Buffalo History -WILLIAM WELLS BROWN IN BUFFALO

WILLIAM WELLS BROWN IN BUFFALO

Reprinted from: The Journal of Negro History

VOL. XXXIX, NO. 4 OCTOBER, 1954

In January, 1834, William Wells Brown, a mulatto youth about nineteen years of age, escaped from slavery in Missouri and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. There he began working, educating himself, and reading antislavery newspapers. During the following summer he became a workman on a Lake Erie steamboat and continued as such for nine years. By the end of the summer he had met, wooed, and married Elizabeth Schooner, whom he affectionately called Betsey; and by the end of the year he had established a home in the city and had begun to bring up a family.At the end of the summer of 1836 Brown moved his family to Buffalo, New York, for several reasons. Because Buffalo was a terminus of the lake steamboat lines, it was more convenient for a steamboat workman to reside there than in Cleveland. In addition to being then three times as large as Cleveland, it had a much larger Negro population-a fact which seemed to indicate that opportunities for employment f or Negroes were more numerous there. Brown was interested in this fact, of course, for every year after the navigation season he would need to find other work, as he had had to do during the two preceding winters. Another fact which Brown could not have overlooked was that it was comparatively easy to move quickly from Buffalo to Canada-whither he might find it necessary to move he knew not how soon. There was also a circumstance of which Brown was unaware at the time but which began within the next decade to determine the course of his life for many years. Removal to Buffalo brought him into a little closer contact with Garrisonian abolitionism, which was soon to develop in western New York. Many years were to pass, however, before he was to know William Lloyd Garrison personally and to be directly influenced by him. When Brown moved to Buffalo, presumably he found a house somewhere in the area east of Michigan Avenue and between Exchange Street and Broadway, for that was where the majority of the Negroes in the city were living when he settled there. I have searched the city directories of Buffalo for the period beginning with 1836 and ending with 1844; and in these directories, which listed residents by race, I found no Negro named Brown listed for any year earlier than 1841. In the directories for this year and the next William Brown, "cook," was listed as a householder on North Division Street, and in the directory for 1844 William W. Brown, "lecturer," was listed as a house holder at 13 Pine Street.' Both of these addresses are in the area designated above. The first two listings might or might not have referred to Brown. Inasmuch as the name William Brown was common then, as it still is, and Negro cooks were relatively numerous, as they still are, there might have been in Buffalo at the time another Negro who had this name and who was a cook-which William Wells Brown is not known to have been. The third listing almost certainly referred to Brown, for before 1844 he had become a lecturer for the Western New York Antislavery Society, and lecturing of any kind was not a common occupation among Negroes. No directories of Buffalo seem to have been published for either 1843 or 1845. Early in the summer of the last mentioned year Brown moved his home to Farmington, Ontario County, and there was no reason for the inclusion of his name in later directories of Buffalo.

Before his removal from Cleveland, Brown had become a practicing as well as a practical abolitionist and was beginning to take just pride in the fact that he was losing none of his "cases." Soon after he began working on the lake steamers, he had begun to carry fugitive slaves to Canada by way of both Detroit and Buffalo. In his "lucrative situation on one of the lake steamboats" he found it convenient and often adventurous to hide fugitives from injustice, as they came to be called, and to convey them beyond the jurisdiction of the "person held to service or labor" clause in the United States Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, and the Federal fugitive slave law of 1793. Once, according to a tale Brown told long after he had left the region of the Great Lakes, a young fugitive of very dark complexion was trailed by his claimant to the home of an abolitionist in Cleveland. For ten days the claimant and his coadjutors watched so closely the abolitionist's home and also all steamboats departing from Cleveland, that it seemed impossible for the fugitive to avoid recapture. In this emergency Brown secured the help of a painter; and, "In an hour, by my directions, the black man was as white, and with as rosy cheeks, as any of the Anglo-Saxon race, and disguised in the dress of a woman, with a thick veil over her face." Thus disguised and with Brown as his guide, the fugitive embarked on the steamer North America, without being recognized by his claimant, and was

carried to Buffalo, whence he proceeded to Canada.

Here Brown seems to have adhered much closer to the spirit than to the letter of truth. Unless the painter was miraculously skillful and the pursuers of the fugitive were inconceivably naive, painting the fugitive as Brown said he had him painted would have been an ingenious way, not of concealing his identity, but of calling attention to him. It is true, of course, that in escaping from slavery fugitives often assumed various disguises; and in helping as many to escape as he did, Brown had to resort from time to time to various expediencies. Some of these might have seemed incredible, but to be useful all of them had to be probable as well as possible-which painting a fugitive hardly seems to have been.

Within a few weeks after his removal to Buffalo, Brown participated in what might have been called the clearing of a wreck, on the Underground Railroad. About this time Bacon Tate, a slave-trader of Nashville, Tennessee, went to Buffalo to recapture some slaves who had escaped from Nashville and had settled in the Niagara area. Among these was a family whose surname was Stanford and who had established a home in Saint Catherines, Ontario. The family consisted of a man, his wife, and their child about six weeks old. With the assistance of "a profligate colored woman" who was a servant in the Eagle Tavern in Buffalo, Tate informed himself concerning the situation of the Stanfords, and late one Saturday night be sent four men to Saint Catherines to kidnap them. At sunrise the next morning, with their captives bound and gagged in a carriage the kidnappers crossed the Black Rock Ferry on the Niagara River. After stopping for a few minutes in Buffalo, where their number was reduced and their team was changed, the kidnappers proceeded southward to Hamburg, about eleven miles from Buffalo. There they stopped at an inn to change horses again. Meanwhile, the kidnapping having been discovered in Saint Catherines, news of it bad reached Buffalo before noon, and a group of Negroes from that city, including Brown, had gone in pursuit of the kidnappers and their captives. The group overtook them at an inn in Hamburg, where, encouraged by the innkeeper, they quickly rescued the Stanfords and took them northward again, followed by the kidnappers. When Tate, who was still in Buffalo, was informed about the turn of affairs, he appealed to the sheriff of Erie County for help. Late in the afternoon a group of about fifty persons, most of whom were Negroes, armed with pistols, knives, and clubs took the Stanfords to the Black Rock Ferry to send them back to Saint Catherines. They were intercepted near the ferry by a sheriff's posse of "some sixty or seventy men," and a free-for-all fight between the two groups ensued. Amid the confusion thus created, the Stanfords were put in a boat and rowed across the Niagara River to Canada, while the rescuers and their sympathizers cheered.

Now that their aim had been accomplished, about forty of the rescuers submitted to arrest by the sheriff's posse and were taken to Buffalo and imprisoned for the night. Whether Brown was one of the forty who were arrested is not altogether clear; but if he was, this seems to have been the only instance of his being in prison after he freed himself from slavery. On the following Monday morning those who had been arrested were taken before a justice named Grosvenor and charged with breaking the peace of the Sabbath and apparently with unlawful assembly. Twenty-five of them were bound for appearance in a higher court, by which they were eventually found guilty and fined from five to fifty dollars. No one had been killed in the melee at the ferry; but one man, who was an actor, had been so badly wounded that he died three months later. "Thus ended," said Brown, "one of the most fearful fights for human freedom that I ever witnessed." Freedom, he had found, was indeed more than a word. It involved fighting not only for one's own security but also for that of others; and paradoxically enough, it might mean imprisonment or even death for its defenders. A search of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser for September, October, and November, 1836, the principal newspaper then being published in Buffalo, revealed no information about the incident I have just synopsized. My authority for it is Brown's account, which seems to have been first published in his Narrative, Fourth Edition, Boston, 1849, pages 109-124.

In a lecture before a small audience in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, on October 4,1854. Brown incidentally referred to his participation during his residence in Buffalo in another kind of rescue of a man who had been accused of being a fugitive slave. According to Brown, on one occasion he and other abolitionists retained Millard Fillmore as counsel "for an alleged fugitive" and that Fillmore served without accepting a fee, explaining that he considered it "his duty to help the poor fugitive." This was the same Fillmore, Brown observed, who as President of the United States had signed the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850.Brown also did anti-slavery work, in Buffalo in less dramatic but none the less effective ways. He welcomed antislavery agents and lecturers as guests in his home. He made his house a station on the Underground Railroad; and because many fugitive slaves passed through Buffalo en route to Canada, he frequently had stopover passengers to accommodate. Moreover, "As Niagara Falls were [sic] only twenty miles from Buffalo, slaveholders not unfrequently passed through the latter place attended by one or more slave servants. Mr. Brown was always on the lookout f or such, to inform them that they were free by the laws of New York,

and to give the necessary aid.

