William Wells Brown

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William Wells Brown bigraphy, stories - Historians

William Wells Brown : biography

November 6, 1814 – November 6, 1884

William Wells Brown (November 6, 1814 – November 6, 1884) was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, Kentucky, and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

Lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US, which required people in the North to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves, Brown stayed for several years to avoid the risk of capture and re-enslavement. After his freedom was purchased by a British couple in 1854, he and his family returned to the US, where he rejoined the abolitionist lecture circuit. A contemporary of Frederick Douglass, Wells Brown was overshadowed by the charismatic orator and the two feuded publicly.The Works of William Wells Brown: Using His ‘Strong, Manly Voice’, Eds. Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins, Oxford University Press, 2006, xvii-xxxvi.

Move to New York

From 1836 to about 1845, Brown made his home in Buffalo, New York, where he worked as a steamboat man on Lake Erie. He helped many fugitive slaves gain their freedom by hiding them on the boat to take them to Buffalo, New York or Detroit, Michigan or to Canada. He later wrote that from May to December 1842, he had helped 69 fugitives get to Canada.Brown, William Wells. "Narrative of William W. Brown", in Slave Narratives, eds William Andrews and Henry Louis Gates (Literary Classics of United States Inc, 2000), 374 -423.Farrison, William E. ", Journal of Negro History, v.XXXIX, no. 4, October 1954. Brown became active in the abolitionist movement in Buffalo by joining several anti-slavery societies and the Negro Convention Movement.

Biography

William was born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky. His mother Elizabeth was owned by Dr. Thomas Young and had seven children, each by different fathers. (In addition to William, her children were Solomon, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Milford, and Elizabeth.) William’s father was George W. Higgins, a white planter and cousin of Elizabeth’s master Dr. Young. Higgins had formally recognized William as his son and made his cousin Young promise not to sell the boy.T.N.R. Rogers, "Introduction", William Wells Brown, Clotel or The President’s Daughter. Dover Publications Inc., Mineola/NewYork, 2004. Young did sell him, and William went through several sales before he was twenty years old.

William 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 steamships and the slave trade. In 1833, he and his mother attempted to escape, and they were captured in Illinois. In 1834, Brown made a second attempt at escape, and this time he successfully slipped away from a steamboat when docked in Cincinnati, Ohio, a free state. In freedom, he took the names of Wells Brown, a Quaker friend, who helped him after his escape by providing food, clothes and some money.

Later life

Brown stayed abroad until 1854. Passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law had increased his risk of capture even in the free states. Only after the Richardson family of Britain purchased his freedom in 1854 (they had done the same for Frederick Douglass), did Brown return to the United States. He quickly rejoined the anti-slavery lecture circuit again.

Perhaps because of the rising social tensions in the 1850s, Brown became a proponent of African-American emigration to Haiti, an independent black republic in the Caribbean since 1804. He decided that more militant actions were needed to help the abolitionist cause.