William Wells Brown

Brown, William Wells (1814–1884), antislavery lecturer, slave narrator, novelist, dramatist, and historian. William Wells Brown is generally regarded as the first African American to achieve distinction as a writer of belles lettres. A famous antislavery lecturer and fugitive slave narrator in the 1840s, Brown turned to a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, travel writing, and history, to help him dramatize his case against slavery while promoting sympathetic and heroic images of African Americans in both the United States and England.

William Wells Brown was born sometime in 1814 on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of a white man and a slave woman. Light-complexioned and quick-witted, Brown spent his first twenty years mainly in St. Louis, Missouri, and its vicinity, working as a house servant, a fieldhand, a tavernkeeper's assistant, a printer's helper, an assistant in a medical office, and finally a handyman for James Walker, a Missouri slave trader with whom Brown claimed to have made three trips on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and the New Orleans slave market. Before he escaped from slavery on New Year's Day, 1834, this unusually well-traveled slave had seen and experienced slavery from almost every perspective, an education that he would put to good use throughout his literary career.

After seizing his freedom, Brown (who received his middle and last name from an Ohio Quaker who helped him get to Canada) worked for nine years as a steamboatman on Lake Erie and a conductor for the Underground Railroad in Buffalo, New York. In 1843, the fugitive slave became a lecturing agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. Moving to Boston in 1847, he wrote the first and still the most famous version of his autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, which went through four American and five British editions before 1850, earning its author international fame. Brown's Narrative was exceeded in popularity and sales only by the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which appeared in 1845. In 1849, Brown went abroad to attend an international peace conference in Paris and to lend his voice to the antislavery crusade in England. In addition to his demanding speaking schedule, he found time to try his hand at a new form of first-person narrative, which he entitled Three Years in Europe, or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852). This was the first travel book authored by an African American; it was favorably received by the British press in general as well as by the American antislavery press. A year later Clotel, or The President's Daughter, generally regarded as the first full-length African American novel was published.

After returning to the United States in 1854, Brown continued his pioneering literary work, publishing The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first drama by an African American. During the 1860s he brought out three more versions of Clotel: Miralda, or The Beautiful Quadroon (1860–1861), Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864), and Clotelle, or The Colored Heroine (1867). Brown also wrote two volumes of African American history in the 1860s, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867). The latter is the first military history of the African American in the United States. Brown's final autobiography, My Southern Home, or The South and Its People (1880), returned again to the scene of his years in slavery, not to retrace his own steps from bondage to freedom but rather to characterize from an intimate perspective the power struggles between blacks and whites in the South both before and after the Civil War. William Wells Brown died in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on 6 November 1884.

In the modest, understated plain style of Brown's autobiographies, it is often the ordinary, the representative, and the nonheroic—even the antiheroic—that come to the fore. Brown's willingness to focus on these aspects of his experience reveals a striking brand of realism in his first-person writing. Like many of his African American literary contemporaries during the 1850s, Brown felt obliged to create characters that epitomized the ideals of aspiring men and women of color in order to educate an American readership that saw mostly the defamation of African American character in newspapers, magazines, and books. Thus the real and the ideal maintain an uncertain balance in Brown's writing. Nevertheless the tension between them and the problematic ways Brown tried to resolve them tell us much about the conflicting aesthetic and ideological agendas underlying early African American literature.

Bibliography

• William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown, 1969.
• Sidonie Smith, Where I’m Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography, 1974.
• William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, 1986.
• Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature, vol. 1, The Long Beginning, 1746–1895, 1989.
• John Ernest, Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature, 1995

William L. Andrews

For more information on William Wells Brown, visit Britannica.com.

Born a slave, William Wells Brown (1815-1884) escaped to freedom and became the first African American to publish a novel or a play. He was also an abolitionist and an internationally acclaimed lecturer.

William Wells Brown was born in Lexington, Ky. 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. 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. Brown taught himself to read and write. 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 1834 he had married a free African American woman, and they had two daughters.

