His
life was as compelling as any character
her ever created—up from illiterate slavery to international celebrity as a pioneering Black author and leading abolitionist. In his day William Wells Brown was nearly as famed as Fredrick Douglass
but today is barely a
footnote in American literary
and social justice history. This
post aims to help fix that.
Brown
was born in 1814 or ’15 near Lexington,
Kentucky in the racially complex
circumstances common to slavery. His mother
Elizabeth had both African and Native American ancestry, and she was held in bondage by Dr. John Young. She was repeatedly sexually exploited and gave
birth to seven children each with different
fathers. His father was Dr. Young’s cousin George W. Higgins, a neighboring
planter and a Mayflower descendant. Higgins acknowledged the child and showed some care for him and his mother, at least to the extent of getting
Young to promise not to sell either
of them.
But
Young, perhaps out of jealously,
did sell both before the boy was 10 years old. Both would be on the block again but managed
to stay together. They were held mostly in and around St. Louis where the boy was hired out as a deck hand on Mississippi steamboats
through most of his teens. He escaped the drudgery of field labor
and got to see more of the world than most slaves.
In
1833 mother and son managed to escape
together across the river into Illinois but
they were soon recaptured and hauled
back to St. Louis. He was sold for the final time to Captain Enoch Price and was soon back
on the river on his master’s paddle
wheeler. A year later he jumped ship at Cincinnati on the Ohio River
and was aided in his escape by a largely Quaker abolitionist network. In gratitude
he adopted the name of one of his chief benefactors, William Wells and the last name Brown.
Despite
the anguish of being now separated from his mother, Brown set
about making a new life. He began with a program of self-improvement, quickly teaching himself to read and devouring newspapers, magazines,
religious tracks, and any books he could find. He also met
and married Elizabeth Schooner and
began a family that included two daughters who would survive into adulthood, Clarissa and Josephine.
By
1836 Brown was literate enough and, more significantly, well enough connected in Abolitionist circles
to go to work for Elijah P.
Lovejoy in his Alton, Illinois printing shop where the noted anti-slavery zealot published the Alton Observer. On November 7, 1837 a pro-slavery mob attacked a warehouse where Lovejoy was hiding a
new printing press after two others
had been smashed and thrown into the river. The warehouse
was set on fire and Lovejoy was
murdered by the mob making him a significant early abolitionist martyr.
Brown
left Lovejoy’s employment before the attack after he believed his identity had
been discovered by the slave catchers active in the area. He and his family fled north settling in Buffalo,
New York.
Buffalo
offered him both economic opportunities
as a steamboat man on Lake Erie out
of the busy port. It was also a center of the vigorous Up State New York abolitionist
movement and a key link in the Underground Railway. Between 1837 and 1849 Brown used the
boats on which he worked, usually with the support of the owners or captains, to
help hundreds of fugitive slaves escaped
to Canada either by taking them
directly to Canadian ports or to Detroit,
Michigan from where they could easily cross the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario and safety.
In
his memoirs Brown said that from May
to December 1842 alone, he had helped 69 fugitives reach Canada. The effectiveness
of the Buffalo connection and the Underground Railway as a whole was underscored by a report published by the Anti-Slavery
Society of Canada that more than 30,000 fugitives had reached safety there
by 1852.
Brown
was also taking an increasingly public
role in the Abolitionist movement and as a pillar of the Black
community in Buffalo, and then estimated to number about 800. He joined and was active in both Negro and integrated Anti-Slavery Societies and
became active in the Negro Convention
Movement which helped build the first
national network of Black
organizations of all types. He also founded a Negro Temperance Society based in Buffalo that reported a membership of
more than 500. That also was a second bridge to white activists as Abolitionism and Temperance were the mother issues to generations of social reformers of all stripes.
He
became an increasingly noted orator and
lecturer. His lectures were unique in that he incorporated
music into the programs often singing to
the accompaniment of a guitar or lap organ. The songs were
mostly adapted hymns and
Abolitionist anthems by White composers and
writers but included some with lyrics written by Backs, most likely
including himself.
