Clotel; or, The President's Daughter

Glossary

"

"Sons of Ham" (the Curse of Ham): A biblical justification for slavery current in antebellum religious defense of the institution, holding that Black people were the cursed descendants of Noah's son Ham and therefore providentially destined for servitude. Rev. Peck invokes it in Chapter 6 to justify bringing the gospel to enslaved people while continuing to hold them as property, exemplifying the religious hypocrisy Brown catalogs across the novel.; Related: Rev. John Peck

A

Althesa: Clotel's sister, sold at the same Richmond auction that opens the novel and purchased by James Crawford of Vermont, whom she later marries — one of several enslaved women in the novel whose fates trace different paths through the same system of sale, concubinage, and (rarely) comparatively humane ownership.; Related: Currer, Clotel, James Crawford
Amalgamation: Period term for racial intermixing, invoked in Chapter 1 through a quoted prediction by Henry Clay that slavery's abolition would ultimately come about through "the amalgamation of the races," and through Virginia statesman John Randolph's own acknowledgment that the blood of "the first American statesmen" already ran through enslaved people's veins — evidence, in Brown's use of these quotations, that even slavery's defenders knew the color line was already broken in practice.; Related: Quadroon and Mulatto, The Jefferson Rumor

B

Brown's Documentary Method: William Wells Brown's practice, acknowledged directly in the novel's closing chapter, of grounding fictional scenes in real newspaper accounts, court cases, antislavery documents, and his own firsthand experience as a formerly enslaved man — his final words insist the incidents are "founded in truth," positioning Clotel as argument as much as story, and making it, as the first novel published by an African American, a deliberate use of fiction's reach to make an abolitionist case.; Related: The Jefferson Rumor

C

Carlton: An old school-fellow of Rev. Peck's, over thirty and unmarried, whose extended visit to the Peck plantation and growing attachment to Georgiana expose him — and the reader — to the daily operations of slaveholding from the perspective of a relative outsider gradually persuaded of its wrongness.; Related: Georgiana Carlton, Rev. John Peck
Clotel: The novel's protagonist, presented as the enslaved daughter of Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman named Currer — sold away from her mother and sister at the Richmond auction that opens the novel, and later taken as the concubine of Horatio Green before his political ambitions require him to abandon her for a socially respectable marriage.; Related: The Jefferson Rumor, Currer, Horatio Green
Currer: Clotel and Althesa's mother, introduced as a woman who had once kept house for Thomas Jefferson and borne him two daughters before he was called away to Washington, after which she was left behind and eventually sold. Her position — housekeeper, unacknowledged partner, and finally auctioned property — is Brown's opening illustration of the "sexual economy of slavery" the entire novel indicts.; Related: Clotel, Althesa, The Jefferson Rumor

D

Dick Walker: The slave speculator who conducts the Richmond auction that opens the novel, presiding over the sale of Currer, Clotel, and Althesa — the novel's first embodiment of the commercial machinery of the domestic slave trade, introduced by name in Chapter 2.; Related: The Negro Sale (the Auction)
Dinah: The cook in the Green household who comments, in period dialect Brown reproduces directly, on Mary's mistreatment in the garden — one of the novel's minor enslaved characters whose brief but pointed remarks ("Dees white niggers always tink dey sef good as white folks") register both intra-household hierarchy among enslaved people and the absurdity of a nominally "white" girl being treated as property.; Related: Mary (Clotel's Daughter), Sam

G

George Green: A man who takes his master's surname after escaping slavery, eventually reaching England and building a life in freedom; his sustained effort to raise money and free Mary from Virginia, and his reunion with her in France, supplies the novel's closing movement toward resolution.; Related: Mary (Clotel's Daughter)
Georgiana Carlton: Rev. Peck's only daughter, educated in Connecticut and marked by the contrast she has seen there between the professed spirit of Christianity and liberty and the reality of Southern slavery; she later marries Carlton and becomes, in Brown's narration, "an ornament to human nature" for the antislavery convictions she acts on rather than merely holds.; Related: Rev. John Peck, Carlton, The Fugitive Slave Law

H

Henry Morton: Althesa's husband, described as a kind and affectionate man whose unsuccessful efforts to purchase her mother Currer's freedom "doubly endeared him" to Althesa — one of the novel's several marriages complicated and constrained by the surrounding institution of slavery even where personal affection is genuine.; Related: Althesa, Currer
Horatio Green: The son of a wealthy Richmond gentleman who takes the sixteen-year-old Clotel as his concubine after meeting her at a party, fathering her daughter Mary, before political ambition drives him to marry a socially advantageous white woman and abandon Clotel entirely — Brown's case study in how respectability and political careerism absorb and discard the very relationships slavery makes possible.; Related: Clotel, Mary (Clotel's Daughter)

J

James Crawford: Althesa's purchaser and later husband, a man from Vermont whose Northern origins mark him, like Georgiana, as one of the novel's few slaveholding-adjacent figures capable of genuine affection and eventual efforts toward emancipation rather than pure exploitation.; Related: Althesa

