Two Slave Rebellions at Sea
6. Song of Solomon 1:5.
7. The Greek mythological hero Heracles, known to the Romans as Hercules, was a mortal son of the chief god Zeus and famed for his strength.
8. The name of Madison Washington’s wife is not recorded in surviving historical records. Douglass knew several of the people whom Washington had met in Canada and in the United States after his first escape from slavery; see the Robert Purvis selection in part 4 of this volume. Douglass either learned her first name from these people or invented a fictional one.
9. The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, 4.1.1–7. Douglass uses a common nineteenth-century spelling of Shakespeare.
10. Beginning in the early 1820s, fugitive slaves from the United States began to settle in Upper Canada (also known as Canada West), where they formed their own communities. Although not restricted legally, the fugitives were not welcomed by many white Canadians.
11. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. The image was made in the camera on a silvered copper plate. The French inventor Louis J. M. Daguerre (1787–1851) perfected the process after a decade of experimentation. Douglass himself was fascinated by photography; see, for example, his lecture “Pictures and Progress” (1861).
12. As with Washington’s wife’s name, Douglass either learned about the existence of the slave rebel’s children from abolitionist friends or invented them for literary purposes.
13. Probably a reference to the Great Dismal Swamp, located along the coastal plain of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. The region had been a site for runaway slave maroon colonies since colonial times.
14. In the Old Testament, the cities of refuge were towns in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah that offered the possibility of trial by law for those accused of manslaughter (Numbers 35:11–34; Deuteronomy 19:3–13).
15. Gerrit Smith, a New York antislavery reformer (1797–1874), helped organize the Liberty Party and was elected to Congress in 1852. A philanthropist, Smith gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers; beginning in the early 1850s, he also helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
16. An allusion to Psalms 147:9, the phrase, often in the form “the young raven’s cry,” is found in a number of hymns from the nineteenth century; Douglass’s source may have been Charles Wesley’s “Son of Thy Sire’s Eternal Love” (in A Collection of Hymns: For the Use of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Principally from the Collection of Rev. John Wesley [New York, 1845]).
17. Matthew 19:26.
18. Acts 7:34.
19. A corrupt tax collector, Zacchaeus climbed a tree to view Jesus and then publicly repented for his sins after receiving Jesus’ love (Luke 19:1–10).
20. Fight (French).
21. The constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, contains the group of stars known as the Big Dipper. An imaginary line running from the cup of the Big Dipper points to the North Star.
22. Upwards of forty thousand runaway slaves escaped to Canadian freedom through Ohio, with the help of antislavery supporters who set up networks of over seven hundred safe houses. Although a “free state,” a designation indicating only that its residents could not own slaves, Ohio overall was a dangerous host to the escapees. Bounty hunters crisscrossed the state, and Ohio law rewarded those who turned in or reported runaways.
23. Lake Erie; passage northward across Lake Erie would lead a fugitive slave to safety in Canada.
24. On the southern shore of Lake Erie.
25. Perhaps a reference to the steamer Admiral, which was operated on Lake Erie by the Canadian shipowner Donald Bethune (1802–1869). The ship broke down in 1851.
26. An allusion to Queen Victoria (1819–1901) and the antislavery actions taken by the British government during the early to mid-nineteenth century.
27. God declares in Jeremiah 21:12: “Execute judgment in the morning, and deliver him that is spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor.”
28. Ezekiel 18:7; Matthew 25:36.
29. By the eighteenth century, the lion had become a symbol of Great Britain; the eagle similarly came to serve as a symbol of U.S. collective identity.
30. From canto 4, stanza 141, of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
31. The Manchester & Petersburg Turnpike, also known as the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike.
32. Douglass draws on accounts of the Half Way House, one of the earliest taverns in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
33. Nautical term for the part of a rope or sail that hangs loose.
34. Scottish monastery founded in the twelfth century and the burial place of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). In 1846, Douglass, who had taken his surname from a character in one of Scott’s romances, visited the region near the abbey during an abolitionist speaking tour.
35. Possibly refers to the great New York race horse known as “American Eclipse” (1814–1847), which defeated its southern rival, named Henry, in a famous race of 1822 held in Washington, D.C. Two other less famous horses, named Bachelor and Jumping Jimmy, raced mile heats in the District of Columbia region in the 1810s.
36. Encounters (French).
37. Job 20:12.
38. In Matthew 7:6, Jesus advises his disciples: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet.”
39. The motto of the New York City–based abolitionist newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
40. Most likely an allusion to the Dutch priest and biblical scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who cautiously tried to avoid antagonizing either Catholic or Protestant authorities in the heated theological controversies of the early years of the Reformation.
41. Former (Latin).
42. The islander Caliban uses the phrase “foreheads villainous low” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 4.1.248.
43. As a principal port, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum era in the Atlantic slave trade.
44. Since colonial times, Baltimore had been a major shipbuilding city, and by the 1840s its shipyards were producing the majority of the vessels used in the slave trade. In the 1830s, while still a slave, Douglass himself worked in Baltimore’s Fells Point shipyards.
