In 1850, the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law was strengthened, making it dangerous for Brown to return home. William, therfore, chose to remain abroad.With England as his base, he spent the next four years traveling throughout Great Britain and to Europe, giving lectures about the slavery question and completing three more books. The first–A Description of William Wells Brown’s Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave, from His Birth in Slavery to His Death or His Escape to His First Home of Freedom on British Soil–consisted of stories and a series of 24 sketches, which were drawn by artists at his direction.

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Three Years in Europe: or, Places I have Seen and People I have Met, published in 1852, was a compilation of 23 letters Brown had written since his arrival there, comparing the freedom of life in Europe to the tyranny faced by blacks in America. The book was well received, one reviewer noting that Brown wrote ‘with ease and ability, and his intelligent observations upon the great question to which he has devoted, and is devoting, his life, will command influence and respect.’

Brown’s novel, Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, was published in London in 1853. The book took its title from allegations that Thomas Jefferson had fathered several mixed-race children, whom he then abandoned to slavery. Published about a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, Brown’s work failed to create much of a stir or garner critical acclaim.

While abroad, Brown also used his time to become versed in the practice of medicine. In a day when formal training still was not required for doctors, he attended lectures and conducted private study, gradually obtaining sufficient knowledge to become a medical practitioner. Instead of pursuing that profession, however, he continued to devote himself to the anti-slavery cause.

In 1854, Brown finally agreed to purchase his freedom so that he might return to the United States and fight more effectively for the abolition of the ‘most cruel system of oppression that ever blackened the character or hardened the heart of man.’

Soon after he arrived in America, Brown published The American Fugitive in Europe, an enlarged version of his Three Years in Europe. This new edition was the first book written by Brown to be reviewed by a major American newspaper. The New York Daily Tribune declared that the work was a ‘lively and entertaining record of foreign travel’ and, due to its origins, a worthy ‘novelty in literature.’

During the Civil War, Brown joined fellow abolitionists Frederick Douglass and T. Morris Chester in recruiting in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey for the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment. The war years also saw publication of Brown’s first historical work, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements. An anthology of biographical sketches of blacks with significant accomplishments to their credit, this work went through ten editions in just three years.

Two years after the war, Brown brought out The Negro in the American Rebellion, His Heroism and His Fidelity. And in 1874, he published his most complete and important historical undertaking, The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancements of the Colored Race, which traced the roots of America’s blacks from Africa. As he had in his previous histories, Brown strongly refuted the era’s belief in the inferiority of the black race.

William Wells Brown died in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1884. Despite his literary achievements and his many contributions in the struggle for freedom and equality, he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, cemetery.

He was eulogized in the Boston newspapers as ‘one of the most intelligent, earnest and active members of the little band of oldtime abolitionists’ and as a ‘prolific writer, commanding a clear intellect and facile pen . . . .’ Brown, who spent his last years fighting for improved education for black children, did his utmost throughout his life to combat racial prejudice and its resulting indignities, consistently emphasizing the need for cooperation among people of all races.

This article was written by Marsh Cassady and originally published in American History Magazine in December 1999. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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