M

Mary (Clotel's Daughter): Clotel and Horatio Green's daughter, light-skinned enough to be described in the novel as a "white slave-girl," who is brought into Horatio's own household as a servant after his marriage — a deliberately unbearable arrangement Brown uses to dramatize how completely slavery could sever a father's public respectability from his private obligations to his own child.; Related: Horatio Green, Clotel, Passing

N

Nat Turner's Insurrection: The 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, a preacher "distinguished for his eloquence, respected by the whites, and loved and venerated by the Negroes," referenced in Chapter 24 as the real historical event Brown weaves into his fictional narrative — grounding the novel's later chapters of flight and pursuit in an actual, documented uprising against slavery.; Related: Picquilo

P

Passing: The novel's recurring device of light-skinned enslaved characters moving through white society undetected — used by Brown both as a plot mechanism enabling escape and disguise, and as an argument about the constructed, unstable nature of the color line itself, since the same person could be treated as property or as a free white citizen depending entirely on what others assumed about their ancestry.; Related: Quadroon and Mulatto, Mary (Clotel's Daughter)
Picquilo: A fugitive living in a swamp cave, armed with a sword made from a stolen scythe blade, whose dress, manner, and mode of fighting Brown likens explicitly to a maroon warrior — introduced in the same chapter that recounts Nat Turner's insurrection, linking Picquilo to the broader history of armed resistance to slavery.; Related: Nat Turner's Insurrection

Q

Quadroon and Mulatto: Period racial classifications for people of mixed Black and white ancestry — "mulatto" generally denoting one Black and one white parent, "quadroon" one Black grandparent — used throughout the novel both descriptively and as the basis for the light-skinned characters' ability to "pass" undetected in white society. Brown presents this vocabulary as it was used in 1853, including its function in setting sale prices at auction.; Related: Passing, The "Fancy Trade"

R

Rev. John Peck: A Connecticut-born minister who becomes a Southern slaveholder and preaches that "the sons of Ham should have the gospel" even as he keeps enslaved people himself — Brown's central portrait of the religious hypocrisy the novel catalogs throughout, a man who reconciles Christian preaching with human bondage without apparent strain.; Related: "Sons of Ham" (the Curse of Ham), Georgiana Carlton

S

Sam: The senior of Rev. Peck's four household servants besides Currer, whose comic set-pieces around dinner-table service Brown uses partly for humor and partly to illustrate the constant, unacknowledged skilled labor enslaved household staff performed to sustain their owners' domestic lives.; Related: Rev. John Peck, Dinah

T

The "Fancy Trade": The specific, documented practice Chapter 1's auction scene dramatizes: light-skinned enslaved women advertised and sold at premium prices explicitly for their beauty, using language like "fit for a fancy girl" — Brown names this trade directly rather than leaving its sexual economy implicit, making it foundational to the novel's opening argument.; Related: The Negro Sale (the Auction), Quadroon and Mulatto
The "Peculiar Institution": The era's common euphemism for slavery, used by defenders and critics alike; Carlton is described in Chapter 20 becoming socially unwelcome for the "denunciatory manner" in which he condemns it at a party, illustrating how thoroughly even open discussion of slavery's wrongs could threaten a person's standing in Southern society.; Related: The Fugitive Slave Law
The Fugitive Slave Law: The federal law requiring the return of escaped enslaved people even from free states, denounced in Chapter 21 as an "infamous" statute given religious cover by a "hypocritical priesthood." Brown invokes it directly to indict Northern complicity in slavery, not just Southern practice, sharpening the novel's argument that the whole nation bore responsibility.; Related: Georgiana Carlton
The Jefferson Rumor: The persistent nineteenth-century allegation, originating in an 1802 newspaper attack by James T. Callender, that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with an enslaved woman. Brown built Clotel's entire premise directly on this rumor, naming Jefferson explicitly in Chapter 1 as Currer's former household head and the father of Clotel and Althesa; DNA and historical evidence gathered since the 1990s has substantially supported a Jefferson-Hemings relationship.; Related: Clotel, Currer
The Negro Pens: The slave prisons Brown describes operating in the District of Columbia, holding enslaved people awaiting sale or transport — introduced in Chapter 25 as part of the novel's documentary method of naming specific, verifiable institutions of the slave trade rather than leaving its cruelties abstract.; Related: The Negro Sale (the Auction), Dick Walker
The Negro Sale (the Auction): The opening scene of the novel: an auction at which Currer and her daughters are sold, setting the entire plot in motion and establishing Brown's method of using specific, documented practices of the domestic slave trade — including the sale of light-skinned women at premium prices — as narrative material rather than invention.; Related: Currer, Dick Walker, The "Fancy Trade"

W

William: An enslaved man who hires out his own time from his master and befriends Clotel during her later enslavement, having himself been separated from near and dear relatives — his quiet, sympathetic presence in Chapter 19 offers Clotel one of her few sources of comfort before her escape.; Related: Clotel