With his emphasis on the interracial dynamic of Washington’s eloquence, Douglass approaches black rebellion very differently from Herman Melville, whose Benito Cereno (1855) is the other great novella of black rebellion at sea published during the 1850s. Whereas Washington gains the allegiance of the main white character in The Heroic Slave, in ways that Douglass hoped would gain the allegiance of his white readers, Melville chose to create a black rebel, Babo, who speaks ironically and archly and then, when captured, chooses not to speak at all. Melville works through irony and indirection; Douglass, consistent with his commitment to abolitionism, works more directly in articulating his themes. But different as the novellas may seem, they are similarly committed to the use of theatrical form, in the sense that both works present blacks as performers in white slave culture. Melville philosophically explores the psychological interdependence of masters and slaves; Douglass more directly challenges white mastery.32
There is a third large truth or insight in The Heroic Slave: slave rebels and abolitionists were willing to embrace any society in which they could live as free and equal citizens. In his historical accounts and novella, Douglass presents Madison Washington as “protected” by the British lion’s “mighty paw from the talons and the beak of the American eagle.” Though Douglass invokes American Revolutionary ideals, his novella displays no overarching or unconditional loyalty to the United States; instead, it is an uncompromising critique of American society and liberal (that is, white male) democracy. The state of Virginia, in part 3 of the novella, is presented as having descended from the glory days of the American Revolution to the point of being identified with spittoons and heavy drinking, a place where intemperate racist whites delude themselves into a sense of self-worth by thinking of themselves as superior to blacks. By emphasizing the fallenness of American culture and ideals, The Heroic Slave offers a powerful vision of black nationalism when the blacks of Nassau embrace the African Americans of the Creole. Douglass and his fictional hero would ideally prefer to remain in the United States, for it is their birthplace and the home of their families and friends. But the novella suggests that if this were not the case, that if the nation continued to fail to live up to its democratic ideals, then new nationalist realignments would be in order.33
The black nationalism that emerges at the end of The Heroic Slave may seem at odds with the conventional understanding of Frederick Douglass, who is often cast as a “representative American,” an integrationist, a non-emigrationist, and (after the Civil War) a Republican party hack. But Douglass had a long-standing fascination with black history and black nations; he considered the possibility of immigrating to Haiti in the late 1850s, when he was especially disillusioned about the prospects for blacks in the United States; and near the end of his life, he held a consulship in Haiti and then represented Haiti at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.34 With its emphasis on violence and black community, The Heroic Slave speaks to values that Douglass had long embraced but had tempered while working for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Moreover, the novella offers insights that are at odds with the traditional historiography of abolitionism, which conceives of the movement as primarily white and nonviolent. Douglass recognized that abolitionists were radical critics rather than boosters of American society, and that blacks had absolutely crucial roles in the movement. Even Listwell, the white abolitionist, who can seem relatively passive, becomes implicated in black violence and transnationalist dissent when he decides, at the very last minute, to give Washington “three strong files.”35 In the version of events presented in The Heroic Slave, without those files Washington would have found it difficult to act; but without having listened to Washington in the first place, Listwell would not have offered those files. In this way, Douglass points to the crucial role played by black oppositional voices in the abolitionist movement. Through the friendship between Listwell and Washington, he also points to the multiracial possibilities of the novella’s transnationalist vision.
Appearing in the 1853 Autographs for Freedom, which had American and British editions, and then serialized in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, The Heroic Slave had a considerable readership at the time of its publication. As an indication of its popularity, there was even a pirated edition, probably published in 1853.36 After that printing, there are just a few references to the novella before 1975, when Philip S. Foner included it in the Supplement to his five-volume The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1950–75). In Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (1891), Frederick May Holland commented briefly on The Heroic Slave: “Early in 1853 he [Douglass] published in his own paper a highly wrought story, which had already appeared in ‘Autographs for Freedom,’ entitled ‘The Heroic Slave.’ It is based on actual adventures of Madison Washington, who set himself free by his own courage some ten years earlier.” Presumably, these remarks would have inspired some admirers of Douglass’s writing to seek out his novella. Three decades later, The Heroic Slave made an odd appearance in Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an influential collection of essays on black art and culture published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The illustration accompanying William Stanley Braithwaite’s chapter, titled “The Negro in American Literature,” depicts the cover page of the pirated edition of The Heroic Slave (see figure 2). Over the course of his essay, Braithwaite refers to Douglass’s autobiographies but not The Heroic Slave, so the illustration offered just a tantalizing glimpse of a Douglass text that probably most readers of The New Negro knew nothing about. It wasn’t until Foner’s 1975 reprinting of the novella that The Heroic Slave, over 120 years after its initial publication, was again widely disseminated.37
2. Pirated edition of The Heroic Slave, from Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925). Widener Library, Harvard University.
