Living principally in and around St. Louis, Missouri until the age of twenty, Brown was exposed to and experienced slavery amid remarkably wide-ranging conditions. William Wells Brown worked as a house servant, a field slave, and was hired out as an assistant to a tavern keeper, a printer, and was “Enslaved” by the slave trader James Walker, who voyaged extensively, traveling to and from the New Orleans slave market on the Mississippi River. After at least two failed attempts, Brown did escape slavery on New Year 's Day, 1834. Aided in his flight from Ohio into Canada by the Quaker Wells Brown, William adopted the man 's names out of gratitude and admiration. For the next nine years, Brown worked aboard a Lake Erie steamboat while concurrently acting as an Underground Railroad conductor in Buffalo, New …show more content…
Brown exposes a vaunted president who authored the Declaration of Independence—with its assertion of shared human rights, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—showing Jefferson to be a slave owner. Moreover, Jefferson participated in the sexual exploitation of his female slaves. Though Brown does not explicitly analyze the violation implied in such a relationship, he does insinuate both the both slave owner 's indifference and the slaves ' humiliations. (Brown doesn’t know it could have been what he insinuated, but it could have been that she was irresistibly seductive.
What Brown does portray, then, throughout “Clotel,” is the pervasive, recurring victimization of Black women under slavery. Even individuals of mixed-race status who attempt to pass as White nevertheless suffer. Brown also exposes the insidious intersection of economic gain and political ambition—represented by Founding Fathers such as Jefferson and Horatio Green—that works to preserve this "Peculiar" institution. Such marked inconsistency between slavery and the United States ' founding ideals too general to effective, the country 's exalted place as the bastion of