Clotel

By writing of the slave daughter of Thomas Jefferson, Brown comments not only on the institution of slavery but on the hypocrisy of the nation, which is founded on independence. Brown frequently reminds readers that Clotel is the daughter of “the writer of the Declaration of American Independence” (51), who “when speaking against slavery in the legislature of Virginia” (130) stated that slavery embodies “the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submission on the other” (130). That Clotel, in trying to escape slavery, dies “within plain sight of the President’s house and the capitol of the Union” (184) serves as further condemnation of a country that willingly supports the subjugation of its people. The death of the heroine in the nation’s capital illuminates how slavery sits at the heart of America—a country whose soil has been “enriched,” Georgiana reminds us, by the “blood and tears” of slaves (134). Slaves, Brown suggests, have helped create the nation that oppresses them.

George encapsulates the hypocrisy of American slavery. During his trial after Nat Turner’s rebellion he states that hearing “that all men are created free and equal” (190) inspired him “to inquire of myself why I was a slave” (190). He compares the rebellion with the Revolutionary War, for participants of both “fought for freedom” (191). He notes the irony of Fourth of July celebrations, for “while these cannons are roaring and bells are ringing, one-sixth of the people of this land are in chains and slavery” (191). In this passage, George argues that slave owners have betrayed the spirit of the war in which America was founded. It’s a sentiment that echoes Henry’s insistence that America, in upholding slavery, is “losing its character” (153).

Though Northerners like Carlton and Henry are more likely to condemn slavery than Southerners, Brown is careful to make clear that black people are not much freer in the North than they are in the South. In Chapter 14, when William escapes to Ohio, he finds that “[t]he prejudice that exists in the Free States against coloured persons […] is but another form of slavery itself” (146). He is forced to ride in the luggage-van of a train and is spoken to by the conductor “in a manner that is never used except by Americans to blacks” (147). This prejudice inspires Brown, as related in his narrative, to tell a British audience that it is only when he arrives “on British soil” (32) that he is “recognized as a man and an equal” (32). The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law further ensures that black people are not safe from the clutches of slavery even in Free States: in the final line of George and Mary’s story, Brown laments that “fugitives from American slavery, can receive protection from any of the governments of Europe, [but] they cannot return to their native land without becoming slaves” (207).

Clotel muses on the soul of America, which was founded on noble ideals but has degraded itself by failing to abolish slavery. In Chapter 21, “the Christian’s Death,” Brown tells the story of two different ships—the Mayflower, which brought to America “good men” who founded “the prosperous, labour-honoring, law-sustaining institutions of the North” (156), and a ship that brought “slavery, idleness, lynch-law, ignorance, unpaid labour, poverty, and duelling, despotism, the ceaseless swing of the whip, and the peculiar institutions of the South” (156). Stating that “[t]hese ships are the representation of good and evil in the New World” (156), he asks, “When shall one of those parallel lines come to an end?” (156). In Clotel, Brown argues that America has not lived up to its own ideals. In pleading for the end of slavery, he seeks to save not only the slaves but also the country itself.

Clotel depicts how slave owners dehumanize slaves in order to justify oppressing them. Slaves, who are “property” in both “body and soul” (44), lack agency and can own no possessions—they can “do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything” that does not belong to their masters (43). Brown frequently describes how the slaves are “adjudged in law to be chattels” (43). Ellen and Jane, the daughters of Henry and Althesa Morton, are “bartered away like cattle in Smithfield market” (174). Slaves are examined like livestock “in a manner calculated to shock the feelings of any one not devoid of the milk of human kindness” (68). Once purchased, slaves are overworked, humiliated, and tortured. Horatio’s wife makes Mary work in the garden without protection and, when the girl faints in the heat, tells the cook she is “lying in the sun, seasoning” (129) like meat. Clotel, after being arrested in Virginia, is kept in one of the many “Negro pens” in Washington, DC. Even free black people are treated as animals: Brown writes that a church in New York segregates black worshippers into “a dark, dismal looking place in one corner of the gallery, grated in front like a hen-coop” (151).

Dehumanizing the slaves enables traders and slave owners to sell and trade them without compunction; slaves’ horror at being separated from their families is unrecognized or ignored. Brown describes a card game in which slaves are won and lost despite their tears—the slave, he writes, “goes to bed at night the property of the man with whom he has lived for years, and gets up in the morning the slave of someone whom he has never seen before” (56). Currer’s pleading with Mr. Peck to buy Althesa is denied: “I only want one for my own use, and would not need another” (57). At the slave market, a potential buyer cannot understand why a woman weeps for her husband, telling her, “Oh, if I buy you I will furnish you with a better man than you left” (68). Brown writes in his narrative of several mothers whose babies are taken from them and sold or given to others, simply because the trader Walker was annoyed by their crying or by their mothers’ inability to carry them. Georgiana tells Carlton how her father’s slave, Harry, was not allowed to live with his wife in town because her father “could not spare him from the farm” (114). Slave marriages are not considered “of any importance” (45) and are not recognized by law.

That Henry’s brother James, even after meeting his nieces Ellen and Jane, is unaware that their mother had been a slave illustrates the fallacy of this hierarchy: Ellen and Jane are slaves by law but are otherwise indistinguishable from non-slaves. Similarly, though Clotel’s “bones, and sinews had been purchased by […] gold, yet she had the heart of a true woman” (89). Clotel is about not only the horrors and injustice of slavery but also the futility of fixating on differences when we are all essentially the same.