He who saves a nation violates no law.
—Donald J. Trump, plagiarizing the character
Napoleon, in Rod Steiger’s Waterloo (1970)
They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child to death.
—William Wells Brown
According to one of philosophy’s most famous anecdotes, as Hegel was putting the finishing touches on The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1806, Napoleon’s forces invaded Jena. The philosopher looked out his window just in time to catch a glimpse of “the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance.” Recounting the incident in a letter to a friend, Hegel wrote, “It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” Hegel never caught a glimpse of the abolitionist William Wells Brown, though Brown was born less than a decade after Napoleon made his fateful ride through the Prussian city. And even if the great thinker had been lucky enough to lay eyes on him, it’s doubtful that the sight of a fugitive slave turned globetrotting activist and man of letters would have sparked in him the same thrill of recognition as the Corsican general. Yet, to hear Brown tell his own story of slavery and stateless fugitivity, he was the soul of the modern world.
And tell it Brown did—in thousands of speeches, a popular slave narrative, an abolitionist songbook, a moving panorama, a magic lantern show, a pair of European travelogues, the first African American novel, the first published African American play, three germinal works of African American history, and a memoir. His story traveled with him as he crisscrossed the United States and then England, Ireland, France, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies, performing it for anyone who would listen, as well as for many who wouldn’t. If, to Hegel, Napoleon was the world-conquering hero who would sweep away the remnants of feudal Prussia and replace it with a modern nation-state and the liberal ideals of the French Revolution, what Brown swept away with his mix of artistry and activism was that tale of progressive history. Beneath the steam engines and industrial factories, museums and crystal palaces, Napoleons and Hegels, constitutional monarchies and democratic republics, Brown knew the modern world was no such thing: it was still slavery all the way down.
Brown has often been compared to his more famous colleague, Frederick Douglass. Ostensibly, Douglass cuts a figure that is easier to recognize as a nineteenth-century world-soul, or at least as a figure that is more consistent with the nineteenth century’s self-image. Self-consciously iconic, Douglass was one of the most photographed men in the United States during his lifetime. In his speeches and writings, he confronts slavery head on, a Byronic hero striking a blow against slavery in a manner that is of a piece with the Age of Revolution and the era of romantic nationalism to which Hegel bore witness. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” Douglass proclaims in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, shortly before he bests the slave-breaker Edward Covey in physical combat. Loosely reminiscent of the struggle for recognition in Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic, the fight that pits Douglass against Covey is a key turning point in Douglass’s autobiography. Douglass’s refusal to allow himself to be reduced to an object of Covey’s will transforms him from a slave into a man by making him conscious of his own freedom, and it also marks the beginning of a path of development that will lead him to become the author of his own life story, synthesizing its many breaks and vicissitudes into the kind of teleological progression that would have made the author of the Phenomenology proud.
In contrast to Douglass’s story of self-emancipation through redemptive violence, Brown, who once described himself as “a man without a name,” tends to portray himself as a critical spectator whose inner personhood almost entirely dissolves beneath his own acid wit and layered ironies. Also dissolved by Brown’s acid wit is the ontological distinction between the slave and the freeman on which Douglass’s story of self-transformation relies. In Brown’s telling, the enslaved always have a self-consciousness of their own freedom, regardless of whether they physically resist their enslavers. Indeed, for Brown, the idea that the enslaved are purely the objects of their master’s will is a delusion of the society that has enslaved them and the set of laws, practices, and institutions that has been built to safeguard that delusion. It is a sign of the master’s ignorance rather than his omnipotence, making him easy for the enslaved to deceive. Consequently, in Brown’s writings, to the extent that the enslaved play along with their assigned roles, they do so as a ruse that enables them to hide their critical subjectivity from the punishing gaze of a slave society predicated on the belief that such a subjectivity should not exist and, therefore, must be extirpated.
As for those scenes of heroic rebellion that Douglass’s narrative celebrates, Brown celebrates them too, but often at a comic distance that deflates the position of the Byronic hero. In his 1853 novel Clotel, Brown stages a scene in which George Green, the phenotypically white but legally Black enslaved son of a congressman, participates in a failed revolution. At his trial, George harangues the judge, telling him that he was inspired to rebel by listening to his master and his master’s visitors talk about their own republican ideals and revolutionary forefathers, forefathers whom he shares and whose ideals he has upheld more faithfully than they have. So far, so Douglass. But then George is sentenced to hang. And at that point things take a very un-Douglass-like turn.
