Samuel Williams was not quite 10 years old when he said goodbye to his older brother for the last time. Both boys were enslaved in Charleston, S.C., the property of a white family who made the decision for them. The brother, several years older, had been sent to a Confederate army camp to serve an officer, and had died there of fever. They sent the younger boy next.
Years later, writing as an old man in Windsor, Vt., Williams set down his recollection of that experience in a memoir. “I must admit I wore the ‘gray,’” he wrote. “I have never attended any of the Confederate reunions. I suppose they overlooked my name on the army roll!”
Williams was born in Charleston around 1852, into a family that was, by the brutal arithmetic of slavery, remarkably intact. His parents, Susan and Alexander Williams, were owned by different households but were permitted to live together, and Samuel grew up alongside his siblings, his grandmothers, and an extended community of enslaved people whose stories he would later work hard to preserve in his memoir. He was even taught to read, illegally, by a trio of white sisters on Guignard Street who defied both law and custom to do it, and whom he remembered decades later with affection.
Not all of Williams’s childhood was governed by dread. He raced horses as a boy, trained as a child jockey for the gambling entertainment of white Charlestonians, and found it thrilling, at least until he understood what it actually was: a child put in needless danger. He worked in the city rather than the fields for much of his early life, running errands through Charleston’s streets as a boy.
During the Civil War, he was sent for a stretch to a plantation labor camp outside the city, and whatever illusions urban slavery might have permitted, the plantation allowed none. In his memoir he tells the story of a man named Mingo who was beaten for trying to visit the woman he loved without the proper written permission. And while he had some kind things to say about some of his enslavers, Williams never romanticized what he had lived through. “There is nothing good to be said of American slavery,” he wrote. “I am not prepared to admit that it had any bright sides, unless it was the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Emancipation, when it came, found his family scattered by sale and the separations the war had forced on them. But the Williams family found its way back together in Charleston, and now a teenager, he attended school long enough to build on the reading his earlier teachers had given him. Things might have seemed promising for the future.
By the 1880s , though, the brief possibilities of Reconstruction had collapsed into a backlash of racial violence and shrinking opportunity. Williams made the decision many Black Southerners were beginning to make. He headed north, stopping first in New York before making his way to Vermont, where he settled his family in Springfield. He enrolled his children in the local schools and pronounced the public school system there “perfect.” He found, as he later wrote, “a kind and hospitable people,” and he stayed.
He described with fondness the Vermont neighbors who kept bringing him pie and for a man who had endured great starvation and suffering during his youth, that meant a lot. He described Vermont with some wonder as “the heart of the pie belt.”
In his early years in Vermont, he had worked on farms. Over time he shifted into domestic work, often maintaining summer properties through the cold winters while wealthy families retreated elsewhere. He lived in as a handyman and caretaker, sometimes with his eldest daughter Susan working as a family cook.
Williams came to the Upper Valley working first for the Carter family in Lebanon, N.H., before eventually settling in Windsor. Williams spent many years there in the household of Thomas Head Thomas, Maxwell Perkins’s brother-in-law.
It was during those Windsor years, around 1914, that Williams wrote his memoir. He called himself “Sam Aleckson,” a name was a tribute to his father’s name, Alexander – even as it hid his own identity. Perhaps to protect the family he had left behind from offending powerful families or perhaps for other unknown reasons, he renamed the people and places in his story and tucked Windsor into the pages under the name “Sorwin.” The manuscript sat for years before his family published it themselves in 1929, without a commercial publisher or anyone else’s permission — certainly without help from the prominent editor, Maxwell Perkins. By then, though, Williams had left Windsor, following his daughter Susan to Cambridge, Mass., where she had married and settled. He died there in 1946, nearly a century old.
For most of the twentieth century, the connection between “Sam Aleckson” and Samuel Williams of Windsor was not known outside his family. I came to his story through years of archival research into South Carolina slave narratives, and with the crucial help of a letter from one of his descendants, I was eventually able to confirm that the two names belonged to the same man. His descendant family had kept the memory of the book alive without knowing that anyone outside the family had ever heard of it.
Williams lived in Windsor for close to a decade, and the memoir he wrote here names this town on its cover page. He called it “Sorwin” inside those pages, but he knew where he was. The question is whether Windsor, more than a century later, knows who was here.
Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University and the editor of Before the War and After the Union: An Autobiography by Sam Aleckson (Samuel Williams), published by Clemson University Press and the curator of an online exhibit Samuel Williams and His World.