This cultural and critical edition of The Heroic Slave brings the novella to a new generation of readers. We begin with an authoritative text of The Heroic Slave, which corrects the errors in the first printing in Autographs for Freedom and draws on Douglass’s newspaper printing and the British edition of Autographs as well. In part 2, we offer a representative selection of contemporary responses to the Creole rebellion, including newspaper reportage, depositions, and political writings. Many of these texts served as important sources for Douglass, who spoke or wrote about Madison Washington a number of times from 1845 to 1861. Part 3 collects virtually everything Douglass had to say about the rebellion during that sixteen-year period. Douglass wasn’t the only writer with an interest in the Creole rebellion. Part 4 presents six narratives of the uprising, including several that have not been republished since their first appearance in the nineteenth century. These narratives help us better understand what Douglass chose to emphasize and leave out in his own telling of the story. Storytelling is key to Robert B. Stepto’s 1982 discussion of The Heroic Slave, and that essay, which initiated modern scholarship on Douglass’s novella, heads the cluster of criticism in part 5 of the volume. Here critics address gender, black nationalism, violence, and other important topics, including matters of literary form and artistry. As the selected bibliography at the end of the volume indicates, The Heroic Slave has emerged as a major text in Douglass’s canon, a novella that continues to engage readers with its compelling vision of reform, black revolution, and the quest for human freedom.
1. For good historical overviews of the Creole rebellion, see Howard Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt,” Civil War History 21, no. 1 (1975), 28–50; George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick, The Creole Mutiny: A Tale of Revolt aboard a Slave Ship (Chicago: Dee, 2003). An important recent reassessment is Walter Johnson, “White Lies: Human Property and Domestic Slavery aboard the Slave Ship Creole,” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 237–63.
2. Copies of the 1853 Autographs for Freedom were distributed at antislavery meetings as early as December 1852.
3. “Case of the Creole,” Liberator, 7 January 1842,
2.
4. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 195.
5. See Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
6. See William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996).
7. Joshua Giddings, History of the Rebellion: Its Authors and Causes (New York: Follet, Foster, 1864), 197; James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), ch. 4; Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 444–54. A selection from Giddings is included in part 2 of this volume.
8. William Ellery Channing, The Duty of the Free States, or Remarks Suggested by the Case of the Creole, 2 vols. (Boston: William Crosby, 1842), 1:8, 29; Charles Sumner, quoted in Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 2 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 200. After reading a draft of The Duty of the Free States, Sumner, Channing’s friend and protégé, suggested revisions on several legal points, which Channing adopted; see Pierce, Memoir, 2:194. A selection from Channing’s Duty of the Free States is included in part 2 of this volume.
9. See James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013), 22–25.
10. William A. Stearns, Sermon in Commemoration of Daniel Webster (Boston: James Munroe, 1852), 26.
11. Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor,” 45.
12. “Madison Washington: Another Chapter in His History,” Liberator, 10 June 1842, reprinted in part 2 of this volume; “The Hero Mutineers,” Liberator, 7 January 1842, reprinted in part 2 of this volume. See John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 113, 150–51, 187, 226.
13. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. John Stauffer (1855; New York: Modern Library, 2003), 212; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. David W. Blight (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 119.
14. N. P. Rogers, Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom, 10 December 1841, quoted in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1950–75), 1:48; Douglass, The Heroic Slave, in this volume, 14. The quotation draws on similar ones in the Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1703) and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788).
15. “Hero Mutineers,” Liberator, 7 January 1842.
16. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 137, 138, 140, 141.