While awaiting execution in prison, George is visited by his first love, Mary, the granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and another phenotypically white but legally Black slave. She convinces George to trade clothes with her and escape wearing her dress, which he does, eventually making his way to a free state disguised as a white woman. Rather than a slave heroically transforming himself into a man through redemptive violence, an enslaved man transforms himself into a white woman and runs away. The true hero, if there is one, is Mary, the enslaved woman who hatches an escape plan and transforms herself into a man so that she can take George’s place in prison. Black and white, female and male, slavery and freedom, are seldom absolute in Brown’s work, except as caricatures and disguises that characters are forced to adopt to comport with the political ontology of a society predicated on chattel slavery, patriarchy, and anti-Blackness. When Brown depicts characters under the sign of realism, such binaries are typically cross-hatched, interdependent, and relational. If the flight of this Black George who becomes white Mary, this white Mary who becomes Black George, is not the nineteenth-century’s world-soul riding by, maybe it’s the twenty-first’s.
Brown’s writings are simultaneously keenly responsive to the questions of his time and stylistically out of joint, seeming both older and newer than his mid-nineteenth-century life would suggest. Brown’s sardonic wit draws on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century satirical writers like Laurence Sterne and Joseph Addison even as his generic innovations anticipate the compositional experimentation of twentieth-century modernism and even postmodernism. As Brown’s biographer Ezra Greenspan observes, “[Brown was] arguably the parent of our postmodern cultural concerns/preoccupations a century before they were born. Fragmentation, alternating perspectives, sampling, multimedia, generic confusion were his signature practices—all the more interesting for us because they came about in a different cultural era and in response to different historical exigencies.”
Of course, as an abolitionist, Brown wrote not only to represent the world around him, but also to change it. The critical labor that Brown’s literary experimentation performs on his readers is akin to what anthropologist James Clifford in another context once called “ethnographic surrealism.” Writing of the overlapping emergence of surrealism and ethnography in twentieth-century France, Clifford describes ethnographic surrealism as “an orientation toward cultural order . . . taking as its problem—and opportunity—the fragmentation and juxtaposition of cultural values. From its disenchanted viewpoint, stable orders of collective meaning appear to be constructed, artificial, and indeed often ideological or repressive. The sort of normality or common sense that can amass empires in its fits of absentmindedness or wander routinely into world wars is seen as a contested reality, to be subverted, parodied, and transgressed.”
Here, again, a comparison with Douglass is instructive. As we have already seen, Douglass often makes absolute categorical distinctions when he contrasts slavery with freedom. In his 1845 Narrative, for instance, Douglass contrasts the sociogenic effects of wage labor on the free city of New Bedford with those of slavery on Baltimore. In free New Bedford, the work is “sober,” “cheerful,” and dignified. As a result, the city is “clean, new, and beautiful,” evincing “wealth, comfort, taste, and refinement.” By contrast, in the slave state of Maryland, Baltimore is filled with “dilapidated houses,” “poverty-stricken inmates,” “half-naked children,” and “barefooted women.” In Douglass’s attempt to draw a firm line between the deleterious socioeconomic influence of slavery and the salutary influence of freedom, he implies that the inhabitants of New Bedford have somehow managed to create a society from which the baleful influence of slavery has been completely eradicated. Douglass had experienced enough Northern anti-Blackness and exploitation as a wage laborer to know that wasn’t true, but pretending that it was helped him highlight the evils of slavery, and it also flattered the self-regard of the Northerners he hoped to recruit to the cause of abolition.
