The Heroic Slave

by Frederick Douglass

  1859

  John Brown and a band of 21 blacks and whites raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as part of a scheme to end slavery. He and all but 5 fellow raiders are captured and executed.

  Douglass flees first to Canada and then Great Britain for safety because of his close connections with John Brown. Douglass is not able to return home until April 1860.

  1860

  Lincoln elected by a plurality, the first antislavery president since John Quincy Adams’s 1824 election. In response, southern states begin secession movement.

  1861

  The Civil War begins in April following a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor.

  In May, General Benjamin Butler admits slaves into his camp at Fort Monroe, Virginia, declares them “contraband of war,” and hires them as laborers rather than sending them back into the Confederacy.

  In response to thousands of slaves flocking to Union lines, Congress in August passes the First Confiscation Act, authorizing the Union army to confiscate slaves of rebel masters.

  Invoking Madison Washington, Douglass celebrates the free black William Tillman, who single-handedly gained control of a ship pirated by Confederate privateers and brought it back to Long Island.

  1863

  Emancipation Proclamation issued.

  William Wells Brown includes a chapter on Madison Washington and the Creole rebels in The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements.

  After recruiting black troops for the Union army, Douglass has the first of three private interviews with President Lincoln.

  1865

  The Civil War ends; Lincoln is assassinated. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, is ratified.

  Henry Highland Garnet preaches a sermon in U.S. House of Representatives after the House passes the Thirteenth Amendment; he is the first black to preach in Congress.

  1866

  Congress approves the Civil Rights Act, which grants citizenship and legal protections to African Americans.

  Assassination attempt on Frederick Douglass while giving a speech in Baltimore. Douglass is unharmed, the assassin flees, and no one is arrested.

  1868

  Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship and equal protection under the law to all individuals born or naturalized in the United States.

  1870

  Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing African American men the right to vote.

  Douglass relocates to Washington, D.C., and begins editing the New National Era, which calls for black civil rights as well as other reforms.

  1874

  Appointed president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank in March, Douglass has to close the institution as insolvent in July.

  1877

  The Compromise of 1877, which helps decide the presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, results in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. With the loss of federal protection, African Americans suffer a precipitous loss of civil rights and become subject to new Jim Crow laws and a wave of violence.

  Douglass appointed U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia by President Hayes, becoming the first black to receive a federal appointment requiring Senate approval.

  1881

  President James A. Garfield appoints Douglass recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. Douglass publishes his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

  1882

  Anna Murray Douglass dies in August.

  1883

  The U.S. Supreme Court invalidates the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which had declared unconstitutional segregation in all public establishments except schools.

  1884

  Douglass’s marriage in January to a younger, white woman, Helen Pitts, causes a public controversy.

  1889

  Douglass accepts appointment as U.S. minister resident and consul general to Haiti.

  The black abolitionist Robert Purvis reminisces about Madison Washington in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  1891

  Douglass resigns Haitian post after clashes with Benjamin Harrison’s administration over attempted annexation of a Haitian port to operate as an American naval base.

  1892

  Douglass serves as commissioner of the Haitian pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; publishes revised and expanded edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

  1895

  Douglass dies at his Cedar Hill home in Washington, D.C., on 20 February after attending a women’s rights convention.

  1896

  The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upholds the constitutionality of “separate but equal” rules mandating racial segregation.

  1901

  Pauline Hopkins publishes “A Dash for Liberty,” a story about Madison Washington and the Creole rebels, in the Colored American Magazine. In 1900, she published a biographical sketch of Frederick Douglass in the same journal.

  Selected Bibliography

  Works marked with an asterisk are excerpted in this volume.

  *Andrews, William L. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.” PMLA 105, no. 1 (1990): 23–34.

  Beavers, Herman. “The Blind Leading the Blind: The Racial Gaze as Plot Dilemma in ‘Benito Cereno’ and ‘The Heroic Slave.’” In Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, edited by Henry B. Wonham, 205–29. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

  *Bernier, Celeste-Marie. “‘Arms Like Polished Iron’: The Black Slave Body in Narratives of a Slave Ship Revolt.” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 2 (2002): 91–106.

  ———. Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

  ———. “A Comparative Exploration of Narrative Ambiguities in Frederick Douglass’s Two Versions of The Heroic Slave (1853, 1863?).” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 2 (2001): 69–86.

