1814? – Born William (and called by come colloquial variant) on a farm outside Mt. Sterling, Montgomery County, Kentucky. His mother is Elizabeth, a slave owned by Dr. John Young; his father is Young’s first cousin, George W. Higgins, a white man of some property and education living nearby who shortly afterward migrates to Tennessee. He is probably the youngest of his mother’s seven children, each one the offspring of a different father.
1816 – Dr. Young makes a reconnaissance trip to sprawling St. Charles County, Missouri, looking to purchase land in the vicinity of the Boone Settlement near the Missouri River.
1817 – Dr. Young relocates with his wife and slaves to a large tract of land near the old French pioneer settlement of Charrette about sixty miles west of St. Louis and one mile north of the Missouri River. He lays out a working farm for himself and auctions off lots for a settlement he names Marthasville, which he hopes will become the seat of a new county to be split off from St. Charles. Elizabeth’s family survives intact through the move and the entire period Young resides on his farm in Marthasville.
1820-21 – Dr. Young serves in the territorial legislature that debates the terms on which Missouri will enter the Union. In the eventual sectional compromise struck in Congress, Missouri – with Young’s strong backing – enters as a slave state, balanced by Maine’s entry as a free state. About this time Young forcibly renames William “Sandford” to distinguish him from his ward, an act of dispossession he never forgives.
1825 – Dr. Young relocates to St. Louis, where he and his wife purchase land in and outside the town. Elizabeth and her seven children follow in due course. Too many slaves for too little work leads Young to begin to hire out members of the family to locally based employers.
1827 – Dr. Young moves to Galena, Illinois, with his wife and takes several female slaves to attend to them but leaves Elizabeth and her children behind in St. Louis. The Youngs return to their farm a few miles outside St. Louis the next year, and one of their slaves (Dolly) institutes a freedom suit against them.
1828-30 – Begins a series of work assignments outside the Young house and farm, including various periods of service as a waiter (and later steward) onboard of Missouri and Mississippi river steamboats. Young begins to sell members of Elizabeth’s family to local masters, in particular a successful roofing contractor named Isaac Mansfield.
1831 or 32 – Contracted to labor for a full calendar year to William Walker, one of the most notorious slave traders on the Mississippi River. Brown accompanies Walker on three slave trading circuits, assisting Walker in purchasing slaves in the upcountry of Missouri and then descending the Mississippi River to sell them at Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans. Brown remembers the experience as “the longest year I ever lived.”
1832 – Isaac Mansfield sells Brown’s favorite sibling, his sister Elizabeth, to a buyer who plans to take her and other female slaves down to the notorious market town of Natchez for sale. Brown responds by persuading his mother to join him in a joint escape. They cross the Mississippi in a rowboat and run for ten days across Illinois until they are apprehended by mounted slave catchers, returned to St. Louis, and placed for safe keeping in jail. Mansfield summarily sells Brown’s mother to a slave trader, who transports her down to New Orleans for final disposition. Brown returns to Dr. Young, who soon sells him to a St. Louis merchant tailor named Samuel Willi. Having little use of him, Willi hires Brown out to various employers.
1833 – Willi cashes Brown in for a quick profit in early October by selling him to a well-known Mississippi River steamboat owner and pilot named Enoch Price, who plans to employ Brown as a domestic servant. In late November Price takes Brown along to serve his family during a trip to New Orleans. After receiving Brown’s assurance he will not take flight if they dock in free territory, Price alters his original plan to return straight to St. Louis by steering up the Ohio River to Cincinnati.
1834 – Absconds as soon as the ship docks in Cincinnati, on New Year’s Day, and runs northeast toward Cleveland with the eventual goal of crossing Lake Erie to refuge in slave-free Canada. Harsh wintry conditions force him to seek refuge with an elderly couple, which shelters and prepares him for the remainder of his journey – but not before the man renames his prodigy after himself as Wells Brown. Brown finds passage to Canada blocked by the winter ice and instead settles in Cleveland, where he works on Lake Erie steamers and assists fugitive slaves to reach freedom in Canada. Shortly after getting established, he meets a teenaged woman named Elizabeth (Betsey) Schooner of mixed African American and Native American heritage and marries her within a matter of weeks. Functionally illiterate at the time of his escape, he begins the process of self-education.