Brown always paints a murkier picture. Hired out to a slave trader on the trans-Mississippi river network as a teenager, he saw firsthand the people, capital, and goods flowing between slavery and freedom, co-producing their conjoined worlds. Hence, Brown often draws the firm dividing line between slavery and freedom that was so flattering to his Northern and British readers only to immediately undercut it through generic confusion and unexpected juxtapositions. The reader is never allowed to forget that, as Walter Benjamin once put it, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
We see this most clearly in Brown’s European travelogues. Sojourning in an aggressively imperial 1850s England, which had abolished slavery two decades prior, but which continued to rely on American slavery to fill its factories with cheap cotton, Brown toys with his readers’ expectations. On the one hand, as expected, he contrasts his freedom of physical and social movement in England with the restrictions placed on him in the United States by American slavery and anti-Blackness. And yet his visit to the Bank of England, which he describes ambivalently as “this monster building of gold and silver,” is preceded by an account of the Irish famine. Likewise, following his visit to the British Museum, industrial fog blocks out the sun, and he encounters two beggars, one a fugitive slave. Where Douglass separates the “poverty-stricken inmates” of slavery from the free world’s “wealth, refinement, and taste,” Brown sketches them together surreptitiously in a single constellation. Better still, he does it all with such easy jocularity that his British readers can be forgiven for not realizing that although they are laughing along with Brown, the joke is at their own expense.
These aesthetic and ideological differences between Brown and Douglass sometimes make Brown a more nuanced and discerning critic of his own time than Douglass was. They also make Brown an equally necessary companion of our own. As we reach the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, underdevelopment, neoliberalism, renascent colonialism, and a looming climate crisis have all combined to produce a new global underclass and waves of stateless refugees. Meanwhile, a reactionary politics of authoritarian ethnonationalism has arisen to greet them. And, by any account, this is only the beginning. Projections estimate that, due to climate change, by 2050 the number of environmental migrants will be anywhere from a few hundred million to as high as 1.2 billion. Though the Global North is largely to blame, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East are expected to experience the worst effects. Currently, environmental migration is only a small fraction of those projections. Yet parts of Europe are already building mass detention facilities. In the United States, deportation sweeps are underway, and aid to the world’s poorest countries, as well as the poorest Americans, is being summarily torn apart by the richest man in the world.
Amid the ruins of our incomplete present, Douglass remains a tutelary figure. We still need his leonine example of self-actualization, political mobilization, and heroic resistance. But we need much more than that. We can’t afford to see freedom and slavery, wealth and poverty, citizenship and statelessness, as anything other than conjoined twins who share a stomach. We’re going to need William Wells Brown.
_____
Published in 2014, Ezra Greenspan’s biography of Brown, William Wells Brown: An African American Life, and the Greenspan-edited collection of Brown’s texts, William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings, remain indispensable entry points to the career and corpus of a writer, performer, and activist who reshaped African American literature and helped end slavery in the United States.
Greenspan is a professor of English who describes himself as “a literary, media, and social historian.” It is to his credit that An African American Life is both engaging enough for a general reader and thorough enough to be of lasting use to scholars. Brown’s gradual transformation from a slave into a professional abolitionist, performer, and author is the biography’s guiding thread. As Greenspan details, that transformation was an increasingly common one by 1847, when Brown’s first book, the autobiographical Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, was published. Throughout the late 1840s and ’50s, Brown appeared onstage with a diverse cohort of other former slaves turned fledgling author-performers, all trying to aid the cause of abolition while scraping up a living in the process. As abolitionists, those other former slaves were Brown’s colleagues, but as author-performers they were also his competitors. And many of them had escapes to recount that were either more thrilling or more shocking to mid-nineteenth-century sensibilities than Brown’s. William and Ellen Craft, whom Brown mentored on a tour of the British Isles, escaped to freedom together with the light-skinned Ellen dressed as an ailing White Southern gentleman and her soon-to-be husband William pretending to be her slave. Their scandalous escape was such an international sensation that Brown would later borrow it for one of the subplots in Clotel. Another former slave, Henry Brown, whom William Wells Brown gave the moniker “Box” Brown, packed himself in a box and mailed himself to freedom, a feat that “Box” Brown turned into a regular part of his act, emerging from a crate onstage, as though from a coffin, and then singing the antislavery song “Escape from Slavery” to the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Uncle Ned,” much to the delight of the audiences who had gathered to witness his miraculous resurrection.
