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View allClotel; or, The President's Daughter
Brown
1853
A founding father's rumored daughter, sold at auction, in the first novel published by an African American.
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter
William Wells Brown · 1853
In 1853, William Wells Brown — a formerly enslaved man who had escaped to freedom and become a leading abolitionist writer — built a novel around a rumor that had circulated since 1802: that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with an enslaved woman. Clotel follows the imagined lives and fates of Jefferson's fictional enslaved daughters through auction blocks, plantations, and the hardening color line of antebellum America. Modern historical and DNA evidence has since substantially supported the Jefferson-Hemings relationship Brown was writing from rumor, giving this founding work of African American fiction an uncomfortable second life as something closer to prophecy than invention.
29 chapters · 56,732 words · ~4.3 hr read
Contents
The Sale
Currer and her daughters are sold at auction in Richmond, setting the novel's central premise and its cast of characters in motion.
Masters and Bondage
Life under a succession of masters and mistresses, the religious hypocrisies Brown catalogs along the way, and the separations that structure enslaved family life.
Flight and Pursuit
Escapes, slave hunts, and recaptures, as the novel's threads of romance and antislavery argument tighten toward crisis.
Truth and Consequence
The novel's final movement — deaths, escapes, and reunions — closing with Brown's own direct address to his British readers.