Abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian William Wells Brown became a prominent speaker for the abolitionist movement, using his personal experiences to advocate for the end of slavery. He was born into slavery in 1814 (or March 15, 1815) near Lexington, Kentucky, where his mother Elizabeth was enslaved on a farm owned by Dr. John Young, a physician and farmer. William was of mixed race, his father was George W. Higgins, a White planter and Dr. Young’s half-brother or cousin. Because Brown was intelligent and alert, he was not sent out into the fields but hired out to work in larger cities. Soon, Higgins formally acknowledged William as his son and made Young promise not to sell him. But he was sold multiple times before he was twenty years old.
In 1816, Dr. Young moved to Missouri with his family and slaves, settling in Saint Charles County on the northern shore of the Missouri River. Four years later, Young went off to serve in the state’s first legislature, leaving his farm in the hands of overseer Grove Cook. Cook was a cruel man who made frequent use of the whip. Light skinned, William also found himself at the wrong end of the lash when people mistook him for a member of the Young family, a resemblance that was obviously beyond his control. When Dr. Young moved to St. Louis in 1827, he hired William out to work in a variety of jobs. After brief stints working on a steamboat and at the Missouri Hotel in the city, William was hired by Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of the St. Louis Times, also a well-known abolitionist.
William held many diverse jobs as a youth which provided him with firsthand knowledge of the slave era South and aided him in his writing. In 1832, William was put in the employ of James Walker, a slave trader, for one year and was forced to take part in the transportation of fellow slaves down river for auction. By the time William’s distasteful service to Walker had expired, Dr. Young found himself in financial difficulty. To ease his situation, he made plans to sell William, despite an earlier promise to Higgins that he never would sell his son. Regretful that such a move was necessary, Young gave William a week to find a new owner. Instead, William talked his mother into trying to flee to Canada. Against her better judgement, Elizabeth agreed to escape.
The pair was eventually captured in Illinois. Elizabeth was sold into the deep South and never saw her son again. William was sold for $500 to a St. Louis tailor, Samuel Willi, who hired him out as a servant on a steamboat. Less than a year later, Willi sold William to a merchant and riverboat owner, Enoch Price. When his new owner, acting as captain, took one of his boats to New Orleans and then to Cincinnati, in the free state of Ohio, he took William along. William made several attempts to escape. On January 1, 1834, William carried a passenger’s trunk ashore in Cincinnati. Seizing this chance to escape, he kept on walking and quickly made his way out of the city. For six days, he wandered by himself during the night hours, ill-clothed for the winter weather and without food.
During his escape he received help from an Ohio Quaker named Wells Brown. Wells Brown, a Quaker, gave the youth shelter and food, and cared for him until he was well. On learning that William had no family name, he offered his own, and the runaway slave became William Wells Brown. With a new name and a fresh start in a free state, the light-skinned William traveled to Cleveland, where he worked at odd jobs until navigation resumed on the Great Lakes in the spring. When shipping again opened up, William found employment as a steward on a Lake Erie steamer, the Detroit. He learned to read and write, and eagerly sought more education, reading extensively to make up for what he had been deprived. In 1834, at age 20, William married Elizabeth Schooner, a free Black woman.
Brown became an active abolitionist and activist in the anti-slavery movement while working for a journalist for the abolitionist cause. He spent the next two years working on a Lake Erie steamboat and running fugitive slaves into Canada. By 1840, Brown and his family had moved to Buffalo, New York, where he began his career in the abolitionist movement by boarding antislavery lecturers at his home. Soon after his arrival in Buffalo, Brown organized the Union Total Abstinence Society. The next watershed year in his life, 1842, marked the passing of the private man into the public figure. Inspired by a rousing address by Frederick Douglass, he began lecturing in churches and soon became part of the William Lloyd Garrison wing of the abolitionist movement.
In 1843 Brown was invited to lecture for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and gained renown as a public figure. He lectured for the abolitionist cause, using his speeches to attack America’s idea of democracy, which he felt only existed for Whites, and the hypocrisy of using religion to ensure the docility of slaves. He gave a series of anti-slavery presentations throughout New England, the new farmlands from upstate New York across Ohio and Illinois, and into Canada, illustrating the evils of involuntary servitude. Brown continually struggled with how to represent slavery "as it was" to his audiences. A speech he delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1847 was his first published work. During that year he published his memoir, "The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave", written by himself, which became a bestseller across the United States, second only to Frederick Douglass' slave narrative memoir. William wrote of his treatment at the hands of a tavern keeper named Major Freeland, a drunkard who severely beat the then-teenager.
In the two years following its publication, the biography went through four editions. While this work did show the influence of previously published slave narratives, Brown’s was unique in its inclusion of cases other than his own to point up the overwhelming cruelty of slavery. Brown critiques his master's lack of Christian values and the customary brutal use of violence by owners in master-slave relations. After seeing a copy of William’s slave narrative, Enoch Price, his former owner, wrote in 1848 offering William his freedom for $325.00. Brown refused, firm in his belief that freedom can not be bought or sold but is a divine and moral right. ‘God,’ he declared, ‘made me as free as he did Enoch Price,’ and therefore, not a penny would be paid for his freedom ‘with my consent.’ A year later, he published "The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings", a compilation of 46 pieces to be sung to familiar melodies.
In 1849, William Wells Brown began a lecture tour of Britain, delivering over a thousand speeches and remained abroad until 1854. The length of his stay was conditioned by personal and political motives. He was exhilarated by the tour, had time to write, and enjoyed the benefits of reform circle society. He was also trying to recover from the dissolution of his marriage. Quite as important, once the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, it was dangerous for the escaped slave to return to America. William, therefore, chose to remain abroad. With England as his base, he spent the next four years traveling throughout Great Britain and to Europe, giving lectures about the slavery question and completing three more books. He also wrote more works, including travel accounts and plays.
His first novel, entitled "Clotel", or, "The President's Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life" in the United States, was published in London in 1853. The book took its title from allegations that Thomas Jefferson had fathered several mixed-race children, whom he then abandoned to slavery. Published about a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin". It is a sensational blending of pathos and history, resulting in a tale of mythic proportions. However, Brown’s work failed to create much of a stir or garner critical acclaim. Historically, Jefferson's household was known to include numerous mixed-race slaves, and there were rumors since the early 19th century that he had children with a slave, Sally Hemings. This novel is believed to be the first written by an African American.
Brown became a proponent of Black American emigration to Haiti. He was finishing "St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Its Patriots", a history of the Haitian Revolution, a work that suggests Brown's growing antislavery militancy. The publication of those works as well as a travelogue, a play, and a compilation of antislavery songs established his reputation as the most prolific African American literary figure of the mid-nineteenth century. While Brown was in Europe he used his time to become versed in the practice of medicine. In a day when formal training still was not required for doctors, he attended lectures and conducted private study, gradually obtaining sufficient knowledge to become a medical practitioner. Instead of pursuing that profession, however, he continued to devote himself to the anti-slavery cause. Concern for Brown's safety prompted British abolitionists to "purchase" his freedom in 1854.
Soon after he arrived in America, Brown published "The American Fugitive in Europe", an enlarged version of his "Three Years in Europe: or, Places I have Seen and People I have Met", which was published in 1852. This new edition was the first book written by Brown to be reviewed by a major American newspaper. The New York Daily Tribune declared that the work was a ‘lively and entertaining record of foreign travel’ and, due to its origins, a worthy ‘novelty in literature. Brown wrote two plays after his return to the United States. "Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone" in 1856 and "The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom" written in 1858. These two plays made William Wells Brown the first published African-American playwright.
During the Civil War, Brown joined fellow abolitionists Frederick Douglass and T. Morris Chester in recruiting in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey for the all-Black 54th Massachusetts Regiment. The war years also saw publication of Brown’s first historical work, "The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements". An anthology of biographical sketches of Blacks with significant accomplishments to their credit, this work went through ten editions in just three years. After the war, he wrote "The Negro in the American Rebellion" (1867), considered the first historical work about Black soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. His final book "My Southern Home", or "The South and Its People", appeared in 1880. While continuing to write, Brown was active in the Temperance movement as a lecturer. After studying homeopathic medicine, he opened a medical practice in Boston's South End while keeping a residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1882 he moved to the nearby city of Chelsea, where he passed away in 1884.