because of the extraordinary memoir he left behind. Memoirs of enslaved people are not uncommon, but one this long and detailed, or which include memories of Africa, is extremely rare. Titled “The Blind African Slave: Or the Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-Named Jeffrey Brace,” his memoir was published in 1810, at which point Brace was about 68 years old and had recently lost his eyesight.
The book was a collaboration with a 22-year-old lawyer in St. Albans named Benjamin Prentiss, who met Brace and was struck by his life story. Prentiss interviewed Brace and turned the man’s recollections into a narrative. The purpose of Prentiss’ publication was purely political, as he explained in his introduction: “This simple narrative of an individual African cannot possibly compass all the objections to slavery; yet we hope that the extraordinary features and simplicity of the facts, with the novelty of this publication, will induce many to read and learn the abuses of their fellow beings.”
Although some of the events described in the book had occurred more than a half century earlier, Brace remembered them in great detail. His contemporaries commended Brace for his honesty and his prodigious memory. “Jeffrey Brace(’s) reputation for truth & veracity stands unimpeached & will gain Credit where ever he is known,” wrote the judge who certified his Revolutionary War pension application. The Northern Spectator newspaper commented in his obituary that “his mental powers appear to be hardly impaired. The powers of his memory are frequently tested by repeating whole chapters of the scripture nearly verbatim.”
After reading what he could find about western Africa, especially the Niger River Basin where Brace grew up (probably in what is today Mali), Prentiss devoted the book’s first two chapters to trying to acquaint readers with the region’s geography, flora, fauna, civic structures and religious practices. In this early section, Prentiss explains that Brace was born into a prominent family, his father and grandfather having both served as regional rulers.
Brace, whose birth name Prentiss spelled phonetically as Boyrereau Brinch, doesn’t enter the story until the third chapter. Looking back at his teenage self, the elderly Brace remembered the fateful day he went swimming in the Niger River with friends. Climbing the riverbank afterward, they were confronted by 30 or 40 white men who blocked their path. The boys tried to run, but 11 of the 14, including Brace, were captured and hustled aboard a slaving ship.
Brace described the horrors he and others endured on the Middle Passage, the route frequented by slave ships between Africa to the Americas, during which they were crowded and chained below decks and given only enough food and water to survive the voyage. Things didn’t improve when they reached Barbados. Brace and others were packed into a “house of subjection,” where they were beaten and nearly starved in an effort to break their spirits.
Brace’s freedom was eventually sold to a New England merchant captain, who was a privateer. That is, he was authorized by the British government to attack and seize the vessels of other nations. That governmental authority was the only thing that distinguished privateers from pirates.
For two years, Brace served aboard the ship and bravely remained on deck during a battle with a Spanish vessel. Brace suffered five wounds in the fighting, including being shot in the ankle and hip. For his courage, the merchant captain started calling him Jeffrey, after British General Jeffrey Amherst.
The end of the French and Indian War in 1763 brought relative peace to the Caribbean, so the captain sold Brace to a man in Connecticut. The move to New England did nothing to end the brutality that punctuated Brace’s days. Brace’s new enslaver beat him regularly and denied him a coat or shoes, even when he was working outside in winter. A neighbor was so horrified by the way Brace was being treated that he threatened the enslaver with legal action and took Brace into his household.
Soon, however, Brace was passed along to another Connecticut man, who whipped him ferociously on multiple occasions. Brace was then moved on to several other households, most of which continued to beat him regularly.
In 1768, he had the good fortune to be transferred to the household of 73-year-old Mary Stiles, a kind widow who lived in Woodbury, Connecticut. Brace remembered her as “one of the finest women in the world.” Stiles helped Brace improve his spoken English and taught him to read, using the Bible as the text. The experience made Brace a devout Christian and might explain the many passages from Scripture contained in his memoir, though that may have been Prentiss’ decision.
Upon the death of Mary Stiles in 1774, Jeffrey legally became the property of her son, Benjamin. When the Revolutionary War broke out, two of Benjamin Stiles’ sons served in the Connecticut militia. A third son apparently did not. Some historians believe that Jeffrey served in his place and was promised his freedom in return.
“Thus was I, a slave, for five years fighting for liberty,” Brace explained. Much of his service involved harrying British forces in and around New York and cutting off their supplies.
At war’s end, he returned to live with Benjamin Stiles as a free man. He had most recently been referred to as Jeffrey Stiles, but he began using the last name of Brace, an Anglicization of his birth family’s name.