By comparison, William Wells Brown’s escape was anticlimactic: traveling with his master’s family by steamboat in the free city of Cincinnati, Brown pretended to be unloading his master’s luggage, and then he simply walked away. Nevertheless, if William Wells Brown’s story lacked the sensationalism of the Crafts’ or “Box” Brown’s, what he possessed instead was his literary inventiveness, profound insight into the political economy of slavery, and an audacious sense of humor. As Greenspan notes, although there were many important abolitionists, “as a writer, William Wells Brown was born different.” Greenspan’s ability to capture that difference makes for lively prose. Longtime readers of Brown will be pleased to find that Greenspan is able to recreate Brown’s wry humor and penchant for outrageous anecdotes. That is no small feat, and not only because Brown was inimitable, but also because sources are hard to come by: as prolific as Brown was, he left no archive. In the absence of one, Greenspan does the arduous work of piecing Brown’s life together from the archives of his correspondents, friends, enemies, and acquaintances, as well as the newspaper accounts of his performances and Brown’s published texts.
Brown’s lack of an archive might be disappointing for readers looking for the man behind the public persona. Although Greenspan carefully weighs the existing evidence to speculate about how Brown is likely to have thought or felt at key turning points in his life, he generally doesn’t strive for a novelistic recreation of Brown’s emotional state or the kind of deep psychological insight that some more recent biographies of famous abolitionists have attempted to provide, such as David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018) or Ilyon Woo’s Pulitzer–winning biography of the Crafts, Master Slave Husband Wife (2023). But what Greenspan produces instead is an account of Brown’s life that is ultimately more fitting, more Brownian in its contours.
One of Brown’s signature authorial practices was to purloin the stories of others and stitch them into his own texts. His autobiographies are composite texts that transform his life into a frame tale in which other people’s stories provide some of the most important episodes. No doubt, he would have been amused by a biography of himself in which the anecdotes of those who met him were used to paper over the gaps. Moreover, what Brown’s many texts and performances record is less his inner life than what he meant to the world around him as a slave, an abolitionist, a Black man, and an author, and what that meaning in turn revealed to him about the world. It is Brown’s production of that lifelong meditation on what he meant to the world and what the world meant to him that Greenspan charts.
Since Greenspan is forced to approach Brown through his interactions with others, he also ends up providing readers with a particularly rich portrait of the otherwise opaque world of international abolitionism in which Brown circulated during the roughly half-decade he spent living in England, a period in which he was at his most prolific and inventive. Brown’s trip began with his attendance at an international peace congress in Paris. There, while still a fugitive from American slavery, he was part of a delegation representing the United States. After hobnobbing with Victor Hugo and visiting the Louvre, he began what was supposed to be a short lecture tour of the British Isles. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, that short tour turned into a lengthy residency in England. Necessity being the mother of invention, Brown was able to keep up interest in his texts and performances by transforming them into more unique and elaborate productions than any of his competitors on the abolitionist circuit. In 1849, he brought out a moving panorama titled William Wells Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave. A precursor to the cinema, moving panoramas were created by painting multiple scenes on a single continuous canvas, which would slowly scroll against a wall, creating the illusion of movement. Brown toured with his panorama, reading from a script while the panorama scrolled behind him, taking audiences on a trip downriver from Virginia to New Orleans, with glimpses at enslaved plantation labor and the domestic slave trade along the way. In its final scenes, the panorama tracked his own escape to freedom and transatlantic voyage to England, bringing his British audience into the narrative. In 1852, he published Three Years in Europe; or, Places I have Seen and People I have Met, an epistolary travelogue of his experiences while touring France and the British Isles. In 1848, Europe had been roiled by a wave of mostly unsuccessful revolutions, which Brown and his fellow abolitionists had supported from a distance in the United States. Keenly aware of the conservative counter-revolution underway in the 1850s, Brown provides an unparalleled look at the age of democratic revolutions from the vantage point of an American abolitionist and fugitive slave hoping to push those revolutions beyond their own limits. The same year that Brown published his travelogue, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Uncle Tom mania swept through England. Looking to capitalize on the trend, Brown published Clotel in 1853, the first African American novel and the work for which he is best known today. Clotel tells the story of two generations of enslaved women born to Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves, continuing the meditation on the significance of slavery in the revolutionary era that Brown began in his travelogue. In addition to being a national allegory, Clotel is a densely allusive work with passing references to everything from Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and the Haitian Revolution to the Polish Uprising of 1848 and the founding of modern Egypt.
Greenspan walks us through Brown’s interactions with publishers, printers, and illustrators as the author/performer tackles the logistics of bringing out a new illustrated edition of his slave narrative in Ireland, commissioning the massive paintings for his moving panorama in England, and self-publishing his travelogue and novel. In addition to his thorough handling of these practical matters on which Brown’s transformation into a professional author depended, Greenspan details the surprisingly diverse array of intellectuals, radicals, and authors Brown encountered abroad. There are, of course, Brown’s interactions with his fellow abolitionists, such as William and Ellen Craft. And there are the internecine struggles in the international abolitionist movement, which pitted Brown, a loyal member of the arch-radical Garrisonian faction of the American Anti-Slavery Society, against his more moderate rivals in the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. But, more unexpectedly, we also see Brown get a letter of introduction to Alexandre Dumas from exiled French socialist Louis Blanc. We watch Brown run into the anti-Black Thomas Carlyle on an omnibus and then excoriate him in the newspapers, and we see the increasingly famous performer organize an antislavery meeting attended by poet laureate Alfred Tennyson and historian Thomas Macaulay. As Greenspan shows us Brown rubbing elbows with England’s most fêted thinkers and writers, it gradually becomes clear that he isn’t the only one trying to gain legitimacy by way of their mutual contact. Those thinkers and writers are trying to show that they can stay au courant with the modern world through their contact with Brown as well.
Perhaps the only area of An African American Life that is underdeveloped is Greenspan’s analysis of Brown’s literary output, which Greenspan approaches more as a historian than as a literary scholar. Although Greenspan provides detailed accounts of each of Brown’s texts and the logistics of its publication, he doesn’t spend much time analyzing how Brown’s generic innovations, textual sampling, and unique authorial style inflect his analysis of slavery and its world-historical significance. Fortunately, for readers who want to experience Brown’s texts directly and draw their own conclusions, Greenspan has also given us the ample collection William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings.
For general readers, Clotel & Other Writings remains the best available collection of Brown’s work. Arguably, it comprises all of Brown’s most significant texts, beginning with the 1847 slave narrative that made him famous and ending with his final monograph, an 1880 miscellany disguised as a memoir, My Southern Home. Also included are a generous selection of Brown’s essays and speeches, some of which can otherwise be hard to find in print. Especially exciting is the inclusion of two of Brown’s least commented on but most aesthetically satisfying monographs, The American Fugitive in Europe (1855) and The Escape (1858). The American Fugitive in Europe is the heavily revised American edition of Brown’s travelogue, Three Years in Europe. Unlike Three Years, which was rushed to the printer with one of its chapters out of order, and which largely abandons the travel narrative genre in its final third, American Fugitive makes for a more cohesive read by staying true to Brown’s generic experiment of blending the perspective of the American slave narrative with the conventions of the European travelogue. The Escape is often described as the first published play by an African American, but it has seldom been given its just due by critics or audiences. Loosely based on Brown’s experiences as the multiracial son of an enslaved mother and a relative of his master, the play hilariously lampoons the racial politics of the slaveholding household, in which the blood relation between household slave and master must be constantly repressed to preserve the fiction of a fundamental ontological difference between Black and white, enslaved and free.
Nevertheless, for anyone already familiar with Brown’s work, or for those seeking to read it deeply rather than broadly, Greenspan’s collection is ultimately more tantalizing than it is satisfying. Here the fault lies with Brown, whose idiosyncrasies as a writer and self-publisher create irresolvable problems for any editor seeking to put together a single-volume collection of his major writings. For instance, there is the problem of redundancy. Brown self-plagiarizes with delightful abandon. Anecdotes told for the first time in one work are sometimes repeated verbatim in subsequent works. At other times they are reworked entirely to fit a different genre: a story that first appears in a travelogue reappears in altered form in a novel; the final chapter of a slave narrative is adapted into a play.
Then there is the problem of textual variation. Brown often published multiple versions and editions of a work, sometimes under a different title and with minor or major alterations. There are, for example, four very different versions of Clotel. The first version, Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, has received the most attention from readers and scholars. But a revised version of the novel with different character names was serialized as Miralda; or The Beautiful Quadroon in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1860 to 1861. Then, in 1864, Brown published a third version, titled Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States. This Clotelle had a new ending and was part of the “Books for the Campfires series” intended for Union soldiers. Finally, in 1867, Brown published a fourth version, Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine, updating the end of the novel yet again to take events up through the Civil War. In addition to the dizzying level of variation that he introduced into the main text of his works, Brown also included an everchanging set of supplementary texts, such as autobiographies, letters, and essays, whenever he published a new edition. For instance, the first edition of Clotel was published with an autobiographical preface that Brown pieced together from slightly altered portions of his 1847 slave narrative and his 1852 travelogue. However, that autobiography was replaced with different prefatory notes in all subsequent editions. With space at a premium, what is an editor to do with such a protean corpus?