45. Douglass, who worked in shipyards in Baltimore and New Bedford, accurately employs nautical terminology to describe the sails on a large square-rigged sailing vessel.
46. From “Where Is the Slave” (1848), by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852).
47. From canto 2, stanza 76, of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
48. Name generally used in the nineteenth century to refer to the entire west coast of Africa.
49. Sailors.
50. The actual first mate of the Creole was Zephaniah Gifford, who was wounded in the revolt but survived. Williams seems drawn in part on the slave trader and overseer William H. Merritt; see “Protest of the Officers and Crew of the American Brig Creole” and Deposition of William H. Merritt in part 2 of this volume.
51. Derogatory term for a person of African ancestry. It was first used in the eighteenth century to refer to the alleged ability of slaves to go undetected in the dark of night.
52. Nautical term for a ship’s galley.
53. Probably refers to Fortress Monroe, located at Old Point Comfort on the Virginia shore of Chesapeake Bay.
54. Here Douglass followed the historical record, which indicated that nineteen slaves were involved in the uprising.
55. The Massachusetts reformer William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) was so closely identified with the abolitionist movement in the United States that his name became almost synonymous with the cause. He founded and edited the Liberator (1831–65), arguably the most influential abolitionist journal. He helped recruit Douglass into the lecturing ranks of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1845 he published Douglass’s Narrative. The two reformers had a falling-out in the late 1840s, precipitated by Douglass’s decis
ion in 1847 to found and edit his own antislavery newspaper.
56. Skilled workers who made wooden ships watertight by packing seams with waterproof materials. Douglass trained as a caulker while a teenage slave in Baltimore.
57. The actual owner of most of the slaves aboard the Creole was the Richmond slave trader Thomas McCargo.
58. The actual captain of the Creole was Robert Ensor, who was badly wounded by the slave rebels. The only person to die during the rebellion was John R. Hewell, who was McCargo’s hired agent on board ship.
59. Capital of the Bahamas, which was under British control until 1973.
60. A case or stand on a ship’s deck to house a compass and possibly other nautical instruments.
61. Radical political abolitionists such as Douglass and Gerrit Smith believed that the U.S. Constitution had to be interpreted in light of the egalitarian and implicitly antislavery principles of the Declaration of Independence.
62. In historical fact, Governor Francis Cockburn of the Bahamas sent a detachment of twenty black soldiers under a white officer to take control of the Creole soon after it arrived in Nassau harbor on 9 November 1841. By 16 April 1842, all the blacks on the Creole had been freed by British authorities.
A Note on the Text
The goal of the Yale University Press edition of Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave is to provide readers for the first time with a definitive critical text of this historically important work. While a few other editions of Douglass’s novella have been reprinted in modern times, none of their texts of The Heroic Slave have been guided by the principles of textual editing. Other editions have reproduced an electronic facsimile or have reset the text of one of the work’s three earliest printings. Such an “uncritical” preparation of a text overlooks the corruptions of the author’s intentions by contemporary copy editors, compositors, or bookbinders. It also ignores any “authoritative” corrections or revisions that Douglass might have instructed for later printings of his work. Instead, our goal for this edition is to recover and reproduce a text that accurately reflects Douglass’s intentions for The Heroic Slave.
The first step in our work on The Heroic Slave was to discover as much as possible about its publication history. Our research uncovered three potentially authoritative texts for the novella: the first edition of Autographs for Freedom, published in late December 1852 (copyrighted 1853) by the Boston firm of John P. Jewett; the second, printed serially in Frederick Douglass’ Paper on 4, 11, 18, and 25 March 1853; and the third, a British edition of Autographs for Freedom, published by the London firm of Low, Son & Company and John Cassell later in the spring of 1853.
4. The Heroic Slave, in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 March 1853. Widener Library, Harvard University.
Based on our critical reading and the collation of potentially authoritative texts of The Heroic Slave, and on an analysis of external evidence, the editors selected the Boston edition of Autographs for Freedom as the copy-text to be critically edited. The present text was reproduced as carefully as possible from its original published source, and then checked against the two subsequent versions. The editors strove to preserve the distinctive features, dubbed “accidentals” by textual scholars, of the work that Douglass intended to make available to his readers, so the original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and other distinctive stylistic usages are reproduced here, although the possibility exists that many such features were introduced by a copy editor or compositor. The editors then compared or collated these three texts and compiled a list of variations in the texts.
Since the editors’ goal was to provide the text of The Heroic Slave as Douglass intended it for his 1853 readers, we made only twenty-seven alterations, or emendations, to the original Boston-published Autographs for Freedom text. Most were intended to correct errors made by the original compositors and were based on intensive study of the subsequent two authoritative texts of the novella. A smaller number of our emendations are what textual editors call “substantives”: changes of capitalization, punctuation, or spelling to correct grammatical errors that, the editors believe, Douglass could not have intended, because they produce confusion or provide misinformation. Where possible, Douglass’s usage elsewhere in the novella or his other contemporary writings guided such emendations. For a detailed discussion of textual issues in The Heroic Slave,” see the forthcoming volume Other Writings in the Yale University Press Frederick Douglass Papers.