Among the Negroes in Buffalo Brown discovered many who, like himself, had freed themselves from chattel slavery; but among them he also found many who were being victimized by another kind of servitude, namely, servitude to intoxicating drinks. In order to abolish this evil, Brown organized a temperance society-one of the first to be organized in western New York-and served as president of it for three terms." That the society became popular and made progress was evidenced by the fact that it grew rapidly. According to Brown's earliest published account of it, within three years its membership numbered more than five hundred of the total Negro population of less than seven hundred which Buffalo then had." In 1843, however, after Brown had retired from the presidency of the organization, it had "upwards of 300 members," although the Negro population of the city had not decreased, even if it had not been noticeably increased."

While this society flourished, it met periodically to discuss and promote temperance, but its meetings incidentally served other good purposes. They became forums in which members were afforded opportunities to learn the fundamentals of parliamentary procedure and public speaking. In these meetings Brown learned both and thereby further prepared himself, as he was doing by studying grammar, mathematics, history, and literature, for the work he was to begin doing as an antislavery lecturer within the next six or seven years. He did not then know, of course, exactly what work he was to do during the next twenty-five years, that temperance reform was not to be his primary interest for that period, nor that he would devote much time to it during the last twenty years of his life. Without losing interest in the cause of temperance, he became increasingly interested in the organized abolition movement and sought to translate his interest into action more extensive than his work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad had been. In the mean time other things beside temperance and abolitionism claimed some of his attention.

A daughter had been born to the Browns in 1835 and another in 1836, while they were still living in Cleveland. The first of these children bad died when she was only a few months old. In the summer of 1839 a third daughter was born to the Browns and was named Josephine. This was the child -who within twenty years was to make her father proud of her for many reasons. But now while she was a baby, although she filled her father's eyes with light, he was worried about her and her sister's future. Because of the pro-slavery power in the South and the anti-Negro sentiment in the North, he could hardly expect that there would ever be realized in America for either Josephine or her three-years-old sister the kind of future he wanted to be theirs. Could it be realized anywhere else! He wondered. Why not travel a little and try to find out?

In 1840 Brown visited Cuba and Haiti and possibly other islands in the West Indies. If the purpose of his trip was what I have conjectured in the preceding paragraph, probably Haiti was his principal objective. He had doubtless heard of the successful revolution of the Haitian Negroes and was interested in the possibilities of life unhampered by race prejudice in the Negro republic. On the contrary, knowing that slavery still existed in Cuba and that it had been only recently abolished in the British West Indies, he could scarcely have dreamed of finding better prospects in the former than in the United States or as good opportunities in the latter as in Canada. Brown probably was not favorably impressed by what he saw on his trip. Anyway, he said nothing about it in any of the editions of his Narrative or in any of his autobiographical sketches, nor did his daughter Josephine mention it in her biography of him.

In his The Negro Author, New York, 1931, page 168, Vernon Loggins said that possibly Brown made a trip to the West Indies between 1854 and 1863. Loggins's conjecture is based on Brown's statement in the "Preface" to his The Black Man, New York and Boston, 1863, page 6, that he had visited the West Indies. In this statement there is no specific reference to time. Apparently Loggins was unaware of Brown's remark in his The Rising Son, Boston, 1874 pages 80 and 140, that he had visited Havana in 1840 and Haiti about the same time. I have traced Brown's activities in the northern United States and Canada month by month from his return to America in September, 1854, after a sojourn of five years in Great Britain, to December, 1858, and from May, 1859, to December, 1862, when the first edition of The Black Man, including the "Preface," was actually published. If Brown made a trip to the West Indies between the dates mentioned by Loggins, he must have done so during the first four months of 1859, and that trip should not be confused with the one he made in 1840.

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