Clotel or The President's Daughter

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2004, is a republication of the work originally published by Partridge & Oakey, London, in 1853. The text of Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter is unabridged, but this edition does not include the author’s Preface or The Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown, which preceded Clotel in the 1853 edition. A new Introduction has been provided for the Dover edition.

Copyright

Introduction copyright © 2004 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, William Wells, 1815–1884.

Clotel, or, The presidents daughter / William Wells Brown.

p. cm.

9780486149349

1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Relations with women—Fiction. 2. African American families—Fiction. 3. Children of presidents—Fiction. 4. African American women—Fiction. 5. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 6. Women slaves—Fiction. I. Title: Clotel. II. Title: Presidents daughter. III. Title.

PS1139.B9C53 2004b

813’.4—dc22

2004052791

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

INTRODUCTION

WILLIAM WELLS BROWN was born into slavery on a farm near Lexington, Kentucky, probably in 1814 or 1815. He was the seventh child (all with different fathers) of Elizabeth, one of about forty slaves owned by Dr. John Young; his father was Young’s cousin, George Higgins, who extracted from Young a promise never to sell the boy. When Young moved to St. Louis in 1827, he hired William out to various employers who for the most part educated him further in the cruelty of the white man. One of these employers was quite different: Elijah P. Lovejoy, the young editor of the abolitionist St. Louis Times—decidedly the best master I had ever had, Brown wrote later, and the man to whom he was indebted for what little learning I obtained while in slavery.¹ But his stay with Lovejoy was much too brief. In 1832 he was hired out to a slave trader, and for a year—the longest year I ever lived—had to assist in transporting other slaves down to New Orleans for auction. When that excruciating experience was over and he was returned to Young again, he found that his owner and relative, in need of money, had decided to sell him despite the promise he had made to Higgins.

At that point, William persuaded his mother to escape with him to Canada. The two were caught eleven days later in Illinois, and William’s mother was sold down river. She knew she would not survive long in the cruel cotton fields of the deep south and she would meet him no more this side of the grave, but she exhorted her son to do whatever he must to obtain his own liberty.

He himself was sold for $500 to a St. Louis tailor, who hired him out as a servant on a steamboat and less than a year later resold him to Enoch Price, a merchant and riverboat owner. Price took him along as a steward on one of his riverboats—first down to New Orleans, and then (despite Price’s misgivings about carrying his slave right to the threshold of the free state of Ohio) up the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers to Cincinnati. It was the opportunity William had been waiting for. On New Year’s Day 1834, he carried a passenger’s trunk ashore, set it down, and kept on going.

After a week of running and hiding—with little food, and clothing that was too flimsy to protect him against the icy weather and freezing rain—his feet were frostbitten and he was almost done in by sickness. It was time for a nerve-racking toss of the dice. Coming out of hiding, he threw himself on the mercy of the first passing white man who appeared to have goodness in him. You are the man that I have been looking for! William told himself. Nor was I mistaken. He was the very man! His angel was a Quaker named Wells Brown, and he brought William home, cared for him for a couple of weeks till he was well, and sent him off again with new clothing, new boots, and money in his pocket. It was in honor of this gentle soul—the first man to extend the hand of friendship to me—that the slave theretofore known only as William reinvented himself as William Wells Brown.

William made it to Cleveland, where he found work on a Lake Erie steamer—a job he held for nine years and made use of to help other runaways escape to Canada. In the first summer of his freedom, he met and married Elizabeth Schooner—Betsey, he called her—a free African-American woman, with whom he had three daughters (the first died soon after birth). A few years later, still working on the steamboat (and using every spare moment to educate himself), he moved his family to Buffalo, New York. Here he became more politically active, boarding antislavery lecturers in his home and making it a station on the underground railroad. (In 1842 alone, he helped sixty-nine fugitive slaves make their escape.) He also organized a temperance society.

Brown soon became known and sought after as a speaker. He was invited to lecture at the American Anti-Slavery Society’s 1844 annual meeting in New York City, and in 1847 he was hired by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and moved to Boston. Before the end of that year, he wrote his autobiography, The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, which went through numerous editions both in the U.S. and in Britain and earned Brown international fame. (His former owner, Enoch Price, having seen a copy, sent a letter the following year to offer him his freedom for $325, half of what he’d paid for him. But Brown, declaring that God made me as free as he did Enoch Price, refused to pay a cent.) In 1848 he published The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings, and in 1849 he traveled to France as a delegate to the International Peace Congress in Paris.

Brown remained abroad until 1854, largely because the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law meant that he could no longer be safe from capture even in the so-called free states. It was a productive period: in five years, he gave more than a thousand lectures, wrote two books (Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, published in 1852, and Clotel, published in 1853—the first travel book and first novel, respectively, by an African American), and learned enough medicine to become a practitioner. But his energies were needed for the antislavery movement back home, and at last his British friends did purchase his freedom, and, all bought and paid for, he came back to Boston.

In Boston he continued his abolitionist work and his writing, and also established a medical practice. Among his writings were The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first drama by an African American; The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863); The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867); The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancements of the Colored Race (1873); and, finally, My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People (1880). Brown died of cancer in 1884 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Cambridge cemetery.

CLOTEL was published in four different versions. The first, the one that came out in 1853—Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter—was published only in London. Evidently hoping to bring the book to a wider audience in America, and perhaps dissatisfied with the discrepancy between the melodrama and sentimentality of the novel’s plot and the vitality and painful realism of its slave scenes, Brown published a revised version in 1860 called Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact. In 1864 he shortened the novel (to fit the requirements of the Campfire Series, inexpensive editions published by abolitionist James Redpath for Union soldiers) and made some more changes in the characters’ names; this version came out as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. The fourth version, which contained four new chapters that brought the narrative up to two years after the Civil War, was published in 1867 as Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine, a Tale of the Southern States.

Despite its flaws, the 1853 version is the strongest and the best known, and that is the one reprinted here.

T. N. R. ROGERS