The Fugitive Slave Who Wrote to the President with Regina E. Mason

In 2024, after a nationwide examination of surviving copies of William Grimes’s 1825 narrative, independent researcher Regina Mason visited the Boston Athenaeum to examine its copy firsthand. There she identified a long-overlooked inscription in Grimes’s own hand indicating that he had presented a copy of his book to President John Quincy Adams in 1826. The discovery prompted a deeper investigation into the meaning of that extraordinary gesture. Why did William Grimes send his book to the President? Why was this remarkable inscription overlooked for nearly two centuries? And what does Grimes’s message reveal about freedom, citizenship, and America’s founding ideals? Drawing on her recent Atlantic article, The Fugitive Slave Who Wrote to the President, Mason tells the story behind this remarkable discovery, revealing how a message intended for the President—and preserved for nearly two centuries in the Boston Athenaeum—still speaks powerfully to America at 250.

About the Speaker

Regina Mason is the third great-granddaughter of William Grimes, author of the first fugitive slave narrative published in the United States, and an independent scholar, author, lecturer, and executive producer. For more than thirty years, she has researched Grimes’s life and legacy, co-editing the Oxford University Press edition of Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself with William L. Andrews. Through her scholarship, writing, and public programs, Mason continues to illuminate Grimes’s enduring place in American history.