While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement.

[3] A descendant of Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins through his father, William was born into slavery in 1814 (or March 15, 1815) near Lexington, Kentucky, where his mother Elizabeth was enslaved.

His brother Joseph has been identified by researchers Ron L. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White as Joe, the slave of Alamo commander William B. Travis.

In 1834, Brown made a second escape attempt, successfully slipping away from a steamboat when it docked in Cincinnati, Ohio, a free state.

In freedom, he took the names of Wells Brown, a Quaker friend who helped him after his escape by providing food, clothes and some money.

[9][10] In 1856, Well's daughter Josephine Brown published Biography of an American Bondman (1856), an updated account of his life.

He helped many fugitive slaves gain their freedom by hiding them on the boat to take them to Buffalo, or Detroit, Michigan, or across the lake to Canada.

Brown's work in anti-slavery societies often included public speaking, and he frequently used music as part of his performance.

[1] In 1849, Brown left the United States with his two young daughters to travel in the British Isles to lecture against slavery.

[16] An article in the Scotch Independent reported the following: By dint of resolution, self-culture, and force of character, he [Brown] has rendered himself a popular lecturer to a British audience, and vigorous expositor of the evils and atrocities of that system whose chains he has shaken off so triumphantly and forever.

We may safely pronounce William Wells Brown a remarkable man, and a full refutation of the doctrine of the inferiority of the negro.

In his 1852 memoir of travel in Europe, he wrote, He who escapes from slavery at the age of twenty years, without any education, as did the writer of this letter, must read when others are asleep, if he would catch up with the rest of the world.

His travel account was popular with middle-class readers as he recounted sightseeing trips to the foundational monuments of European culture.

Due to his reputation as a powerful orator, Brown was invited to the National Convention of Colored Citizens, where he met other prominent abolitionists.

When the Liberty Party formed, he chose to remain independent, believing that the abolitionist movement should avoid becoming entrenched in politics.

Brown critiques his master's lack of Christian values and the customary brutal use of violence by owners in master-slave relations.

Brown wrote two plays after his return to the US: Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone (1856, unpublished and no longer extant) and The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858).

For instance, in an 1847 lecture to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, he said: "Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you.

"[22] Brown also wrote several histories, including: St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Its Patriots (1855), a history of the Haitian Revolution;[23] The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863); The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), considered the first historical work about black soldiers in the American Revolutionary War; and The Rising Son (1873).

[24] Perhaps because of the rising social tensions in the 1850s, Brown became a proponent of African-American emigration to Haiti, an independent black republic in the Caribbean since 1804.

[25] During the American Civil War and in the decades that followed, Brown continued to publish fiction and non-fiction books, securing his reputation as one of the most prolific African-American writers of his time.

After studying homeopathic medicine, he opened a medical practice in Boston's South End while keeping a residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts.