Clotel · Chapter
XXV: Death Is Freedom explained
Clotel is imprisoned in a Washington, D.C.
What happens
Clotel is imprisoned in a Washington, D.C. slave pen to be sent to New Orleans. She escapes and flees to the Long Bridge, but is cornered by pursuers. Rather than be recaptured, she leaps into the Potomac River and drowns. Her body is buried without ceremony. The chapter includes a poem commemorating her death and reflects on the hypocrisy of American freedom.
Themes in this chapter
Hypocrisy of American Democracy
Clotel's death occurs in sight of the President's house and Capitol, highlighting the contradiction between American ideals of liberty and the reality of slavery.
Heroism and Resistance
Clotel's desperate flight and suicidal leap are portrayed as a heroic act of defiance, choosing death over enslavement.
Characters to notice
- Clotel
The fugitive slave who escapes from the Washington prison and leaps to her death from the Long Bridge.
Key passages
“She clasped her hands convulsively, and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes towards heaven, and begged for that mercy and compassion there, which had been denied her on earth; and then, with a single bound, she vaulted over the railings of the bridge, and sunk forever beneath the waves of the river!”
Clotel prayed for heavenly mercy, then jumped from the bridge into the Potomac and drowned.
Clotel's final act of resistance and her appeal to divine justice.
“Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.”
Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, died a slave despite her father's role in declaring American independence.
The irony of Jefferson's legacy as a founder of liberty while his own daughter died enslaved.