(This is the remarkable story of two trips by a fugitive s...)
This is the remarkable story of two trips by a fugitive slave: his dramatic andesperate journey up the Mississippi to the North into freedom, and his glorious voyage as an eloquent ambassador of the abolitionists to Europe. Includes two books in one. Illustrated.
The black man, his antecedents, his genius, and his achievements
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
Clotel: or, The President's Daughter (Penguin Classics)
(First published in December 1853, Clotel was written amid...)
First published in December 1853, Clotel was written amid then unconfirmed rumors that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves. The story begins with the auction of his mistress, here called Currer, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. The Virginian who buys Clotel falls in love with her, gets her pregnant, seems to promise marriagethen sells her. Escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returns to Virginia disguised as a white man in order to rescue her daughter, Mary, a slave in her fathers house. A fast-paced and harrowing tale of slavery and freedom, of the hypocrisies of a nation founded on democratic principles, Clotel is more than a sensationalist novel. It is a founding text of the African American novelistic tradition, a brilliantly composed and richly detailed exploration of human relations in a new world in which race is a cultural construct.
• First time in Penguin Classics
• Published in time for African-American History Month
• Includes appendices that show the different endings Brown created for the various later versions of Clotel, along with the author's narrative of his "Life and Escape," Introduction, suggested readings, and comprehensive explanatory notes
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist, writer, historian.
Background
William Wells Brown was born in 1815 in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. His mother was a slave and, according to tradition, the daughter of Daniel Boone, the frontiersman. His father was the owner of the plantation on which William was born.
Education
He learned to read and write, and eagerly sought more education, reading extensively to make up for what he had been deprived. Later he found time to study medicine
Career
While still a boy William was hired out to the captain of a St. Louis steamboat in the booming Mississippi River trade. After a year he was put to work in the printing office of Elijah P. Lovejoy, a well-known abolitionist.
While working again on a steamboat, Brown escaped, and by 1834 he had made his way to freedom in Canada. He became a steward aboard a ship plying the Great Lakes. In the course of his travels he was befriended by a Quaker, and he named himself after his benefactor.
He also became an important link in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom, sometimes concealing them aboard his ship until they could be put ashore in a friendly port.
In 1843 Brown was invited to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Society and soon gained renown as a public speaker. The American Peace Society chose him as their representative to the Peace Congress in Paris in 1849. The American Anti-Slavery Society provided him with letters of commendation introducing him to many distinguished Europeans, and he was soon well known in intellectual circles in Europe.
Brown remained in Europe for several years. Brown's first work, The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1842), was a recollection of his life. He published a collection of his poems, The Anti-Slavery Harp, in 1843. His Three Years in Europe and his first novel, Clotelle, or the President's Daughter, a melodramatic commentary on interracial love, were published in London in 1853.
The following year he produced Sketches of Places and People Abroad. His play, The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom, was published in 1858.
Other works by Brown include The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements, written in support of emancipation (1863); The Negro in the American Rebellion (1866); The Rising Sun (1874); and My Southern Home (1884). He was a contributor to Frederick Douglass's paper, the Liberator, and to the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the London Daily News.
Brown died on November 6, 1884, at his home in Chelsea, Massachussets
(First published in December 1853, Clotel was written amid...)
Politics
He was active in the temperance, woman's-suffrage, and prison reform movements. When the Liberty Party formed, he chose to remain independent, believing that the abolitionist movement should avoid becoming entrenched in politics.
Views
Quotations:
He wrote: "He who escapes from slavery at the age of twenty years, without any education, as did the writer of this letter, must read when others are asleep, if he would catch up with the rest of the world. "
Connections
In 1834 Brown at age 20 married Elizabeth Schooner. They had two daughters who survived to adulthood: Clarissa and Josephine. In 1851, Elizabeth died in the United States.
On April 12, 1860, the 44-year-old Brown married again, to 25-year-old Anna Elizabeth Gray in Boston.