The Autobiographical Writings of William Wells Brown by William Wells Brown

First published:Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave, 1847; The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad, 1855

Type of work: Slave narratives

Time of work: 1815-1852

Locale: United States and Europe

Principal Personages:

Narrative of William Wells Brown

• William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave, the son of his master’s cousin
• Dr. John Young, a gentleman farmer and physician, William’s first master
• Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist printer—and later martyr—for whom William works briefly as a boy Friday
• James Walker, a slave driver for whom William works for a year
• Wells Brown, an Ohio Quaker who shelters William during his escape and who gives William his name

The American Fugitive in Europe

• William Wells Brown, a Paris Peace Conference delegate, racial ambassador, and author
• Victor Hugo, a celebrated French novelist and dramatist
• Richard Cobden, an English free-trade advocate and social reformer
• Alexis de Tocqueville, the French minister of foreign affairs
• Alexander Crummell, an African American Episcopal clergyman who would become celebrated as a Liberian missionary, diplomat, and educator
• Joseph Jenkins, a putative kidnapped African prince
• Harriet Martineau, an English historian, biographer, journalist, essayist, feminist, and antislavery advocate
• William, and
• Ellen Craft, a famous couple who escaped slavery by having the wife dress as a man and pass as the white owner of her husband

Form and Content

Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slavechronicles William Wells Brown’s life as a slave from his birth in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1815 until his escape from Missouri to Ohio and freedom in 1834. It concludes with brief comments about Brown’s life in Cleveland and in Buffalo, New York, until 1843, when Brown became a traveling agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society.

The genesis of Brown’s narrative and the purpose it was meant to serve shed light on both its form and its content. The text proper represented the fleshing out of incidents from Brown’s life in bondage that he had been recounting on the antislavery lecture circuit since 1843. Dramatically witnessing the horrors of slavery—it was published two years after Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) and was more popular than Douglass’s pioneering account—it represented firsthand testimony that the abolitionist movement was eager to exploit. Because the effectiveness of Narrative of William Wells Brown as an antislavery brief turned on the authority of its author, a fugitive slave, Brown’s abolitionist friends packaged the text to enhance his credibility and appeal.

Formally, Brown’s autobiography is but one of the constituent elements of the narrative as a rhetorical whole. Readers encounter first an open letter from the author to the Quaker Wells Brown in which this earliest benefactor and “first white friend” is warmly thanked. This letter precedes one from Edmund Quincy, a Boston abolitionist Brown had asked to serve as his editor and public intermediary. There follows a preface by J. C. Hathaway, the president of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, Brown’s first employer.

Packaging Brown’s text in this way was meant to confirm the truthfulness of his account and to suggest in advance how to read it. The issues the book raises are clearly spelled out, and readers’ feelings are manipulated without apology. Functioning as Everyman, Edmund Quincy suggests that to read Brown’s narrative was to understand slavery better and to hate it worse. Hathaway comments that the author’s untutored ingenuousness carried the signature of truth. Christians and friends of the Bible could understand slavery only as theft and sin, Hathaway insists, and right-thinking persons should join the crusade to eliminate it.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Narrative of William Wells Brown—the public impact hoped for from a widely circulated insider account—shed light on its content as well. Brown wrote against the background of Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: Or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), a novel by a white historian in the dress of slave autobiography, and Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), a volume of second-hand reportage by a white abolitionist. Needing to inform his northern audiences about the “peculiar institution” as well as to engage their sympathies, Brown describes the multiple faces of slavery in the Mississippi Valley from the time he was first hired out in 1827 until his escape to Cincinnati in 1834. He reports his experience as a tavern keeper’s helper, a steamboat steward, a boy Friday in Elijah P. Lovejoy’s St. Louis printing office, a field hand, a house servant and carriage driver, a physician’s assistant, and—most wrenchingly—as a gang boss for the slave trader James Walker.

The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad originated as Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852), a series of travel letters that Brown published in London to defray the costs of his trip. The enlarged text, published in Boston in 1855, was recast for American readers.

In The American Fugitive in Europe, Brown reports his activities in Paris as an American Peace Society delegate and his activities in Great Britain—following in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond—as an antislavery publicist. Brown functions abroad as a professional man of letters and antislavery lecturer, on the one hand, and as an acknowledged fugitive slave—the perfect case in point—on the other. Strategically exploiting his anomalous identity, drawing pointed lessons from the ease with which he moved among the notables of European society, Brown is a living refutation of presumptions of black incapacity that he challenges simultaneously on the lecture platform.

As with Narrative of William Wells Brown, the editorial packaging of the later text is integral to its overall argument. The American Fugitive in Europe opens with the preface to the original English edition. Brown makes ritual apology for the shortcomings of the text, reminding readers that he has been twenty years in bondage and is without formal schooling. Thus, his persona as fugitive slave is thrown into high relief. Brown’s note to the American edition is followed by a “Memoir of the Author,” written by a British journalist, introducing the text proper. Modeled on Brown’s earlier narrative, the “Memoir” tells readers who the fugitive is whose adventures they will share, and it brings the story of his life as an antislavery worker up to date.

The external framing of the text is completed by four pages of “Opinions of the British Press.” This follows Brown’s travel account and closes the book. Here the rhetorical point of the volume is made unmistakably. Brown’s “doings and sayings,” the Morning Advertiser confidently predicts, will be “among the means of destruction of the hideous abomination” of slavery.

In publishing these travel sketches—closely following the conventions of the form by cataloging the persons and places he sees—William Wells Brown confirms his cultural literacy, demonstrates his formal range as a man of letters, and strikes a blow for freedom.

Critical Context

The autobiographical writings of William Wells Brown are important from three related points of view. First, the texts are important as biographical landmarks within the corpus of Brown’s work. Narrative of William Wells Brown, in particular, witnesses a double act of self-creation. Brown invents himself as a free man in making the escape the text recounts, and he invents himself as an author in recounting the escape he makes. Taken together, Narrative of William Wells Brown and The American Fugitive in Europe reveal the growth of the author’s distinctive voice and point of view as he fashions differently packaged accounts of successive stages of his life. They shed light on his emergence as an antislavery lecturer and his subsequent development into a polished man of letters.

Second, the texts are important for their exemplary status as distinct forms of first-person nineteenth century prose narratives. From this literary point of view, as the second authentic slave narrative and the first set of travel sketches published by an African American, the texts witness the growing formal repertoire of antebellum black authors.

Third and finally, the texts are important as cultural arguments that challenge normative representations of nineteenth century race relations. As such, they suggest the inherently political dimension of minority self-expression. Narrative of William Wells Brown and The American Fugitive in Europe mirror the emergence in the United States of an African American literary tradition—a family of equivocally subversive manners of speaking—whose richness is widely acknowledged.

Bibliography

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. A pioneering use of speech-act theory to explore the ways African American autobiographies are meant to affect their readers.

Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. The introduction is a particularly useful discussion of how such sources have been and can be exploited as historical evidence.

Chaney, Michael A. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Discusses Brown’s exhibitionism and representation of self in his autobiographical writings.

Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. A useful history of the development of the slave-narrative genre.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Foreword to The Works of William Wells Brown: Using His “Strong, Manly Voice,” edited by Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Commentary on Brown’s narratives by a foremost scholar of African American literature and literarary history.

Harding, Vincent. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Passionate yet scholarly exploration of antebellum African American history. Bibliography, notes.

Williams, Kenny J. They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 1787-1930. Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend Press, 1970. Chapter 3 gives a good analysis of the slave-narrative structure.