Fiction · 1853
Clotel
Or, The President’s Daughter
Currer, once a slave in Thomas Jefferson's household, is sold at auction in Richmond with her two daughters, and the family is broken up on the block. Clotel is bought by a young Virginian who keeps her in a cottage outside Richmond and has a child by her, and will not marry her because the law does not allow it and his prospects do not want it; when he marries elsewhere, she is sold south. The novel follows her escape in men's clothes, her return to find her daughter, and her death in the Potomac within sight of the Capitol, and carries alongside it a running documentary record — advertisements, statutes, newspaper extracts, accounts of slave-breeding and of clergy defending the trade.
William Wells Brown published Clotel in London in 1853, having escaped from slavery himself in 1834. It is the first novel published by an African American, and it was printed in England because no American house would take it.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Preface
- Chapter I — The Negro Sale
- Chapter II — Going to the South
- Chapter III — The Negro Chase
- Chapter IV — The Quadroon’s Home
- Chapter V — The Slave Market
- Chapter VI — The Religious Teacher
- Chapter VII — The Poor Whites, South
- Chapter VIII — The Separation
- Chapter IX — The Man of Honour
- Chapter X — The Young Christian
- Chapter XI — The Parson Poet
- Chapter XII — A Night in the Parson’s Kitchen
- Chapter XIII — A Slave Hunting Parson
- Chapter XIV — A Free Woman Reduced to Slavery
- Chapter XV — To-Day a Mistress, to-Morrow a Slave
- Chapter XVI — Death of the Parson
- Chapter XVII — Retaliation
- Chapter XVIII — The Liberator
- Chapter XIX — Escape of Clotel
- Chapter XX — A True Democrat
- Chapter XXI — The Christian’s Death
- Chapter XXII — A Ride in a Stage-Coach
- Chapter XXIII — Truth Stranger Than Fiction
- Chapter XXIV — The Arrest
- Chapter XXV — Death Is Freedom
- Chapter XXVI — The Escape
- Chapter XXVII — The Mystery
- Chapter XXVIII — The Happy Meeting
- Chapter XXIX — Conclusion
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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