PART 2
Contemporary Responses to the Creole Rebellion, 1841–1843
THE CREOLE REBELLION OCCURRED on the night of 7 November 1841, approximately two years after the more famous slave rebellion on board the Cuban slaver the Amistad and a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of freeing the Amistad’s leader, Joseph Cinqué, and his fellow rebels, who had been imprisoned in Connecticut jailhouses since 1839. The Creole rebellion got less attention than the one on the Amistad because the rebels escaped to the British Bahamas and thus were not available for newspaper interviews or other forms of publicity. Still, there was considerable interest in the case. The Creole was an American slaver, after all, and southerners were disturbed by the specter of black revolt (and the loss of human property), while antislavery northerners saw in both the Amistad and the Creole rebellions clear indications of blacks’ desire for freedom. Because the British refused to return the slaves to slavery, the rebellion exacerbated tensions between Britain and the United States during the time that President John Tyler’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, was negotiating the North American boundary issues central to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, eventually signed in August 1842. Additionally, the rebellion and its aftermath added to existing tensions among northern and southern politicians about the role that the federal government should play in protecting the rights of slave owners.
This section presents contemporary newspaper, diplomatic, and political responses to the Creole rebellion. The emphasis is on those texts that Douglass read or clearly knew about. Douglass followed all aspects of the case. He was an avid reader of William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, and of African American newspapers; five of the ten selections in this section come from antislavery newspapers, including Garrison’s reprinting of the white crew’s deposition about the case, known as the “Protest,” which first appeared in a New Orleans newspaper. In addition, this section reprints an excerpt from another formal deposition by the white officers and seamen, printed as a U.S. Senate document, and three texts that focus on the diplomatic and political implications of the case, including Daniel Webster’s widely disseminated letter about the Creole rebellion (which Douglass regularly attacked in his speeches about the uprising). The concluding selection, from Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” points to the symbolic importance that the Creole would come to assume for nineteenth-century African Americans inspired by the histories and legacies of black rebellion against the slave power.
“Another Amistad Case—What Will Grow Out of It?”
News of the 7 November 1841 revolt on the Creole initially came from the 8 December 1841 issue of the New Orleans Advertiser, which published the lengthy deposition—known as the “Protest”—that white officers and seamen gave to a New Orleans notary shortly after the Creole arrived in New Orleans on 2 December 1841. Southern newspapers summarized or reprinted the “Protest” as part of a campaign to compel the British to return the slaves to their owners. Northern antislavery newspapers printed the “Protest” with the very different aim of celebrating the black slaves for their heroic actions. (See the Liberator’s version below.) Drawing on the “Protest,” on 23 December 1845 the National Anti-Slavery Standard published an article, “An American Cinquez,” that directly linked the Creole rebellion to the Amistad slave rebellion of 1839, led by Joseph Cinqué. Two days later, the Colored American, based in New York City and the leading African American newspaper of the time, published “Another Amistad Cas
e,” which also drew on the “Protest.” The text here is taken from the 25 December 1841 issue of the Colored American.
It appears that on the 27th of Oct., the brig Creole left Richmond, Va.,1 with 135 slaves, for New Orleans, where they were to be sold—that on the night of the 7th of November, a large number of the slaves arose, killed their owner, or the man who had them in charge, and one other passenger,2 seriously wounded the captain and mate, who both fled to the rigging, and finally succeeded in taking full charge of the vessel. The next morning they called the captain and mate down from the rigging, who obeyed; when the mate gave himself up to them, one of the colored men put a pistol to his breast and promised to spare him only on condition that he would take them to an English Island, who promised to do so, and accordingly took the vessel to Nassau, New Providence.3 Upon arriving at Nassau, nineteen of the slaves were recognized as among the revolters, and were detained in temporary durance by the Governor,4 who refused, however, to send them to the United States; the remainder of them were set at liberty, as on English soil slaves cannot breathe.5 A vessel being about to embark for Jamaica, with emigrants, many of them took passage in her; the rest are employed at Nassau. Another paper states that four women and one small boy came to New Orleans in the Creole,—very foolish women. One or two of the colored men died from wounds received in the affray on board.6 It is evident these slaves prepared themselves for the battle before they left Richmond, else whence all their implements of war.
Now here is another Amistad case,7 a very exciting one too, and more trouble in the camp between this country and England. This country will demand them to be given up, at least the slaveholders will. England will not listen for one moment in the case of the 114, most of whom have gone to Jamaica. They are safe—she never will at all surrender one of them up. Of the 19 detained as revolters, England may pause a moment, as to whether to give them up or not, she may, and she may not. Our Supreme Court has just given them a precedent in the Africans of the Amistad, she may follow so illustrious an example.8 But this country has adopted other precedents, in refusing to deliver up her mail robbers, and her murderers, who had taken refuge under our government from Canada.9 England will never do for us, what we have in like circumstance refused to do for them, especially in the case of men fighting to deliver themselves from chattel slavery. The Southern papers are already in a great rage about this case; we advise then to keep cool, not to be too wrathy, they may be glad yet to back out. John Bull won’t be frightened. We advise old Virginia to be careful how she ships her slaves to the South. These Virginia slaves are hard cases.