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. Among his friends were the English statesman Richard Cobden and the French novelist Victor Hugo. Brown remained in Europe for several years. He found time to study medicine and was active in the temperance, woman's-suffrage, and prison reform movements.

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, in which he offered impressions of Cobden, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hugo, and other European notables of the day. 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 SouthernHome (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 Nov. 6, 1884, at his home in Chelsea, Mass.

Further Reading

Many of Brown's works have been reprinted. J. Noel Heermance, William Wells Brown and Clotelle: A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel (1969), reprints the 1864 version of Clotelle, together with a discussion of its literary, biographical, and antislavery background. A good study is William E. Farrison, William Wells Brown, Author and Reformer (1969), although it fails to mention much of the criticism of Brown's works. Probably the best source on Brown is William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1887; repr. 1968). See also Harry A. Ploski and Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., eds., The Negro Almanac (1967).

Additional Sources

Brown, William Wells, From fugitive slave to free man: the autobiographies of William Wells Brown, New York: Mentor Books, 1993.

Brown, William Wells, The travels of William Wells Brown, including The narrative of William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave, and The American fugitive in Europe, sketches of places and people abroad, New York: M. Weiner Pub., 1991.

Two biographies by African-American women, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Whelchel, L. H. (Love Henry), My chains fell off: William Wells Brown, fugitive abolitionist, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.

British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychic researcher. Brown was born December 5, 1881, at Morpeth, England. He studied at Collyer's School in Horsham and at King's College Hospital, London (D.Sc., M.R.C.P., F.R.C.B.). He was consulting psychologist and a reader in psychology at the University of London as well as King's College Hospital. He gave the Terry lectures at Yale University in 1928; in 1936 he became director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1945. In 1951-52 he was president of the British Psychological Society.

Brown's interest in psychic research began early. He joined the Society for Psychical Research and served on its board for 17 years (1923-40). While on the board, he wrote two letters to the Times (London) (May 7 & 14, 1932) in which he spoke appreciatively if guardedly of medium Rudi Schneider's powers and declared that they were worthy of the closest scientific investigation. In a lecture delivered during the jubilee celebrations of the Society of Psychical Research, London, he reviewed the evidence collected and examined by the society and declared that it was "sufficient to make survival scientifically extremely probable."

He died in Oxford, England, on May 17, 1952.

Sources:

Brown, William. Mind and Personality. College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1927.

——. Mind, Medicine, and Metaphysics; The Philosohy of a Physician. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.

——. Psychological Methods of Healing; An Introduction to Psychotherapy. London: University of London Press, Ltd., 1938.

——. Suggestion and Mental Analysis. New York: Doran, 1922.

William Wells Brown
Born	1814 Lexington, Kentucky
Died	November 6, 1884 Chelsea, Massachusetts
Occupation	Abolitionist, Writer, Historian.

William Wells Brown (November 6, 1816 – November 6, 1884) was a prominent abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama, and wrote what is considered to be the first novel by an African American.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 A Fugitive Slave in Europe 1.2 Abolition orator and writer 1.3 Literary works 1.4 Later Life 2 Writings 3 Footnotes 4 References 5 External links

Biography

William Wells Brown was born into slavery near Lexington, Kentucky. His mother, Elizabeth, was owned by a Dr. Young and had seven children, all with different fathers. (In addition to Brown, her children were Solomon, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Milford, and Elizabeth.) Brown's father was George Higgins, a white plantation owner and cousin of the owner of the plantation where Brown was born. Even though Young promised Higgins never to sell the boy,^[1] he was sold multiple times before he was twenty years old.This was because he was a member of the slave trade.Brown spent the majority of his youth in St. Louis. His masters hired him out to work on the Missouri River, then a major thoroughfare for the slave trade. He made several attempts to escape, and on New Year's Day of 1834, he successfully slipped away from a steamboat at a dock in Cincinnati, Ohio. He adopted the name of a Quaker friend of his, who had helped him after his escape by providing him with food, clothes and some money. Shortly after gaining his freedom, he met and married Elizabeth Schooner, a free African-American woman, from whom he separated and later divorced, causing a minor scandal. ^[2] Together they had three daughters. From 1836 to about 1845, Brown made his home in Buffalo, New York, where he served as a conductor for the Underground Railroad and as a steam boatman on Lake Erie, a position he used to ferry escaped slaves to freedom in Canada.^[3] There Brown became active in the abolitionist movement by joining several anti-slavery societies and the Negro Convention Movement.

