[1] Grimké's maternal grandparents were Huguenots who left France in the 17th century after the Edict of Fontainebleau stripped Protestants of their rights and emigrated to South Carolina (other Huguenots went to New England, New York, and Virginia, and to various tolerant European states, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, Prussia, and Russia).

He then sailed to England to study law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court.

Though a young man, he (with Benjamin Franklin and others) signed a 1774 petition to King George III and the British government protesting the Boston Port Act.

After the 1775 outbreak of the American Revolution, Grimké returned to South Carolina and joined the Continental Army; he was commissioned as a Captain in Charleston's Regiment of Artillery.

[3] He served as an officer under Colonel Samuel Elbert, under the extended Georgia command of Major General Robert Howe.

[3] In 1811, political enemies in the South Carolina legislature attempted to remove Judge Grimké from his position by impeachment.

In 1785, Grimké served as a member of a three-man commission designated to revise, digest, and publish the state laws.

The couple maintained a large slave population at Belmont, their rice plantation, and their other up-countries properties, as well as in their house in Charleston at 321 East Bay Street.

Grimké may have had questions concerning slavery,[further explanation needed] but he never publicly stood against the system under which he became a rich man, nor did he take any action to oppose it.

As a widower, their son Henry W. Grimké lived in a common-law relationship with Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman of color.

In 1868, Henry's sisters Sarah and Angelina learned about his to-them unknown sons, then in college at Lincoln University outside Philadelphia.