Held against her will in the early 1800s in an infamous D.C. tavern called the “Slave Bastille” for its housing of enslaved people being moved across states, Ann Williams made a bold decision.

Not wanting to be taken from her lifelong home in Bladensburg to horrific conditions in Georgia, the 24-year-old woman eventually threw herself from a third-story window and survived.

That one moment in 1815 alone secured her place in history, as her act of rebellion changed the course of her life, inspired abolitionists, was cited in a Congressional hearing and helped her win her freedom. It may have even led, indirectly, to the destruction of the much-hated tavern, located at the corner of 13th and F streets, across from the One Freedom Plaza office building.

But the rest of Williams’ life was unknown until recently.

Williams was born into slavery in Bladensburg. When the slaveholder who owned her fell into debt, he sold her and her two daughters to a neighbor. When he too fell on hard times, he sold them to a slave trader from Georgia.

In November of 1815, the Georgia slave trader brought Williams and her daughters to George Miller’s tavern on F Street, which was, at the time, a notorious holding spot for slave traders traveling through D.C. That night she threw herself from the window, breaking her back and both arms.

Seeing Williams’ condition, the trader left her with Miller and took her two daughters south, although he had earlier sworn he would not separate her family. She never saw them again.

Abolitionists who seized on the story characterized the jump as a suicide attempt. Some historians now see it as a possible escape attempt. And still others think of it as an act of desperation without any particular goal in mind.

The only explanation from Williams herself that survives are the following words, transcribed a few weeks later:

They brought me away with two of my children, and would’nt let me see my husband—they did’nt sell my husband, and I did’nt want to go;—I was so confus’d and ‘istratcted, that I did’nt know hardly what I was about—but I did’nt want to go, and I jumped out of the window; —but I am sorry now that I did it; —they have carried my children off with ’em to Carolina.

The transcriber of those words was Jesse Torrey, a physician from Philadelphia who was appalled at the treatment of enslaved people he saw on a visit to Washington. When he heard about her story, he rushed to interview her, as she lied in a mattress with a blood-stained blanket on the third floor of Miller’s tavern.

Torrey enlisted a friend, a lawyer named Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in a series of legal actions against the tavern that helped free three others held with her, and later wrote an anti-slavery book which featured the stories of Williams and others.

Williams’ action led to a congressional investigation into the interstate slave trade in D.C. the following year, which featured sworn testimony from Torrey, Key and the doctors who treated her.

Her story was still remembered widely years later. When Miller’s tavern caught fire in 1819, neighbors carried water to the buildings next door to keep it from spreading, but let the tavern burn. People on site recounted how Williams leapt from the third-story window — and most believed she had died as a result— as one of the reasons to let it burn to the ground.

For many years the story ended there, but recent research turned up an interesting coda. In 1828, Williams petitioned the D.C. Circuit Court for her freedom, arguing that her ostensible owner, Miller, had no claim on her. Key served as her lawyer in the case, which dragged on as Miller and his son simply refused to show up in court.

The course finally went to trial in 1832. The doctors who treated Williams and a man present at the fire testified, while Key discussed a legal issue involving interstate slave trading. For his part, Miller only produced an old bill of sale which, by the standards of the day, should have won the case, leaving him entitled to her and the three children she had since had with her husband.

But on July 2 of that same year the jury ruled that Miller and her children were free.

Their reasoning was not recorded. They may have decided the case on a legal technicality. They may have personally disliked Miller, who by all accounts was easy to dislike.

Or they may have been moved by that long-ago act of rebellion — the moment when Williams threw herself out of a window rather than face a fate beyond her control.

To see an award-winning film about her life, click here.