The President's Other Daughter: Racialized Immunity and Biopolitical Abolitionism in Clotel

Waples’s paper shifts our focus to health and illness. As many scholars have observed, William Wells Brown’s description of a fictional yellow epidemic in Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) reproduces nearly... [ view full abstract ]

Waples’s paper shifts our focus to health and illness. As many scholars have observed, William Wells Brown’s description of a fictional yellow epidemic in Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) reproduces nearly verbatim John Relly Beard’s account of the 1802 outbreak in Saint-Domingue. Yet Brown’s account contains a significant revision. For Beard, the success of the Haitian revolution is solidified due to the presumed immunity of the “acclimated” African body. Brown, however, explicitly resists this fiction of transmission. Indeed, his eponymous heroine’s sister, Althesa, dies in Brown’s imagined epidemic: a detail that has been both ignored and misrepresented in readings of Brown’s novel. Attending to the under-examined death of the president’s other daughter, this paper examines how Brown and others sought to challenge “states’-rights medicine”: a bio-social theory that argued for African enslavement by deigning to supply scientific and statistical “proof” of their immunity to diseases of the “tropical climate.” Echoing the arguments of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, who refuted the theory of African immunity in their account of the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic sixty years earlier, Brown contests this state of immunological exception, linking ideas of susceptibility and citizenship as a way to write black lives—and deaths—into the American social body.