Brown
became a staunch supporter and ally of William Lloyd Garrison and the American
Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and declined to be involved with the Liberty Party
formed in 1840 by abolitionists willing
to work within electoral politics to support their goals. Garrison and Brown opposed voting and working
within the system. They regarded the Constitution as a corrupt
document enshrining slavery and democracy
as a sham. The short
lived Liberty Party was a forerunner
to the anti-slavery but not
abolitionist Free Soil Party in 1848
and Republican Party in the 1850s.
In
1847 Brown published his first book, The
Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself
which became a Northern best seller
and was second only to Frederick Douglass’ 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
Brown
was now nationally in the top ranks of Black Abolitionists. But he was also publicly exposed as a fugitive himself and once again in danger of
being pursued by slave catchers.
During
these busy years he became estranged from his wife. His two young
daughters remained with him.
Little
wonder that in 1849 Brown leapt at the chance to be a delegate to the International
Peace Congress in Paris. He
brought his young daughters with him on his Trans-Atlantic journey in hopes of securing them the formal education that he had been denied. At the famous
conference where its President Victor
Hugo introduced the concept of a
United States of Europe, Brown was
invited to give a featured address on
the anti-slavery movement. During the
conference he also had a noted
confrontation with pro-slavery
American delegates who tried to prevent both
his being seated and his speaking role.
After
the Congress, Brown based himself in Britain
where he launched extensive speaking tours to gain support for the American Abolitionist movement. When Congress
passed the Fugitive Slave Act in
1850 making it even more dangerous for him to return to America, Brown decided
to remain in exile. He was welcomed by
the well-established British
Anti-Slavery Societies which sponsored
his lectures.
Typical
of his reception was this report in the Scotch Independent:
By dint of
resolution, self-culture, and force of character, he has rendered himself a
popular lecturer to a British audience, and vigorous expositor of the evils and
atrocities of that system whose chains he has shaken off so triumphantly and
forever. We may safely pronounce William Wells Brown a remarkable man, and a
full refutation of the doctrine of the inferiority of the negro.
While
in England Brown took advantage of the well-stocked
libraries of some of his Anti-Slavery
Society sponsors as well as the ever reliable British Museum to read as widely as possible to make up for he
considered the deficiencies of his
education. He also traveled widely
across Europe both as a speaker and as a voraciously
curious tourist taking time to absorb as much of the culture and history of
each spot he visited as possible.
The
result was his popular travelogue Three
Years in Europe: or Places I Have Seen And People I Have Met published
by the press of radical social reformer
Charles Gilpin in 1852. That was two
years after Gilpin published a successful English edition of Brown’s slavery
memoirs. The book was the first volume
of travel writing—an exceedingly popular
19th Century genre—ever published by
a Black writer. As a result, he was now
a genuine international literary figure. And he had a driving ambition to expand on that in entirely new directions.
Bursting
with inspiration and energy he wrote furiously. The result was a novel—Clotel,
or, The President’s Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. It was a breathtakingly daring effort about two daughters sired by Thomas Jefferson on
one of his slaves. It was based rumors circulated since the post-Revolutionary
War era and well-founded suspicions as
well as his own mother’s experience of
sexual exploitation in bondage and
the dark secret of the wide-spread miscegenation in plantation life. Explosive stuff.
When
Brown was writing the details of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally
Hemmings, the slave who was his dead
wife’s half-sister were a closely
guarded secret and certainly unknown to Brown except perhaps for reference
to a Dusky Sally in John Quincy Adams’s
anonymous ballad attacking
Jefferson during the 1800 Presidential contest against his father. But Brown’s fiction was not far off the
mark. We now know as a genetically proven fact that two of
Hemming’s sons were fathered by
Jefferson and later freed by
him.
The
topic was too hot for his previous
publisher Gilpin to handle, but Partridge
& Oakey issued it in London in 1854.
No American publisher dared print it until the Civil War. The book is often
considered the first novel by an African-American,
but it loses the title of first Black
novel published in the U.S. to Harriet
Wilson’s Our Nig issued in 1859
because of the delay.
