BROWNE, Martha Griffith

Born date unknown; died 25 May 1906

Wrote under: Martha Griffith, Mattie Griffith

Daughter of Thomas and Martha Young Griffith; married AlbertGallatin Browne

Daughter of slaveowners, Martha Griffith Browne freed the slaves she inherited, and over the protests of her relatives used her own resources to give her ex-slaves a start as free persons. Moving to Boston in 1860, she wrote for Boston and New York antislavery publications and participated in William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society.

Browne's principal work, Autobiograpby of a Female Slave, was first published anonymously in 1857 (reprinted 1998), but the author's identity was soon made known by Garrison's the Liberator, which on 9 January 1857 printed an extract. Since its first publication readers have sometimes taken the Autobiograpby to be an authentic slave narrative, sometimes an edited or shaped narrative, and sometimes a completely fictionalized story. Browne herself reported in 1904 that it was totally composed of "recited" and "well-known" facts. It is clear that Browne's account of slave life in Kentucky is accurately based on her firsthand experiences, but she made the book readable by creating dialogue and shaping a plot.

The value of the Autobiography is twofold. First, despite its touches of sentimentality and interspersed abolitionist polemic, it provides insight into day-to-day Kentucky slave life, both in country and city. The broad range of characters' survival accommodations to slavery—from obsequiousness to militancy in the slaves, and from extreme cruelty to strong antislavery opinions in the whites—gives a comprehensive picture of human interaction with the "peculiar institution." Second, having a female as the central character from whose first-person point of view the stories of many other females are told, is a needed addition to the "authentic" slave narratives, of which scores were published but in which women's stories were sadly underrepresented.

When comparing Browne's novelized Autobiography with the slaves' description of slavery culled from firsthand narratives, one finds many similarities. Legally enforced illiteracy was the bane of slaves, and a mainstay of the system. Slave leaders or high achievers were those who, by subterfuge or luck, received some schooling. Violence was a second, less successful, mainstay of slavery. Mistresses and professed Christians were as cruel or more cruel than tobacco-chewing, whisky-drinking masters. Even though they whip slaves with impunity, even to death, for such sins as loss of a silver fork, slave loyalty is tied not to punishment, but to rewards. Slaves were not well-provided with clothing, food, shelter, or medical care. It was especially hard for childbearing women, who were severely punished for resisting white men's advances, and were expected to do field work and housework while pregnant or nursing; they kept their children alive only to see them beaten or sold. Children were not properly cared for, and had no chance to develop self-esteem. Their mortality rate was extremely high.

As a novel, the Autobiography is inevitably compared to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which preceded it by four years. The Autobiography of a Female Slave is less derivative than might be expected, depending less than Stowe's work on sentimental reaction for its antislavery impact, and being much more blunt and realistic about the majority of slaveholders than is Stowe's depiction of Southern aristocrats.

Other Works:

Madge Vertner (1859-60). Poems (1852, 1853).

Bibliography:

Bayliss, J., Black Slave Narratives (1970). Dumond, D., A Bibliography of Anti-Slavery in America (1967). Loggins, V., The Negro Author, His Development in America to 1900 (1931). Lystar, K. J., "Two Female Perspectives on the Slave Family as Described in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mattie Griffith's Autobiography of a Female Slave" (thesis, 1995). McPherson, J., The Struggle for Equality (1964). Nichols, C., Many Thousands Gone: The Ex-Slaves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom (1963). Ruchames, L., ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (From Disunion to the Brink of War, vol. 4, 1975).

—CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER