Clotel

In Cincinnati, dressed in her disguise as Mr. Johnson, Clotel boards a stage-coach to Richmond, Virginia to try to find Mary. While she attempts to avoid notice, the other passengers engage in passionate conversations about politics and the temperance movement—the movement to abolish alcohol. One man, who used to live in New Orleans and now lives in Tennessee, describes how he went to Vermont, a “teetotaler” or temperance state, to visit family, and despite alcohol being forbidden, he was clandestinely offered alcohol by several family members. A minister from Connecticut says that “no man living who uses intoxicating drinks, is free from the danger of at least occasional, and if of occasional, ultimately of habitual excess” (166). The man from Tennessee retorts that the minister’s religion worships politics and “banks and tariffs” (167); the minister, in attempting to show how the “people of New Orleans are the most ungodly set in the United States” (167), reads an article from a New Orleans newspaper that describes how people gathered to watch a bloody battle between a bull and a bear. Clotel, who in her disguise appears to look like a handsome young Italian man, attracts the affections of two young women; their father invites her to spend a week with them, but Clotel declines.