With freedom, he soon started a family of his own. He moved to Vermont, where he arranged to buy 25 acres in the town of Poultney. Needing money to develop his land, Brace found work in Dorset. There he met and married a widow named Susannah Dublin, who had also been born in Africa and was formerly enslaved. Susannah came to the marriage with two children. She and Jeffrey would eventually have three children of their own.
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Some Vermonters saw Susannah’s son and daughter not so much as children but as cheap sources of labor. Archibald Dixon of Poultney and Elizabeth Powell of Manchester filed complaints, claiming the children would be better cared for if they were contracted out as indentured servants for a set number of years.
“The complaint amounted to this, that I was a black man,” Brace said in his memoir. “The corruption and superstition, mingled with the old Connecticut bigotry and puritanism, made people think a Negro had no right to raise their own children.”
Such actions were legal at the time and disproportionately involved Black children. Authorities sided with Dixon and Powell, who took the children. Powell vowed to teach the girl to read and to give her a feather bed when she completed her indenture at age 18 but failed to keep her promise. Brace wanted to sue Powell, but said he couldn’t find a lawyer willing to support “the cause of an old African Negro.”
In about 1795, Susannah and Jeffrey Brace began the backbreaking labor of clearing their land in Poultney. The work was made even harder because they were neighbors with Jared Gorham, a malevolent man who coveted their property. When Brace refused to sell his land, Gorham pulled down a fence and let his cattle onto Brace’s land, where they destroyed most of the corn crop.
One spring, while Jeffrey was in town buying supplies, Susannah went out to tap their maple trees. Carrying an axe, Gorham confronted her, saying she was on his land. They got into an argument. Gorham grabbed the pail full of taps that Susannah was carrying and threw it in the nearby brook. Susannah responded by seizing Gorham’s axe and throwing it in the brook. Then Gorham tried to throw Susannah in the brook, but she proved too strong, wrestling him to the ground and rubbing snow in his face and neck.
The Braces and Gorham left it to nearby landowners Josiah Grant and Joseph Adams to settle the dispute. Grant and Adams said “we ought under all circumstance (to) keep peace in the neighborhood.” The men said Gorham should apologize to Susannah and that the two families should share the sugarbush.
Because Gorham neglected to build a fence on one of his fields, Brace’s ox wandered onto his property. Seeing this, Gorham rushed out and hurled a large rock at the animal, breaking its leg. This time, Brace explained, the men took their dispute to “Judge Ward and Stephen Clark, who decided that (Gorham) must give me fifteen dollars and take the Ox.”
Soon, Poultney selectmen were knocking on Brace’s door. Gorham had petitioned to have Brace’s children bound out as indentured servants.
“I plainly told them that as I had suffered so much by bondage myself, my children should never be under the direction of any other person whilst I lived,” he said, adding that if they could stop Gorham from destroying his property, then he could support his family as well as Gorham supported his own. Brace proved persuasive and his children remained with him.
In 1802, after seven years in Poultney, the Braces decided to sell their farm. Gorham’s persistent harassment must have been a major factor in the decision. Brace considered relocating his family to Kentucky, where he had heard that Vermont’s combative Rep. Mathew Lyon, who had himself been indentured as a teenager, was moving. But Brace decided against the move, because Kentucky was a slave state and he didn’t want to risk his family’s freedom.
So, instead, they moved to Sheldon, Vermont, where they lived for several years, and then relocated to the town of Georgia. Soon after arriving in town, Jeffrey suffered a double blow: Susannah died and he lost his sight.
Somewhere along the way, Jeffrey Brace met the antislavery lawyer Benjamin Prentiss, who put his story into print in 1810. The book hardly made Brace a celebrity. Few copies were ever printed, the printer having gone out of business the month after the book was published.
For nearly two centuries, the book was almost entirely forgotten. Most scholars of the period were unaware of its existence and even major rare book collectors who knew of it couldn’t get their hands on a copy. Even the world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, didn’t have a copy.
Fortunately, Special Collections at the University of Vermont did. That’s where Kari Winter, a professor at the University of New York at Buffalo, encountered it. She was so taken by the narrative and the fact that it offered a rare glimpse into the early years of the American republic from an African American perspective, that she arranged to have it reprinted in 2004, adding an extensive and invaluable introduction which helps put the book in context. Brace’s memoir has also been put online by the University of North Carolina.
In her research, Winter discovered that Brace’s great grandson fought for the Union in the Civil War. She also found that some of his descendants still live in northwestern Vermont and had been unaware of their ancestor’s story.
Jeffrey Brace died at his Georgia home in April 1827, when he was in his mid-80s. The re-publication of his memoir, however, has brought his story to life for a new generation.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: The memoir of Jeffrey Brace.