1836 – Daughter Clarissa Brown born in Cleveland in spring. In summer the family moves to Buffalo, a city with a much larger African American community. Brown continues to work primarily as a sailor on Lake Erie steamers and to assist fugitives to reach freedom. He also continues to pursue his self-education.
1839 – Daughter Elizabeth Josephine Brown born in either Detroit or Buffalo.
1842 – Serves as president of a local temperance society in Buffalo. His first known published work is a letter to the editor of a black newspaper in Albany on the recent meeting of his Union Total Abstinence Society. Daughter Henrietta Helen Brown is born in Buffalo on or around August 23.
1843 – Takes part in the National Convention of Colored Men in Buffalo, at which he makes the acquaintance of Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet (who recites his insurrectionary “An Address to the Slaves of the United States” to a transfixed convention), Charles Lenox Remond, and other black antislavery activists. He soon afterward enters the antislavery movement officially as an agent of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, the beginning of a three-decade career in the antislavery movement.
1844 – Daughter Henrietta dies in Buffalo on May 6 while he is in New York City participating in his first national convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. His official lecturing itinerary takes him beyond western New York State back to Ohio, where he crisscrosses the eastern third of the state and gets dangerously close to slave territory. In December reports about his family’s poverty lead officials of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society to raise funds to sustain the family.
1845 – His marriage, already undermined by his frequent absences, deteriorates further when he twice discovers Betsey with another man. To end the affair, he moves his family in or around June to the Quaker community of Farmington, New York, a center of reform in central New York that becomes his new antislavery base. In September he corresponds with ex-governor William Seward about black suffrage in New York State.
1846 – Continues his ascent within the regional antislavery movement as popular lecturer and general agent of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society.
1847 – Separates from Betsey in May and moves to Boston with their daughters, whom he settles with a respected black family in New Bedford. He soon finds employment as a lecturer with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who will become his life long friends and comrades. He publishes Narrative of William W. Brown in July, which proves so popular two additional editions appear over the next two years. He also earns a reputation within the national movement as one of its most riveting lecturers.
1848 – Publishes the first edition of The Anti-Slavery Harp, a collection of antislavery hymns so popular three more U.S. editions follow during the next few years. During a speaking tour in Pennsylvania in December he meets and befriends the fugitive couple Ellen and William Craft, just escaped from slavery in Georgia in a stunning feat of deception that Brown publicizes widely. He escorts them to Boston and teams up with them in highly successful antislavery speaking tours that continue into the following spring.
1849 – Plans a visit of indefinite duration to the British Isles. Days before embarking in July he reaches an agreement with the Irish printer Richard Webb for an Anglo-Irish edition of Narrative of William W. Brown and transports with him the stereotype plates. He attends the second International Peace Congress in Paris in September as a delegate of the U.S. Peace Society (although technically a fugitive slave and noncitizen) and speaks so forcefully he impresses leading activists and journalists from the British Isles and the Continent. He quickly establishes himself as a popular and successful antislavery lecture, a role he will pursue aggressively for five years.
1850 – Postpones indefinitely all thought of returning home following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. An English edition of The Anti-Slavery Harp appears in Newcastle, and additional printings of Narrative of William W. Brown issue from London. In summer he commissions London artists to paint an antislavery panorama, which beginning in November he takes on tour across England, Scotland, and Wales. He is forced to defend his reputation publicly when Betsey’s charges of infidelity and abandonment are publicized in the New York Tribune.
1851 – Continues to travel extensively across the British Isles, often alternating antislavery lectures with panorama presentations. He stages an informal protest in June against U.S. slavery at the Crystal Palace, home to the inaugural World’s Fair, which Enoch Price (still his legal owner) visits sometime in summer or fall. He organizes a mass meeting in London to commemorate West Indian Emancipation Day, August 1, at which a supporter reads his “An Appeal to the People of Great Britain and the World.” Clarissa and Josephine arrive in London later that month, staying with him only briefly before he sends them off to attend boarding school in Calais.
1852 – Publishes his pioneering travel book, Three Years in Europe, in London and Edinburgh in September. Clarissa and Josephine return after a year from Calais to London, where he places them in the Home and Colonial School to train for careers as teachers or governesses. Betsey dies destitute in Buffalo.