Greenspan includes first editions and complete texts rather than excerpts, but he omits Brown’s lengthier autobiographical prefaces and the supplementary texts of any subsequent editions. This approach is undoubtedly the correct one for a collection intended for a general reader or someone who is new to Brown’s work. A reader encountering the 1853 edition of Clotel for the first time won’t wonder why a prefatory autobiography that was originally published with the novel has been omitted, because he or she won’t know that such a text exists. Nevertheless, for those who are intimately familiar with Brown’s oeuvre, the result can sometimes feel misleading. The prefatory autobiographies that Greenspan omits are often used by Brown as framing devices, steering the reader toward a particular interpretation of the main work, while indexing it to events in his own life and political developments in the struggle for abolition.
There is also the issue of Brown’s plagiarism—this time of others rather than himself. As a plagiarist, Brown was prolific and inventive. Although Brown’s plagiarism was the subject of occasional criticism during his lifetime, the discovery of just how intricately and inventively he stole from dozens of sources to cobble together a new piece of literature, especially in Clotel, was the subject of a great deal of scholarly investigation and affirmative reevaluation in the years leading up to the publication of Greenspan’s collection. Literary historian Ivy Wilson describes Brown’s textual pilfering as a form of bricolage. In a similar vein, Robert Levine, who edited the first critical edition of Clotel, describes Brown as a kind of cultural editor. Although Greenspan discusses Brown’s plagiarism in An African American Life, he does not alert readers to Brown’s textual prestidigitation in Clotel & Other Writings. The result is that one of Brown’s most distinctive authorial practices is illegible to readers, and those hoping to engage with it will have to turn to the excellent critical editions of Clotel that have been edited by Robert Levine and Geoffrey Sanborn.
_____
In 1849, William Wells Brown looked up and caught a glimpse of Napoleon, by then long dead. He was cast in bronze and standing astride the Vendôme Column in Paris, dressed as a Roman emperor, a globe in one hand, a sword in the other. Unlike Hegel before him, Brown experienced no “wonderful sensation.” Recounting the experience in Three Years in Europe, he describes the statue’s commemoration of “the success of French arms in the German campaign” dismissively as “a monument of folly” wholly at odds with the mission of the peace congress he was in France to attend. For Brown, the statue’s celebration of imperial conquest was too reminiscent of the “the war spirit of America,” which had just annexed much of Mexico, and which he held responsible for keeping “in bondage three million of his brethren.” To his mind, those two acts of violent expropriation—slavery and imperial expansion—were intimately connected. For Brown, then, it was no wonder that after the French and Haitian revolutions had led to the abolition of slavery in the French empire, it was Napoleon who restored the institution.
The same year that Brown’s travelogue appeared, Karl Marx published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his caustic reflections on the Second French Empire and its new emperor, Napoleon III, the shadow of his more illustrious uncle. There, in a quote that has been repeated ad nauseam, Marx writes, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
With Marx’s words in mind in 2025, and as we witness the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term in the United States, a much more chaotic and rapaciously destructive beginning even than that of his first, we might want to pose a question that Marx does not consider but that Brown does: what happens when farce repeats itself? Does it become some new kind of tragedy? Put differently, what happens when history’s forward movement leads to our destruction, and the moral arc of the universe merely turns up new iterations of the same old problems? For William Wells Brown, the tragicomic experience of farce repeating itself was already a stale one by the mid-nineteenth century. What happens to the world when time keeps moving but the progress of progressive history is revealed to be an illusion? Brown had an answer: It explodes, dummy.
