Born in 1742 in West Africa, Boyrereau Brinch was sold into slavery at age 16 and renamed Jeffrey Brace. He fought in the Seven Years War as an enslaved sailor and endured the cruelty of masters in Connecticut. About 1768 he was sold to Mary Stiles, who taught him how to read. In 1783 he was manumitted for his service in the American Revolution. As a freeman, he moved to Poultney in 1784 and in 1804 settled in Georgia, where he purchased 60 acres of land. Blind later in life, he committed the Bible to memory and was baptized at the Baptist Church of Georgia. He filed in the Franklin County Court for an eight-dollar-per-month veteran's pension, which was awarded in 1821. Brace died at his home in Georgia on April 20, 1827. He dictated his life story to lawyer Benjamin Prentiss, saying he felt a duty to recount how poor Africans had been and perhaps still were abused. The memoir begins in Africa and follows his adventures in the British navy, travels, sufferings, sales, abuses, education, service in the American war, emancipation, conversion to Christianity, knowledge of scripture, memory, and blindness. He hoped it would open the hearts of slaveholders and move them to grant enslaved people the freedom that all mankind had an equal right to possess. The Blind African Slave was issued in 1810 as the first book published in St. Albans.