"Foul Abolition Calumny": Reframing Racial Violence in William Wells Brown's Clotel & the Antebellum Press.

The article examines William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel *Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter* as a pivotal early African American literary intervention addressing criminalized Blackness and white mob violence, particularly through its representation of lynching. Brown incorporates and transforms an 1842 lynching report from the *Mississippi Free Trader*, altering its context and rhetoric to critique the legitimation of lynch law and expose the terror it imposed on Black communities. The novel’s reworked lynching scene gained wider circulation when the *New-York Daily Tribune* republished it without acknowledgment, sparking controversy and prompting the *Free Trader* to issue a rebuttal that intensified the racialized justifications for lynching. By situating *Clotel* within traditions of gallows literature and early anti-lynching activism, the article highlights Brown’s strategic use of historical sources and literary techniques to subvert dominant narratives, prefiguring later antilynching discourses such as those of Ida B. Wells.