A Fugitive Slave in Europe

In 1849, Brown left the United States to travel across the British Isles to speak against slavery, and lecture to local antislavery circuits throughout the Isles^[4]. Brown did not wish to only spread the word of abolition, but he also wished to expand his mind on the cultures, religions, and different concepts that enriched the lives of Europeans. Brown adamantly felt that he needed to constantly enrich his intelligence to be able to live in a society where education was a luxury to those who weren't slaves. He best described this sentiment in his memoir, where he stated,“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.”^[5] By 1852, Brown realized that besides broadening his mind, he needed to broaden his wallet. He brought his wife and two young daughters with him, and desired for his children to receive an education that he was denied. So, he needed to a find a way to support them attending private schools in France and in England. So, Brown chose to expand on his literary opportunities and produced the first “production of a Fugitive Slave as a history of travels.” The travel log was titled Three Years in Europe: or Places I Have Seen And People I Have Met, and it was the first travel logs that supplemented correspondents to Frederick Douglass's newspapers to show Europe through a Fugitive Slave perspective.^[6] B Brown’s travel log intrigued middle class readers with chapters of his respectful sightseeing trips to the foundational monuments that were seen as the back bone to European culture. In addition, Brown was able to cast light on racial issues that were once never discussed. Such as, a slave collar that he carried in his luggage to assist in his public displays of slavery; the racial discord that he faced at the Paris Peace Conference when representing the country that enslaved him; and the presence of slaveholders on the grounds of the Crystal Palace.^[7] These scenes gave readers a new perspective of traveling through Europe, and more importantly Brown’s travel log helped establish his creditability as an extraordinary writer.

Abolition orator and writer

Brown became further engaged in the abolitionist movement by delivering lectures in New York and Massachusetts. While his initial cause was prohibition, he soon focused on anti-slavery efforts. His speeches reveal his belief in the power of moral suasion and in the importance of nonviolence. He often attacked the supposed American ideal of democracy and the use of religion to promote submissiveness among slaves. Brown also constantly refuted the idea of black inferiority. Reaching beyond America’s borders, he traveled to Britain in the early 1850s and recruited supporters for the American abolitionist cause. An article in the Scotch Independent reported the following:

"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."^[8]

Thanks in part to his prestige as a powerful orator, he was invited to the National Convention of Colored Citizens, where he met other prominent abolitionists. When the Liberty Party formed, he chose to remain independent, believing that the abolitionist movement should avoid becoming entrenched in politics. He continued to support the Garrisonian approach to abolitionism, sharing his own experiences and observations of slavery in order to convince others to support the cause.

Literary works

Brown's involvement with abolitionism was not limited to lectures. In 1847, he published the Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, which became a bestseller second only to Frederick Douglass' narrative. In it, he critiques his master’s lack of Christian values and the brutal use of violence in master-slave relations. When Brown lived in Britain, he wrote more publications, including travel accounts and plays.

Clotel, or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States

His first novel, entitled Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, is credited as being the first novel written by an African American.^[9] However, because the novel was published in England, the book was not the first African-American novel published in the United States. This credit goes to either: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) or Julia C. Collins' The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865).

However, most scholars agree that Brown is the first published African-American playwright. Brown wrote two plays, Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone (1856, unpublished and no longer extant) and The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (published 1858), which he read aloud at abolitionist meetings in lieu of the typical lecture.

