Brown, William Wells

By: R. J. M. Blackett

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Brown, William Wells

Sex:  Male

Born:  Near Lexington, Kentucky, United States
c. March 1815

Died:  Boston, Massachusetts, United States
6 November 1884

Activity/Profession:  Abolitionist, Slave, Biographer, Fiction Writer, Lecturer

author and reformer, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of George Higgins, a relative of his master, and Elizabeth, a slave. Dr. John Young, Brown’s master, migrated with his family from Kentucky to the Missouri Territory in 1816. Eleven years later the Youngs moved to St. Louis. Although Brown never experienced the hardship of plantation slavery, he was hired out regularly and separated from his family. He worked for a while in the printing office of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy’s St. Louis Times. He was also hired out to a slave trader who took coffles of slaves down the Mississippi River for sale in New Orleans. Brown’s task was to prepare the slaves for sale, making sure that they all appeared to be in good health. Among other things, that meant dyeing the hair of the older slaves black to remove any trace of gray. At the end of one of these trips to New Orleans, Brown discovered that his master, short of cash, had sold his sister and had plans to sell him. Brown decided to escape with his mother, and they crossed into Illinois sometime in the spring in 1833. They were soon captured, however, and brought back to St. Louis. Young sold Brown to a local tailor and his mother to a slave trader, who took her south. In January 1834 Brown made another, this time successful, attempt to escape, crossing the Ohio River to Cincinnati and on to Cleveland.

Soon after settling in Cleveland, Brown met and married Elizabeth Schooner; they had three children. The couple had a strained and difficult relationship, and the marriage finally ended in an acrimonious separation in 1847. Brown married Annie Elizabeth Gray of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts in 1860. During his years in Cleveland, Brown worked as a boatman on Lake Erie and was an active member of the local Underground Railroad, ferrying fugitives across the lake to Canada. He was also active in local and regional abolitionist associations and the Negro Convention Movement. He was employed as a lecturing agent by the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1843 and later in a similar position by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. These agencies aimed to spread the abolitionist message throughout the state, in small towns and hamlets, in an attempt to persuade their listeners to join the anti-slavery cause. By the latter part of the decade, he had become a major figure in the American abolitionist movement.

Brown’s Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself was published in 1847 and became an immediate bestseller; 3,000 copies of the first edition were sold in six months. The book went through four editions in two years with sales of 10,000 copies. Brown’s rise to prominence in abolitionist circles and the success of his book led to his appointment as a delegate to the Peace Congress in Paris in 1849. Presided over by French author Victor Hugo, the congress was attended by 800 delegates. The twenty delegates from the United States included two other African Americans, J. W. C. Pennington and Alexander Crummell. After the meeting, Brown went to London, where he spent the next five years working to win British support for the American abolitionist movement.

During his stay in Britain, Brown claimed to have traveled 25,000 miles and given 1,000 lectures, the majority of which were on abolition. He also found time to write. The first British edition of his Narrative appeared in 1849. Three years later he published Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, an account of his travels in Europe. His novel Clotel; of the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States was published in 1853, the first novel published by an African American. A tragic story of a mulatto mother and her quadroon daughter, Clotel, who was fathered by Thomas Jefferson, the novel paints a lurid and sometimes moving picture of the devastating impact of slavery and racism. All of these publications were generally well received.

Brown’s successes in Britain were crowned by the decision of British friends to raise sufficient money to purchase his freedom in 1854. Like so many of his contemporaries who had campaigned in Britain, Brown returned to the United States that year fortified by his successes and recommitted to the struggle against slavery and racial discrimination at home. But these were dark and uncertain times for African Americans in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Dred Scott decision (1857), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that blacks were not citizens and as such had no constitutionally protected rights. This period of uncertainty prompted many African Americans to renew the debate over the wisdom of remaining in the United States. Although he had formerly opposed colonization and emigration, Brown became an active promoter of Haitian emigration during this period and regularly contributed to the Pine and Palm, the movement’s newspaper. He lectured throughout the Northeast and Canada West in 1861–1862 as an agent of the Haytian Emigration Bureau, promoting the black independent nation as a future home for African Americans.

While the outbreak of the Civil War dampened emigrationist enthusiasm and raised expectations of a brighter future among some African Americans, Brown counciled caution, insisting that the United States first commit itself to emancipation and full equality for all before blacks would volunteer their services. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the decision of Massachusetts governor John Andrew to raise two black regiments finally brought Brown into the fold as a recruiter and supporter of the Union.

During the war Brown renewed his interest in medicine, an interest first developed while he was a slave and later encouraged by Dr. John Bishop Estlin, the British surgeon and abolitionist who was one of Brown’s mentors. Brown conducted a relatively successful practice as a “Dermapathic and Practical Physician” in Boston for almost nineteen years. He also continued to publish. The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements, a compendium of biographical vignettes of people of African descent, appeared in 1863. Four years later Brown published The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and his Fidelity. The first history of black involvement in the Civil War, it was set in the context of black contributions to the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Brown’s final historical study, The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race, appeared in 1873. A general history of the African experience in the New World, it contains ethnographic analysis, biographical sketches, and brief accounts of blacks in Haiti, the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. Brown’s final publication, My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People, an account of slave life and his travels through the South in 1879–1880, appeared in 1880. He died in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

The Irish abolitionist Richard Webb wrote of Brown in 1851: he is “excellent company, full of anecdotes, has graphic and dramatic powers of no mean order, and a keen appreciation of character… . He and I get on so pleasantly together, and he is so much beloved by his friends that I naturally look to him as a perfect rock of sense.” As these comments and those of other abolitionists suggest, Brown epitomized the true potential of the enslaved once freed from the shackles of oppression. A universal reformer, Brown worked not only for emancipation and the removal of racial restrictions, but also for the promotion of peace and temperance. His publications, together with his reform efforts, are a substantial legacy.

processed xml | source xml