WashU Libraries’ recent acquisition of a first British edition of Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave, Written by Himself (), is an important addition to the collections and will help students and scholars gain a deeper understanding of St. Louis’s history.
Who was William Wells Brown?
William Wells Brown was born into slavery in , the son of a white man and an African American woman. His enslaver eventually moved to St. Louis, and Brown was forced to work in a variety of trades before he was able to escape in His writings, including his autobiography, were extremely popular and widely read. He wrote in a variety of genres including fiction, drama, and nonfiction. He wrote a history of the roles and achievements of African Americans in the military and was also the first African American author to publish a novel in the United States.
Unlike slavery on plantations in the Deep South, enslaved people in St. Louis were commonly hired out to people other than their enslavers. Brown was forced to work in several jobs in the city, ranging from an assistant at Elijah Lovejoy’s newspaper, where he learned to read and write, to working for a slave tr
Personal Narratives
Henry Bibb
Henry Bibb () was born in Shelby County, Kentucky. His father was state senator James Bibb, and his mother was a slave named Mildred Jackson who worked for Willard Gatewood. In , Bibb began lecturing on slavery and became a well known African American activist. In he published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave. Bibb helped create Canada's first black newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive a publication that worked to convince African slaves to settle in Canada. He was also the founding director of a Canadian black colonization project, the Refugee Home Society. He died in
As a teenager, Bibb was sold to a man in Newcastle, Kentucky, named Mr. Vires, whose wife treated Bibb poorly. Recalling the abuses he received in that household, Bibb says that the Vires' cruelty inspired him with a desire to escape. He would run away for days at a time, and though they would beat him for it, he never gave up. Eventually they grew tired of his escapes and returned him to Mr. White, who was now remarried to a woman Bibb describes as a "tyrant" Mr. White began to hire Bibb out again, and again he resumed his
Spartacus Educational
Primary Sources
(1) William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave ()
I was born in Lexington, Kentucky. The man who stole me as soon as I was born, recorded the births of all the infants which he claimed to be born his property, in a book which he kept for that purpose. My mother's name was Elizabeth. She had seven children, Solomon, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Millford, Elizabeth, and myself. No two of us were children of the same father. My father's name, as I learned from my mother, was George Higgins. He was a white man, a relative of my master, and connected with some of the first families in Kentucky.
(2) William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave ()
My master owned about forty slaves, twenty-five of whom were field hands. He removed from Kentucky to Missouri when I was quite young, and settled thirty or forty miles above St. Charles, on the Missouri, where, in addition to his practice as a physician, he carried on milling, merchandising and farming. He had a large farm, the principal productions of which were tobacco and hemp. The slave cabins were situated on the back part of the fa
Born on a plantation near Lexington, Kentucky, in , William Wells Brown was the son of a white man and an enslaved woman. Living principally in and around St. Louis, Missouri until the age of twenty, Brown was exposed to and experienced slavery amid remarkably wide-ranging conditions. William worked as a house servant and field slave and was hired out as an assistant to a tavern keeper, a printer, and the slave trader James Walker, who voyaged extensively, traveling to and from the New Orleans slave market on the Mississippi River. After at least two failed attempts, Brown did escape slavery on New Year's Day, Aided in his flight from Ohio into Canada by the Quaker Wells Brown, William adopted the man's names out of gratitude and admiration. For the next nine years, Brown worked aboard a Lake Erie steamboat while concurrently acting as an Underground Railroad conductor in Buffalo, New York.
Embarking on a career as a lecturing agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society in , Brown eventually moved to Boston in , where he began his impressive literary career. In that same year, he wrote and published his autobiography, the Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Sla
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