In
1854 the Quaker abolitionist Richardson
family of Newcastle Upon Tyne in
Northern England purchased Brown’s
freedom from his legal master
making it safe for him and his family to return to the United
States. The family had previously done
the same for Frederick Douglas.
Brown
and his daughters set sail for America.
But much had changed while they were gone. On a personal level Brown’s estranged wife
and the girls’ mother had died in 1850 completely severing that tenuous tie to the past. They really had
no home to return to—Buffalo had been a useful
base but there were no deep ties there.
The political and social climate had changed as well. The Compromise
of 1850 over the organization of
Territories wrung from Mexico and the admittance of new states to
the Union had satisfied no one
and sectional differences grew
sharper year by year fueled by the
doctrine of Popular Sovereignty
that would lead to a bloody virtual
civil war in Kansas between pro
and anti-slavery settlers. The old Whig
Party, home to many Northern slavery
opponents but also to anti-Jacksonian
Southern aristocrats and pro-slavery
zealots had fallen apart and ceased
to exist due to it irreconcilable
contradictions. A
moderate anti-slavery expansion party, the
Free Soilers had risen and almost immediately began its own steep
decline. Abolitionists were sharply
divided among themselves over participating in electoral politics or a militant complete rejection of the United States consecrated in and founded upon slavery. New social movements, including women’s equality and nascent
labor movements raised
questions of possible cooperation—and
of possible conflict.
Brown
decided to move to Boston, which served
his ambitions well. The Hub of the Universe was still the undisputed literary,
cultural, and philosophic center of America. It was also the center of militant
abolitionism and an active hot bed of
resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which had been strengthened under the terms of the Compromise of 1850. Brown soon returned to the lecture platform and the circuit of
appearances before local Anti-slavery societies and conventions. He had programs tailored to both white and
Black audiences. For white audiences
like the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Salem,
Massachusetts he emphasized the unvarnished
brutality of day to day existence under slavery.
Were I about to
tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest
degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you.
Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.
In
front of Black audiences, he upheld dignity
and emphasized historical
accomplishments by noted Blacks. He urged self-improvement, dignity, and temperance. And while he appreciated White support, he told his Black audiences not to rely on it. He urged community
self-organization and not letting Whites speak for them which inevitably
meant setting goals and limitations that protected White property and privilege
at the expense of Blacks. It was a radical and thoroughly modern sounding program.
As
the tensions of the 1850 grew sharper, Brown despaired of the
possibility of Blacks being able to make a safe
and free home in a county awash
in racism and in terror of Black retaliation for generations of suffering. He began to promote a scheme for Blacks to re-settle
in Haiti, an established Black Republic that had won
Independence from France in a bloody revolution and had almost completely wiped out or driven out the old White plantation aristocracy,
merchants, traders, and government functionaries. This
effort differed from the early earlier scheme promoted by the American Colonization Society in the
1830’s which was led by Whites eager to rid America of Freed Blacks. Colonists
had been recruited and had founded a society modeled on American Democracy but
which itself displaced and oppressed a larger native population that never accepted or welcomed them.
It
is unclear if Brown himself was ready to go to Haiti or to take a leadership
role in colony there that was given at best an uneasy welcome by the Haitian government. Only a few American Blacks ever made it to
the nation before the Civil War dramatically
changed the landscape of possibilities.
After
John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid which
was financed by some of William
Brown’s closest white allies in
Boston including the Rev. Theodore
Parker, he had a crisis of conscience questioning the pacifism
and commitment to non-violence that
he long ago absorbed from his Quaker friends and supporters. As war loomed, he reluctantly concluded
that the nation could only be purged and
redeemed by violence.
Brown
also continued his Temperance work and was also in vocal support of the movement for Women’s Equality
that had emerged after the Seneca Falls
Convention in 1848. That put him on
similar ground to Frederick Douglass, who had attended the Convention and remained a vocal ally of the movement.
The two men had met each other during the Black Convention Movement
and their paths periodically crossed.
But they were never personally
close and did not collaborate. Perhaps there was a touch of wary mutual jealousy as the two often
seemed to be in an undeclared competition. Sometimes the two feuded publicly over differences.