Brown continually struggled with how to represent slavery "as it was" to his audiences. For instance, in an 1847 lecture to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, he said, "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.^[10]

Brown also wrote several historical works, including The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863), The Negro in the American Revolution (1867), The Rising Son (1873), and another volume of autobiography, My Southern Home (1880).

Later Life

Brown stayed abroad until 1854. This was due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that he wasn't free from being captured even in the free states. Only after a British family purchased his freedom in 1854 (the Richardson family who had done the same for Frederick Douglass), a favour he had repeatedly declined, did Brown return to the United States and continue to deliver lectures.^[11]

In a shift likely inspired by the increasingly dangerous environment for black Americans in the 1850s, he became a proponent of African American emigration to Haiti.He decided that more militant acts were necessary to gain progress in their cause. During the American Civil War and in the decades that followed, Brown continued to publish fiction and non-fiction books, securing his reputation as one of the most prolific African American writers of his time. He also played a more active role in Civil War. It was Wells who introduced Bermudian soldier Robert John Simmons to abolitionist Frances George Shaw, father of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commanding officer of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

William Wells Brown died in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1884 at the age of 68.

Writings

• Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself. Boston: The Anti-slavery office, 1847.
• Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave. Written by Himself. London: C. Gilpin, 1849.
• Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met. London: Charles Gilpin, 1852.
• The American Fugitive in Europe. Sketches of Places and People Abroad. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855.
• The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements. New York: Thomas Hamilton; Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1863.
• My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People. Boston: A. G. Brown & Co., Publishers, 1880.
• The Negro in the American rebellion; his heroism and his fidelity ...
• Brown, William Wells (1815-1884). Three years in Europe, or places I have seen and people I have met. with a Memoir of the author. 1852.

Footnotes

1. ^ as stated by T.N.R.Rogers in the introduction to Wells Brown, William. 'Clotel or The President's Daughter. Dover Publications Inc., Mineola/NewYork, 2004.
2. ^ see confession letter published in The National Era reprinted in The Works of William Wells Brown
3. ^ Farrison, William E. "William Wells Brown in Buffalo." Journal of Negro History, v.XXXIX, no.4, October 1954.
4. ^ Greenspan, Ezra William Wells Brown; A ReaderThe University of Georgia Press Athens & London 2008
5. ^ Brown, William W. Three Years In Europe: Places I Have Seen And People I Have Met London, 1852
6. ^ Brown, William W. From Fugitive Slave to Free Man, University of Missouri Press, 1993
7. ^ Greenspan, Ezra William Wells Brown; A Reader, The University of Georgia, Athens & London, 2008.
8. ^ Brown, William W. The Black Man: his Antecedents, his Genius, and his Achievements. New York: Thomas Hamilton 1963. Article from the Scotch Independent, June 20, 1852.
9. ^ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 67. ISBN 086576008X
10. ^ Botelho, Keith M. "'Look on this picture, and on this': Framing Shakespeare in William Wells Brown's The Escape." Comparative Drama 39:2 (Summer 2005): 187-212: 194.
11. ^ BBC Tyne History

References

• Works by William Wells Brown at Project Gutenberg
• African American Registry
• William Wells Brown citation search in Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875
• CLOTEL by William Wells Brown: An Electronic Scholarly Edition edited by Professor Christopher Mulvey
• The Louverture Project: William Wells Brown on Jean-Jacques Dessalines - Excerpt from The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements.
• The Works of William Wells Brown: Using His "Strong, Manly Voice," Eds. Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• William Wells Brown biography by R.J.M. Blackett. American National Biography Online
• William Wells Brown in Buffalo by William E. Farrison. The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 39, No. 4. (Oct., 1954), pp. 298-314. JSTOR
• Summary of Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick. Documenting the American South. 2004.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William Wells Brown

• Clottelle: or the Southern Heroine hypertext from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• The Louverture Project: William Wells Brown - Toussaint L'Ouverture - from the 1863 book The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements.
• The Louverture Project: Dessalines - A description of Jean-Jacques Dessalines from the 1863 book The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements by William Wells Brown.

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