1853 – Publishes his pioneering novel Clotel in London. He continues to tour the British Isles as an antislavery lecturer, sometimes enhancing his talks as multimedia presentations with either painted canvases or magic lantern slides.
1854 – Publishes “Visit of a Fugitive Slave to the Grave of Wilberforce.” Weeks later, supporters led by Ellen Richardson, whose family performed the like service for Frederick Douglass, purchase his freedom papers from Enoch Price. He bids farewell to the antislavery movement at a mass meeting in Manchester held to celebrate West Indian Emancipation Day. When his daughters decide to remain in Europe, he embarks alone from Liverpool on September 6, arriving in Philadelphia after a rough crossing on the 26th. He immediately links up with the antislavery movement and resumes lecturing from his home base in Boston, by now one of the best known and effective figures in the movement. In December he publishes an expanded version of his European travel book, The American Fugitive in Europe, as well as St. Domingo: Its Revolution and its Patriots, a lecture he had originally given in London shortly before his departure.
1855 – Returns to Cincinnati in early spring for first time since his escape and goes down to the Public Landing to see the scene of his escape. Daughter Clarissa marries Fritz Alcide Humbert in London and decides to remain in England. Daughter Josephine, escorted across the Atlantic by Horace Greeley, returns home in August via New York City and joins her father in Boston. For a time they lecture together in New England, and in December Josephine publishes Biography of an American Bondman, probably coauthored with her father.
1856 – Expels Josephine from his life sometime in spring or summer after she engages in some form of deviant sexual behavior, possibly prostitution. He completes but does not print an antislavery play most commonly referred to in the press as Experience, whose text has not survived. He travels extensively across the northern states, giving one-man performances of the play and also lecturing.
1857 – Writes a second, popular antislavery play, The Escape, which he likewise performs widely on tour, sometimes alternating recitations with performances of Experience as well as lectures on slavery and topical subjects.
1858 – Publishes The Escape and continues to perform and lecture extensively.
1859 – Publishes Memoir of William Wells Brown, an American Bondman, an abbreviated version of his fugitive memoir.
1860 – Marries Annie Elizabeth Gray in April, minister Leonard Grimes presiding at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, and moves into house in Cambridge, the family home until 1878. He supports no candidate in the general election, finding Lincoln as untrustworthy as Stephen Douglass. He serializes a second, condensed version of Clotel, retitled Miralda, that runs December 6, 1860 – March 16, 1861, in the leading black journal, the Weekly Anglo-African.
1861 – Takes skeptical view of the outbreak of fighting as a war between and for the sake of whites. Instead of supporting it, he joins the Haitian Emigration Bureau as a promoter of voluntary migration to the Republic of Haiti and lectures on behalf of the movement across southern Canada. William Wells Brown Jr. is born in February and dies of cholera at home on July 25.
1862 – Publishes The Black Man, his first book on African American history, and lectures widely on the history of people of African descent as well as Civil War related subjects. Daughter Clotelle is born on May 8.
1863 – Reads the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to the assembled black community of Boston on New Year’s Day as it awaits confirmation President Lincoln has signed the actual Emancipation Proclamation. Now solidly behind the widening war effort, he recruits locally and in New York City for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, the first black unit formed in the North, and monitors its progress (and that of other black units) in the field. He issues a second, expanded edition of The Black Man, which remains in print through the war.
1864 – Publishes the third version of Clotel as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States as a dime novel in the Books for the Camp Fires, a series oriented for sale to Union troops in the field. He continues to lecture widely on war- and race-related current events and to support antislavery efforts.
1865 – Sponsors and presides over jubilee meeting at Tremont Temple celebrating Congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He advertises himself as a medical doctor operating out of an office in Boston and maintains a practice the remainder of his life. He heads the reception committee that welcomes the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth on their return to Boston following the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. He continues his activity as a reformer, gradually shifting his focus from emancipation to civil rights in both the North and the South.
1866 – Is elected the first chief officer of John Brown Division of Sons of Temperance, one of many senior positions he holds in the temperance movement during his last two decades.
1867 – Serves as general agent of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument, an African American association that plans to honor President Lincoln and commemorate emancipation with a public statue in Washington, D.C. During his first visit to Washington, he tours Virginia and Maryland, meets with freedmen, and emerges with a more urgent sense of the need for political action on their behalf. He publishes The Negro in the American Rebellion, which goes through multiple printings; and the fourth and final version of Clotel, now renamed Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine.
