William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown was, after Frederick Douglass, the leading black American writer, orator, and abolitionist of his time. He lectured powerfully at antislavery meetings in the northeastern United States and abroad, where he had fled after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made him subject to recapture. A prolific writer and exceptional literary stylist, Brown published drama, fiction, and travelogues in addition to his widely popular autobiography Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave,from which the following selection is excerpted. Brown was born a slave in Lexington, Kentucky, to a black mother and white slaveholder. He spent most of his first two decades in St. Louis, where he had several masters, along with the opportunity to witness the horrors of the slave trade firsthand along the Mississippi to New Orleans. In the following selection, Brown describes the circumstances surrounding...