Meanwhile,
Brown had not neglected his literary
ambitions. In 1855 he published The American
Fugitive in Europe. Sketches of Places and People Abroad, a revised and
expanded edition of his European travel memoir including several of the important
speeches he had delivered and a short
auto-biographical sketch.
He
also completed two plays. Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a
Backbone completed in 1856 was never published or produced and is now lost. But its tantalizing title hints at what a bold and in-your-face script it must have been. Two years later he finished The
Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, an autobiographical
piece about his flight to freedom. It was not produced on stage in his lifetime
but was published in 1858 making it the first published play by an African-American
author. Brown would often read from the script, acting out all of the
characters, in lieu of a traditional lecture.
The play was finally brought to the boards more than a century later in a staging at Emerson College in Boston in 1971.
Also,
in 1856 Brown’s now grown younger daughter Josephine Brown published Biography
of an American Bondman, an updated account of his life, drawing heavily
on material from her father's 1847 autobiography. She added details about
abuses he suffered as a slave, as well as new material about his years in
Europe. Josephine would have her own
pioneering literary career and would continue to work collaboratively with her
father on his later efforts.
On
the personal front,
on April 12, 1860, the 44-year-old Brown married again, to 25-year-old Anna
Elizabeth Gray in Boston. It was
exactly one year before the artillery
attack on Ft. Sumter in Charleston,
South Carolina harbor marked the beginning of the Civil War. The marriage would prove happy and productive
despite the gathering war clouds and produce three children, two more daughters
and a son, William Wells Brown,
Jr.
With
the coming of War Brown supported efforts to arm Black troops, both Freemen
in the North and eventually the contraband
escaped slaves who flocked across Union lines. After the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863 President Abraham Lincoln officially authorized the raising of Colored
Regiments as a critical war measure. Brown, too old to fight himself, helped recruit
Black troops. He introduced his Boston
abolitionist ally Francis George Shaw who
was financing the cost of raising the 54th Massachusetts
Infantry to Robert John Simmons,
Bermudan of “more than ordinary
abilities who had learned the science of war in the British Army.” Simmons became a First Sargent in the Regiment which was commanded by Francis’
Shaw’s 24-year old son, Col. Robert
Gould Shaw. Simmons
did indeed turn out to be a fine soldier and natural leader. He died of his wounds after the legendary assault on Fort Wagner at Charleston on July 18, 1863. Col. Shaw and much of the Regiment were
killed on the gallant but fruitless attack on the heavily
defended bastion surrounded by dunes and earthworks.
Brown
was increasingly interested in history and
in what we might call today the sociology
of the Southern planter society that
supported slavery and of the lost achievements of Blacks. With the assistance of his daughter Brown
wrote and published The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements
in 1863; The Negro in the American Rebellion, 1867, considered the first
historical work about black soldiers
in the American Revolutionary War;
and The
Rising Son, or The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race,
1873; and another memoir, My Southern Home in 1880 which was
his last work.
With
his lecture platform income disrupted by the War, the ever energetic Brown reinvented himself once again. He
studied homeopathic medicine and started
his own practice in Boston’s working
class South End. For
several years he commuted there daily from the home he shared with his wife in Cambridge where he enjoyed access to the library and research
facilities at Harvard.
Finally
slowing down, Brown retired to Chelsea,
Massachusetts in 1882 and died on November 6, 1884, at about age 70.
Brown’s
memory has long been overshadowed by his old rival Frederick Douglass. His memory was somewhat boosted by the Black
History movement in American Universities in the 1970’s where he was
seen as both a literary pioneer and
an early exponent of some of the
themes that would be embodied in the Black
Power Movement. Here
and there are markers, or
honors in some of the places he lived. In Kentucky he was elected
to the state’s Writers’
Hall of Fame and an elementary
school has been named for him. In
Buffalo a historic marker has been
placed near the site of his home and his portrait
is included in the outdoor Freedom Wall painted
by artist Edreys Wajed along with 27
other abolition and civil rights legends commissioned
by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and
dedicated in 2017.
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