In the climactic chapter of Clotel, “Death is Freedom,” the eponymous protagonist leaps to her death from a bridge over the Potomac to avoid being recaptured and sent back to slavery. Inspired by the rumor that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings, Clotel, Jefferson’s enslaved daughter, is the symbol of a nation doomed by its own immanent contradictions. Phenotypically white but legally Black, naturally free but legally enslaved, she is the embodiment of a nation divided against itself, professing freedom but built on slavery. Her death accurately presages the coming Civil War and the end of slavery along with the death of the first American republic. But, perhaps more importantly, her death also reveals that slavery had always been an ongoing civil war, pitting slave against enslaver, citizen against non-citizen, legally white against legally Black, simultaneously a class war and a race war. The conflagration that her death symbolizes is not just some future event; for the enslaved in the British American colonies, the war had begun in 1619, and it had never stopped. Fittingly, since her suicide and, by extension, the death of the nation-state are underway before the novel even begins, they are revealed to the reader on the novel’s frontispiece, an engraving titled “The Death of Clotel.” It is easily the most arresting of the novel’s four illustrations, each of which Greenspan wisely reproduces for readers in Clotel & Other Writings.
Although literary historians have tracked down the dozens of sources that Brown plagiarized or adapted to compose the main text of his novel, it seems to have escaped notice that the source for its most conspicuous image is hiding in plain sight in one of the nineteenth century’s most famous paintings: Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire—Destruction (1836). Destruction is the fourth in a series of five paintings, which together show the rise of a classical empire from rustic simplicity to rich imperial splendor, followed by its violent destruction and desolate ruins. Inspired in part by the Vandal sack of Rome in the fifth century, Destruction depicts a magnificent Romanesque city in the moment of its demise at the hands of what can be interpreted as either a barbarian invasion or a civil war. White classical buildings fill the background on either side of the painting. A turbulent river fills its center, across which a large stone bridge teeming with people is collapsing into the water. The massive headless statue of a gladiator on a stone plinth dominates the right side of the view, suggesting a city whose immense wealth has been won through imperial conquest. And beneath the gladiator, in the foreground, a woman with her arms outstretched is leaping to her death from a city wall. Her face is turned back to look at the invading soldier chasing her down and reaching for her dress just a moment too late.
Cole’s painting is typically interpreted as a critique of Jacksonian America and its rapid, violent westward expansion. In “The Death of Clotel,” Cole’s image has been simplified and repurposed for abolitionism. In the background, the classical buildings depicted in Destruction have become the U.S. Capitol. A bridge still bisects the image laterally, only now the river beneath it is the Potomac. Clotel is leaping from the bridge’s center. Surrounding her are a group of slave catchers, reaching out for her with lascivious intent. One of them resembles the soldier in Destruction, only his sword has been replaced with a whip. Tellingly, in “The Death of Clotel,” civilization and barbarism have been inverted. The citizens—slave catchers all—are cast in the position occupied by the barbarian invaders in Cole’s Destruction. Clotel, the fugitive slave, is cast in the role that Cole had assigned to the empire’s subjects, her suicidal leap for freedom suspended at its apex, as though she has just taken flight.
Historical time is also transformed in Brown’s adaptation. In Cole’s The Course of Empire, history is cyclical. The course of empire follows a predictable rise and fall, and then a new empire begins the process again. Course of Empire’s cautionary tale of imperial decline presents a view of empire from the standpoint of those who would forestall its descent from pastoral republic to martial empire and the inevitable destruction that follows. It is the view of those who would venerate the republic’s pure origins and who would attempt to make the republic great again. By contrast, in “The Death of Clotel,” the predictable rise and fall of empire has been condensed into a single tableau that collapses the distinction between republic and empire. There is no pure origin to which we can return. Every moment is a moment of destruction, and therefore every moment is one in which a revolution is not only possible, but necessary. It is a view of empire from the standpoint of its victims, for whom the end cannot come soon enough.
For Brown, writing in the Springtime of Nations and the global expansion of the liberal nation-state, nationalism was never going to be the answer to the problem of unfreedom. In Clotel he writes, “The United States, consisting of all its rulers, all the free citizens” has produced “the most grinding despotism that the world ever saw.” The despots are not only the slaveholders, but “the sovereign people.” Thus, though Clotel represents the enslaved, her significance did not end with emancipation. She also represents all those whom nation-states would render minoritized or stateless in the centuries to come. And she has a message for our own tragicomic time of virulent nationalisms and would-be Napoleons: as William Wells Brown goes, so goes the world.
_____
*An essay-review of
William Wells Brown: An African American Life. By Ezra Greenspan. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014. 624 pp. $35.00.
Clotel & Other Writings. By William Wells Brown. Edited by Ezra Greenspan. New York: Library of America, 2014. 1,042 pp. $40.00.