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Brown's "Clotel": Slavery, Fiction, and a Founding Father
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Do curso por University of Virginia
Pragas, Bruxas e Guerras: Os Mundos da Ficção Histórica
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Two Centuries of Historical Fiction
This module reviews the history of historical fiction looking at major works and authors from the 18th and 19th century including The Leatherstocking Tales, William Wells Brown, and Charles Dickens.
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Bruce HolsingerProfessor
English
I'm standing on the grounds of
the University of Virginia, an institution that
was conceived and designed by Thomas
Jefferson during the years following his presidency.
The novel I will be discussing in this lecture, Clotel, or
The President's Daughter, has an important
relationship to the University of Virginia.
The story it tells begins right in those years, when this university was being
built, built in large part by the labor of slaves, the University of Virginia's
original labor force in the early 19th Century.
The author was himself born into slavery before escaping and
establishing an international reputation as a writer in various genres.
William Wells Brown was born in Kentucky, the son of
a white plantation owner and a slave woman named Elizabeth.
He escaped in 1834, while working on a steamboat crew, and
published his memoirs, Narrative of William W Brown, A Fugitive Slave,
in 1847.
A few years later he fled to England in order to evade the Fugitive Slave Act.
And in 1853, while living in London, he
published Clotel, or The President's Daughter, a narrative
of slave life in the United States, widely
considered the first novel written by an African American.
Clotel was based on what were then rumors,
but is now the largely accepted historical fact.
That Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with his
slave, Sally Hemings.
Jefferson and Hemings were together during the
future president's residence in Paris, during the 1780s.
And it's likely that the relationship between them began
there, when Hemings was a girl, of 14 or 15.
This notorious relationship has been the subject of any number of books and
articles in recent years, most prominently these two, that you see on the screen.
Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, a novel,
published in 1979.
And Annette Gordon Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally
Hemings, an American controversy, which came out in 1997.
A
subsequent DNA study in 1998 strongly supported Gordon Reed's argument that
Jefferson was the likely father of several of Sally Hemings' children.
Which is now the scholarly consensus.
Sally Hemings herself died here in Charlottesville in 1835.
The novel Clotel has a curious place in the Jefferson Hemings controversy, as
it predates by more than a century
the modern scholarly disputations over the affair.
In fact, Clotel takes it entirely for granted
that Jefferson had fathered children by his slave,
in the wake of a decades long series
of rumors and stories, attesting to the relationship.
Some of the first public accusations came very early.
In 1802, near the beginning of Jefferson's
presidency, a journalist named James Thomson Callender
alleged in a racist screed, published in
the Richmond Recorder, that Jefferson had fathered
several children with a slave mistress named
Sally, whom he was keeping at Monticello.
There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does
not believe the story, and not a few who know it, Callender wrote.
Part of Clotel's mission as a historical novel, is to make this presumption
and these rumors, part of the
official literary history of the American Presidency.
Here we might think about the novel's two subtitles,
and what they tell us about its purpose.
We're looking at the title page of the first edition, published from London.
Clotel, or The President's Daughter, a narrative
of slave life in the United States.
It's the shocking juxtaposition and proximity of those
two subtitles, a president's daughter, the life of
a slave, that lends the novel much of its force as a work of historical fiction.
As with any work of historical fiction, titles count.
Think again here about Scott's Waverley; or ' Tis Sixty Years Since.
Also on this title page you're seeing the
novel's epigraph, taken from the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The novel renders Sally Hemings as a woman named Currer,
a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson who
gives birth to two daughters, Clotel and Althesa.
Currer dies separated from her children, while Clotel is purchased by
Horatio Green, a white man who later leaves her for another woman.
In a tragic ending to the story, Clotel commits suicide by
jumping into the Potomac river while being pursued by slave hunters.
Here's how Brown begins to tells Clotel's story in the first chapter of the novel.
And note the matter of fact way
he slips her presidential genealogy into his narrative.
