“Foul Abolition Calumny”: Reframing Racial Violence in William Wells Brown’s Clotel & the Antebellum Press

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on Brown’s Clotel (1853), this essay reconstructs the surprising print history of an infamous antebellum lynching that became a national sensation twice over: first, in 1842 when the Mississippi Free Trader published a graphic report legitimating white mob violence that went viral in the Northern press and, later, when Brown reframed that report in his 1853 novel. Brown’s remix was subsequently reported in the New-York Dialy Tribune, the nation’s leading daily, which attributed the report solely to the Mississippi paper. The Free Trader in turn lambasted the Tribune for its “foul abolition calumny,” not realizing that this sly critique of slavery and lynching originated with an African American author. Besides bringing to light a new source and context—an important discovery demonstrating that Clotel had a much greater presence in the antebellum US than previously assumed—I situate Brown within an earlier gallows tradition and a later practice of antilynching activism (à la Ida B. Wells) to argue that Clotel constitutes a critical inflection point: an early African American intervention in public discourses about criminalized Black people and white mob violence that played out before the Civil War—the standard starting point for scholarship on anti-Black lynching.