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Grandison is the story’s antagonist, whose behavior pleases and deceives the colonel and frustrates Dick’s apparently fool-proof plan to appear heroic and win Charity’s approval. It is Grandison, not Dick, who shows himself to be heroic and self-sacrificial, like the young Ohio abolitionist who died in prison and whose actions so inspire Charity’s admiration. Who Grandison really is, however, is clear only after readers finish the story. He is not the man Dick thinks he is when, in Boston, he refuses to touch the cash Dick provides for him. That is, he is not the “slave who could be free and would not.” Nor is he the man Colonel Owens thinks he is: a slave who’s grateful for his master’s care, such as it is. That Grandison is in fact a patient, smart, careful man dawns on Dick only after Grandison’s return. The “kidnaping yarn” is “improbable,” he reasons, so there must be “some more likely explanation.” The colonel, however, takes the tale as “the gospel truth” and is blindsided by the culmination of Grandison’s plan when he escapes to Canada with his whole family.
Grandison tolerates being thought of as a child by the colonel and underestimated by Dick, all for the purpose of choosing the manner of his escape. He wants to be the agent of his own liberation. Thus, he takes the trip north with Dick as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for his family’s future flight from Kentucky. By returning to the plantation after Dick had him temporarily detained in Canada, Grandison knows he will solidify the colonel’s faith in him, which will earn him the necessary leeway truly to escape. When he and his family successfully make their way north, Grandison proves himself the true hero of the story: a man who, through his own cunning, sacrifices and risks much for the people he loves.