In her younger days Currer had been the housekeeper
of a young slaveholder, but of later years had
been a laundress or washerwoman, and was considered to
be a woman of greater taste in getting up linen.
The gentleman for whom she had kept house
was Thomas Jefferson, By whom she had two daughters.
Jefferson being called to Washington to fill a government
appointment, Currer was left behind, and thus
she took herself to the business of washing,
by which means she paid her master,
Mr. Graver, and supported herself and two children.
At the time of the decease of her masters, Currer's daughters, Clotel and Althesa.
Were aged respectively 16 and 14 years.
And both, like most of their own sex in America, were well grown.
In this understated way, Brown highlights
the moral hypocrisy of America's democratic institutions.
And one of its founding fathers.
Supported as they are by the ravages of slavery.
With this portrayal of the harsh grotesque mistreatment of slaves.
Brown uses the tragedy of Clotel as a parable of national shame.
As he puts it right at the end of chapter 23.
This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed
by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave.
It tells not only its own story of grief,
but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside.
Which never see the light; all the more bitter and dreadful, because
no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer.
Brown portrays Clotel herself as a tragic heroine, whose death by
her own hands serves as an indictment of the brutality of slavery.
The scene of her death comes as she's
pursued across a bridge between Washington and Virginia.
Where she hopes to escape into the woods.
But God, by his providence, writes Brown, had determined
that an appalling tragedy should be enacted that night.
Within plain sight of the President's house and
the capitol of the Union, which should be
an evidence wherever it should be known, of
the unconquerable love of liberty the heart may inherit.
As well as a fresh admonition
to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes.
Brown then describes Clotel's attempt to flee across the bridge, and
her culminating leap to her death, as her pursuers close in.
What follows is perhaps the novel's most direct and stinging
indictment of Jefferson's and America's moral hypocrisy, as Brown imagines it.
Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the
United States, a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration
of Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that county.
Note Brown's phrasing here.
Thomas Jefferson isn't one of the first
statesmen of our country, but of that country.
Brown is writing this from England, remember.
And in this sentence, he's achieving a kind of critical distance
on the United States and the culture of slavery that sustains it.
As I have suggested a number
of times in these lectures, one of the most useful and interesting ways
we can approach and interpret historical fiction
is through the lens of the archive.
And Brown's archive for Clotel was a diverse and fascinating one.
The novel uses the archive to fuse fiction with fact in many ways.
Documentary sources provide about a third of the novel's word count.
Including newspaper cuttings, church statements, slave codes.
Auction announcements, fugitive advertisements,
many of them taken word for word from primary sources.
Others adopted or rewritten by Brown to fit
the narrative context of the novel at particular points.
Scholars have long known that Brown
lifted passages from, among other materials, Lydia
Maria Child's The Quadroons, Bishop William
Meade's Sermons Addressed to Masters and Servants.
And Theodore Weld's Slavery As It Is, among other sources.
One example comes in an early scene that describes
a slave auction in which Clotel is sold to a new owner.
Brown's source for this scene was an article published in
the a, April 29th, 1847 edition of the New York Evangelist.
Published under the heading, An Auction.
Here's how this published article described
the scene of a young woman's sale.
She stood upon the auction stand.
In stature she was of the middle size, slim and delicately built.
Her skin was lighter than many a Northern
brunette, and her features were round, with thin lips.
Indeed, many thought no black blood coursed in her veins.
Now despair sat on her countenance.
Oh I shall never forget that look.
This was a Southern auction, an auction at which the bones, muscles,
sinews, blood and nerves of a young lady of 19, sold for $1000.
Her improved intellect for 600 more.
And, her Christianity, the person of Christ, in his follower, for 400 more.
Brown's novel too highlights the instability of race.
Emphasizing Clotel's near white features that never the
less destine her to a life of servitude.
As he writes.