1868 – Is installed as president of the National Association for the Spread of Temperance among the Freed People of the South and engages in fundraising to subsidize sending agents down south to work in local communities.
1869 – Goes on long lecture tour out West, stopping first in Chicago to debate his old antislavery comrade Susan B. Anthony on the relative importance of African American and women’s suffrage, as Congress debated the Fifteenth Amendment. He next continues on to St. Louis for his first trip “home” since escaping from slavery thirty-five years earlier. He apparently meets his “old master” Enoch Price during the visit in a friendly encounter.
1870 – Participates in formation of a state temperance political party and calls to order the organizational meeting in Boston at which the attendees nominate Wendell Phillips for governor, who proves an ineffective candidate. Clotelle Brown dies suddenly on October 1 and is buried in her mother’s family plot in Cambridge Cemetery.
1871 – Presides over Emancipation Day observance at Tremont Temple with Sojourner Truth and Leonard Grimes present. He sponsors essay contest won by Pauline Hopkins with an essay on “The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies.” He makes a persuasive speech arguing for the seating of black delegates from Maryland at the Boston meeting of National Division of the Sons of Temperance of North America. Returning to Kentucky for the first time since infancy, he works to promote temperance, education, and general self-improvement among the freedmen. On his way to give a talk in central Kentucky, he is kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan and threatened with hanging but escapes, takes the train to Cincinnati, and tells his story to the press. Clarissa Brown Humbert, widowed by 1861, marries George Wainwright Sylvestre in Yorkshire.
1872 – Commends Senator Charles Sumner’s legislative initiative to protect civil rights and continues his temperance activity, mostly on the local level.
1873 – Publishes The Rising Son, his third and most comprehensive study of African, African Caribbean, and African American history. When the plan for commercial publication is thwarted by at the last moment by the financial Panic, he and Annie self publish it under the trade name of A. G. Brown and Company.
1874 – Josephine Brown Campbell dies in Cambridge of tuberculosis and is buried in the same plot with half-sister Clotelle Brown, whom she never met, in Cambridge Cemetery. He eulogizes Senator Charles Sumner at a commemorative meeting in Boston. Clarissa Brown Sylvestre dies in Leeds.
1876 – Takes outspoken position within the national and international temperance movement against moves to segregate lodges by race. In North Adams, Massachusetts, he delivers a fiery denunciation of racist exclusion in Kentucky, sarcastically dismissing the notion of “pure white blood” in Kentucky “as a most ridiculous proposition.” He runs for a state senate position from Middlesex County (Cambridge) on a prohibition ticket and comes in third.
1877 – Makes highly publicized return visit to England and Scotland to take part in the international meeting of the Right Worthy Grand Lodge of the World in Glasgow. He tours the British Isles three months, gives more than thirty talks on the “Negro Question” that is dividing the international temperance movement, and reacquaints himself with people he had known in the antislavery movement three decades earlier.
1878 – Moves home and medical office to Decatur St. in South End of Boston.
1879 – Spends much of this exhausting year on field trips through West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia to promote black temperance and education. What he sees of attempts to impose white supremacy makes him “feel rather blue in the South.” He participates in the funeral service for William Lloyd Garrison.
1880 – Returns in February from a long trip to the South. In spring he publishes My Southern Home under the imprint of A. G. Brown and Co., which also issues new printings of The Negro in the American Rebellion and The Rising Son. Annie and he sell all three books via mail order from their home as well as via agents canvassing the country. He follows the general relocation of the African American community by moving his home and office to 28 East Canton Street, also in South End of Boston.
1882 – Moves office to 35 Hanover Street, East End.
1883 – Moves home from East Canton to 89 Beacon Street in Chelsea, a fast growing community with a mixed population just north of Boston.
1884 – Attends funeral of old friend Wendell Phillips. Gravely ill himself, he makes his last public appearance at the Revere House on October 31 at event celebrating the seventy-fifth birthday of longtime Massachusetts Representative F. W. Bird. He dies on November 6 of bladder cancer at home in Chelsea and is buried three days later in the Gray family plot in Cambridge Cemetery.