17. Ibid., 211.
18. Douglass’s first mention of the Creole mutiny was in 1843 or 1844. During a speech in Pittsburgh, he burlesqued Webster’s, Clay’s, and Calhoun’s demands for restitution in the Creole case, but apparently without mentioning Madison Washington or violent means. See “Colored Orators,” National Era, 28 July 1853, in which the journalist describes hearing Douglass on the Creole “at Pittsburgh, nine years ago [or] more.”
19. “The Buffalo Convention of Men of Color,” Liberator, 22 September 1843; Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Buffalo, on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th of August, 1843 (New York: Piercy and Reed, 1843), 13. Henry Highland Garnet delivered his “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” at the 1843 convention in Buffalo, New York; a selection from the speech is in part 2 of this volume. See also Garnet, “A Letter to Mrs. Maria W. Chapman, November 17th, 1843,” Liberator, 8 December 1843.
20. Douglass, “American Prejudice against Color,” in this volume, 113.
21. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 215; The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 2:59; “The Case of the Creole,” Times (London), 21 January 1842; see also “The Creole,” Times (London), 3 February 1842; “The Creole,” Times (London), 16 February 1842; “The Affair of the Creole,” Times (London), 25 March 1842.
22. “Madison Washington: Another Chapter in His History,” Liberator, 10 June 1842; “Seventh Annual Meeting of the Western N.Y. Anti-Slavery Society,” North Star, 23 January 1851; Lindley Murray Moore, “Religious, Moral, and Political Duties,” Autographs for Freedom (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 114–15; “Mass Anti-Slavery Convention in Rochester,” North Star, 20 March 1851; “Celebration of the National Anniversary,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 1 July 1852; “Editorial,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 27 May 1852.
23. Douglass, Heroic Slave, in this volume, 18–19.
24. “Letter from Wm. C. Nell,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 18 March 1852; “Brooklyn Items,” New York Tribune, 25 February 1852.
25. “Protest of the Officers and Crew of the American Brig Creole,” Liberator, 31 December 1841, in this volume, 66; Douglass, The Heroic Slave, in this volume, 4.
26. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (1852; New York: Norton, 2010), 400; Stowe, A Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), title page; Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 223; David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America (New York: Norton, 2011), 126–67. See also Thomas F. Gossett, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985).
27. “Literary Notices,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 8 April 1852; “Second Anti-Slavery Festival,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 13 August 1852; see also Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 71–75. William Wells Brown’s Clotel, first published in England in November 1853, similarly defines itself as a historical novel. Much like Stowe, the narrator asserts the historical authenticity at the opening of the last chapter: “Are the various incidents and scenes related founded in truth? I answer, Yes. I have personally participated in many of those scenes. Some of the narratives I have derived from other sources; many from the lips of those who, like myself, have run away from the land of bondage.” See Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, ed. Robert S. Levine (2000; Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011), 226.
28. Robert B. Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’ ‘The Heroic Slave,’” Georgia Review 36, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 355–68; Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, 144–76.
29. Douglass, “Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano” (1849), in Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:153. On slave resistance as central to abolitionism, see Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014).
30. Douglass captures Romans 13 in his address to Tom Grant in The Heroic Slave: “You call me a black murderer. I am not a murderer. God is my witness that LIBERTY, not malice, is the motive for this night’s work [the rebellion].” A few months after publishing The Heroic Slave, he employed the exact quote, common among abolitionists, in a lecture; see Douglass, “The Claims of Our Common Cause” (1853), in Life and Writings, 2:255; Douglass, The Heroic Slave, in this volume, 48. r />
31. Douglass, Heroic Slave, in this volume, 8–9, 49.
32. See Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), a selection from which is in part 5 of this volume; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), ch. 2; Maurice S. Lee, “Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Fate of Speech,” American Literature 72, no. 3 (2000): 495–520; John Stauffer, “Interracial Friendship and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 134–43; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 190–94.
33. Douglass, The Heroic Slave, in this volume, 26. On black nationalism in the novella, see Krista Walter, “Trappings of Nationalism in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 233–47; and Ivy G. Wilson, “On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave,’” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 453–68; a selection from Wilson’s essay is reprinted in part 5 of this volume.