There she stood, with a complexion as white as most of those
who were waiting with a wish to become her purchasers, her features
as finely defined as many of her sex of pure Anglo-Saxon,
her long black wavy hair done up in the neatest manner.
Her form tall and graceful, and her
whole appearance indicating one superior to her position.
It's worth looking, too, at what Brown himself has to
say about the diversity of sources he borrowed for the novel.
Here is what he writes in Clotel's final chapter.
My narrative has now come to a close.
I may be asked, and no doubt shall, are
the various incidents and scenes related, founded in truth?
I answer, yes.
I have personally participated in many of those scenes.
Some of the narratives I have derived from other sources, many from the
lips of those who, like myself, have run away from the land of bondage.
Having been for nearly nine years employed on Lake
Erie, I had many opportunities for helping the escape of
fugitives, who in return for the assistance they received,
made me the depositary of their sufferings and wrongs.
Of their relations, I have made free use.
To Mrs. Child of New York, I am indebted for part of a short story.
American abolitionist journals are another source from whence some
of the characters appearing in my narrative are taken.
All these combined have made up my story.
All these combined.
So, Brown's sources for the novel are both archival and personal.
Both witnessed and read.
William Wells Brown revised Clotel three times for publication in
the United States, with different plots, titles, and names of characters.
The four editions were strategically aimed at
specific readerships in relation to abolitionist and
racial politics, during the era of moral suasion of the early 1850s and into
the Reconstruction after the Civil War.
In 1860, Brown's novel served as
an abolitionist exhortation tailored to African-American readers.
In 1864, as a post-emancipation statement, directed at the Union army.
And in 1867, as a post-Civil War appeal to America's emancipated slaves.
What this sequence of publication suggests is that Brown was very aware
of the potential of the historical novel to shape public opinion and sentiment.
And that the genre was eminently adaptable
to the particular political circumstances of the moment.
At the time of its initial publication, Clotel
attracted a lot of praise from the abolitionist press.
In a typical review in 1854, the newspaper The Liberator commended the
novel's portrayal of the dehumanizing aspects
of enslavement that devastate three generations.
Mr. Brown has skillfully embodied in his affecting tale,
numerous well-authenticated occurrences, which have transpired
in the South within a comparatively short
period, all calculated to intensify the moral
indignation of the world against American slavery.
The review also singles out Thomas Jefferson for
perpetuating a moral deviancy that tarnishes his legacy.
While the Declaration of Independence is preserved, the
memory of Thomas Jefferson, its author, will be cherished,
for the clear recognition it makes of the natural equality of mankind, and
the inalienable right of every human being to freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
But it will also be to his
eternal disgrace that lived and died a slave-holder.
Emancipating none of his slaves at his death, and
it is well understood, leaving some of his own
children to be sold to the slave speculators, and
thus to drag out a miserable life of servitude.
Other critics in the 19th century focused more on the prose than on the politics of
the novel, and found fault in the undernourished
plot and unrealistic characters that they found in Clotel.
It didn't help that the novel was published in the
wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin, another novel
with an anti-slavery message, that became an international sensation, and in
Abraham Lincoln's reported words, helped spur the country to civil war.
Contemporary critics have also pointed out some of the novel's shortcomings.
Its conformity to 19th century conventions of
female morality, subjugation and self sacrifice, as
well as an anti progressive politics of
assimilation, by a light skinned and beautiful slave.
I've linked to a few of the more influential
modern critical assessments of the novel in the Readings tab.
So I encourage you to look at a few of these, if
you want to get a sense of the diversity of critical opinion around
this very important historical novel.
As a work of historical fiction then, Clotel leaves a very complicated legacy.
Though the first known novel in the
African American literary tradition, it's published from
abroad while taking on one of the
nation's foundational dilemmas, and its greatest moral flaw.
It wrestles with the ethical hypocrisy of one of the nation's founding
fathers, while exposing the legacy of this particular past to the most pressing
crisis of the author's own moment.
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