  ———. “From Fugitive Slave to Fugitive Abolitionist: The Oratory of Frederick Douglass and the Emerging Heroic Slave Tradition.” Atlantic Studies 3, no. 2 (2006): 201–24.

  Cover, Robert M. Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975.

  Finkenbine, Roy E. “The Symbolism of Slave Mutiny: Black Abolitionist Responses to the Amistad and Creole Incidents.” In Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jane Hathaway, 233–52. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001.

  Foreman, P. Gabriel. “Sentimental Abolition in Douglass’s Decade: Revision, Erotic Conversion, and the Politics of Witnessing in ‘The Heroic Slave’ and My Bondage and My Freedom.” In Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, edited by Henry B. Wonham, 191–204. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

  Goldner, Ellen J. “Allegories of Exposure: The Heroic Slave and the Heroic Agonistics of Frederick Douglass.” In Racing and (E)racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words, edited by Ellen J. Goldner and Safiya Henderson-Holmes, 31–55. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

  Hamilton, Cynthia S. “Models of Agency: Frederick Douglass and ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 114, no. 1 (2005): 87–136.

  Harrold, Stanley. “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, the Creole Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of Violent Means.” In Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, edited by John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, 89–107. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

  Hedin, Raymond. “Probable Readers, Possible Stories: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Black Narrative.” In Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, edited by James L. Machor, 180–205. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

  Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick. The Creole Mutiny: A Tal
e of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship. Chicago: Dee, 2003.

  Hole, Jeffrey. “Enforcement on a Grand Scale: Fugitive Intelligence and the Literary Tactics of Douglass and Melville.” American Literature 85, no. 2 (2013): 217–46.

  *Hyde, Carrie. “The Climates of Liberty: Natural Rights in the Creole Case and ‘The Heroic Slave.’” American Literature 85, no. 3 (2013): 475–504.

  Jervey, Edward D., and C. Harold Huber. “The Creole Affair.” Journal of Negro History 65, no. 3 (1980): 196–211.

  Johnson, Walter. “White Lies: Human Property and Domestic Slavery aboard the Slave Ship Creole.” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 237–63.

  Jones, Howard. “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt.” Civil War History 21, no. 1 (1975): 28–50.

  ———. To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1842. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

  Jones, Paul C. “Copying What the Master Had Written: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and the Southern Historical Romance.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2000): 78–92.

  Levecq, Christine. Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008.

  Levine, Robert S. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

  Lock, Helen. “The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass.” College Literature 30, no. 4 (2003): 54–70.

  McKivigan, John R. “The Frederick Douglass–Gerrit Smith Friendship and Political Abolitionism in the 1850s.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, 205–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Miller, Keith D., and Kevin Quashie. “Slavery Mutiny as Argument, Argument as Fiction, Fiction as America: The Case of Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave.” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 3 (1998): 199–207.

  Miller, William Lee. Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Knopf, 1996.

  Newman, Lance. “Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave.’” American Literature 81, no. 1 (2009): 127–52.

  Noble, Marianne. “Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and My Bondage and My Freedom.” Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1 (2006): 53–69.

  Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. New York: Norton, 2013.

  Reynolds, Larry J. Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

  *Sale, Maggie Montesinos. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

  Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

  ———. “Interracial Friendship and the Aesthetics of Freedom.” In Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter, 134–58. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

  Stepto. Robert B. “Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass.” In New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, 135–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  *———. “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’ ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Georgia Review 36, no. 2 (1982): 355–68.

  Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

  Sweeney, Fionnghuala. “Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave.” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 2 (2012): 305–20.

  Takaki, Ronald T. “Not Afraid to Die: Frederick Douglass and Violence.” In Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents, 17–33. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Troutman, Phillip. “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt.” In The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, edited by Walter Johnson, 203–33. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

  Walter, Krista. “Trappings of Nationalism in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave.” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 233–47.

  Weinauer, Ellen. “Writing Revolt in the Wake of Nat Turner: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of Black Domesticity in ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Studies in American Fiction 33, no. 2 (2005): 193–202.

  Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

  *Wilson, Ivy G. “On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave.’” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 453–68.

  *Yarborough, Richard. “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave.’” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, 166–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.