Eleven days later the pair was captured in Illinois; Elizabeth was sold into the deep South and never saw her son again. William was sold for $500.00 to a St. Louis tailor, Samuel Willi, who hired him out as a servant on a steamboat. Less than a year later, Willi sold William to a merchant and riverboat owner, Enoch Price. When his new owner, acting as captain, took one of his boats to New Orleans and then to Cincinnati, in the free state of Ohio, he took William along.

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On January 1, 1834, William carried a passenger’s trunk ashore in Cincinnati. Seizing this chance to escape, he kept on walking and quickly made his way out of the city. For six days, he wandered by himself during the night hours, ill-clothed for the winter weather and without food.

Nearly frozen and sick with a fever, he finally approached a man who ‘had on a broad-brimmed hat and a very long coat, and was obviously walking for exercise. As soon as I saw him, and observed his dress, I thought to myself, ‘You are the man that I have been looking for!’ Nor was I mistaken. He was the very man!’

Wells Brown, a Quaker, gave the youth shelter and food, and cared for him until he was well. On learning that William had no family name, he offered his own, and the runaway slave became William Wells Brown.

With a new name and a fresh start in a free state, the light-skinned William traveled to Cleveland, where he worked at odd jobs until navigation resumed on the Great Lakes in the spring. When shipping again opened up, William found employment as a steward on a Lake Erie steamer, the Detroit.

That same year, he met and married Elizabeth Schooner, whom he called Betsey. The couple’s first child died not long after birth, but they had two more daughters, Clarissa and Josephine.

During the nine years he plied the lakes, William taught himself to read and write, and helped other fugitives escape to freedom in Canada. By 1840, Brown and his family had moved to Buffalo, New York, and made their home a stop on the Underground Railway; 69 runaways made good their escape through Brown’s efforts during 1842 alone.

Soon after his arrival in Buffalo, Brown organized the Union Total Abstinence Society and began his association with the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. He lectured for the abolitionist cause, using his speeches to attack America’s idea of democracy, which he felt only existed for whites, and the hypocrisy of using religion to ensure the docility of slaves.

Although a speech he delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1847 was his first published work, his first book was his’slave narrative,’ a popular genre of the period, which was released that same year. In the two years following its publication, the biography went through four editions. While this work did show the influence of previously published slave narratives, Brown’s was unique in its inclusion of cases other than his own to point up the overwhelming cruelty of slavery.

After seeing a copy of William’s slave narrative, Enoch Price, his former owner, wrote in 1848 offering William his freedom for $325.00. Brown refused, firm in his belief that freedom can not be bought or sold but is a divine and moral right. ‘God,’ he declared, ‘made me as free as he did Enoch Price,’ and therefore, not a penny would be paid for his freedom ‘with my consent.’

A year later, he published The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings, a compilation of 46 pieces to be sung to familiar melodies. He gave a series of anti-slavery presentations throughout New England, illustrating the evils of involuntary servitude by presenting two escaped slaves from Georgia, William and Ellen Craft. And, he traveled to France in August 1849 as the American Peace Society’s delegate to the International Peace Congress in Paris.

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