Two Slave Rebellions at Sea

by Frederick Douglass

  It is quite easy to talk of flogging niggers here on land, where you have the sympathy of the community, and the whole physical force of the government, State and national, at your command…. It is one thing to manage a company of slaves on the plantation, and quite another to quell an insurrection on the lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty. (158)

  Every breeze of the Atlantic may have spoken of “courage and liberty,” but the ocean turns out to be no more free than Virginian soil, since the freedom of Washington and his company is not secured until they are within the pale of the British empire.

  Although oceans are the liminal spaces among nations and seem to have no state jurisdiction, they are far from neutral territories.2 Grant and the rest of the crew of the Creole are operating not under maritime logic but under the laws of Virginia and the United States. The Creole is a floating, self-contained microcosm of the nation carrying with it the nation’s political and legal mandates. Grant assumes that, on reaching Nassau, he can find recourse with the American consul at port. He is disappointed to hear that “they did not recognize persons as property.” His chagrin is exacerbated by his belief that the laws of the United States—specifically, the Fugitive Slave Law—should be enforceable in other nations: “I told them that by the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States, the slaves on board were as much property as the barrels of flour in the hold” (163). Douglass embellishes the irony here by having a company of black soldiers arrive at the port to protect the ship’s property. That a company of black soldiers, presumably armed, represent the state accentuates the contrast he has established between the United States and its professed ideals. But if the Bahamas are an idealized territory and Nassau, a place where blacks are freed, is a more perfect state than the United States, why does “The Heroic Slave” not close with the pragmatic idea that the Bahamas should be the destination of every black American? If your inalienable rights are withheld in the United States, why not move to where they are protected? What is it, finally, that compels Douglass to champion Washington as a distinctly American hero and to retain faith that the spirit of one founding document, the Declaration of Independence, will ultimately refashion the other, the Constitution?

  Douglass depicts Tom Grant in such a manner as to recall the earlier conversion of Listwell. Whereas Listwell was captivated by Washington’s rhetorical eloquence, Grant is captivated by Washington’s display of physical restraint. Whereas Listwell pledged to remain true to the abolitionist crusade, Grant promises to abandon the business of slavery. Through Listwell, Douglass is able to envisage an idealized, converted white American who acts on his moral beliefs irrespective of legal codes. Douglass does not imbue Grant with a similar sense of moral indignation concerning slavery; instead, Grant is persuaded by Washington’s overwhelming presence. Throughout “The Heroic Slave” the size and strength of the protagonist are detailed but rarely exposed in action, as though to figure a violent black masculinity only to contain it by the man’s higher, cerebral nature. Despite Washington’s physical presence, Douglass mitigates the violence aboard the Creole by refusing to describe it. Instead, he underscores Washington’s benevolence.3 He was surely attempting to preempt accusations of wanton black violence. His audiences may have wanted slavery expelled, but only the most fervent abolitionists advocated violent insurrection. Grant’s conversion is less a result of Washington’s sympathy than a result of Washington’s oratorical skill:

  I felt little disposition to reply to this impudent speech. By heaven, it disarmed me. The fellow loomed up before me. I forgot his blackness in the dignity of his manner, and the eloquence of his speech. It seemed as if the souls of both the great dead (whose names he bore) had entered him. (161)

  Although Grant submits that he “forgot” Washington’s blackness, the black man’s speaking ability did not convince him of racial equality, as it did Listwell. Once again Douglass emphasizes the power of speech. Grant confesses that Washington’s words “disarmed” him. Although conceded in a figurative sense, the disarming here parallels the earlier physical disarming of the crew. They are held captive by Washington physically and orally—equally. In Virginia, Grant subsequently announces to the men seated about him, “I dare say here what many men feel, but dare not speak, that this whole slave-trading business is a disgrace and scandal to Old Virginia” (159). Douglass’s maneuver at this moment is subtle. Instead of having the narrator or even Washington condemn Virginia’s participation in slavery, Douglass uses the recently converted Grant for such a statement.

  Both Grant and Williams contest the legacy of Virginia. Astonished that the insurrection succeeded, Williams is equally concerned that the reputation of Virginian sailors will be tarnished: “For my part I feel ashamed to have the idea go abroad, that a ship load of slaves can’t be safely taken from Richmond to New Orleans. I should like, merely to redeem the character of Virginia sailors, to take charge of a ship load on ’em to-morrow” (158; emphasis mine). His frustration reveals how his disappointment regarding the disruption of the dominant racial hierarchy and his allegiance to Virginia are utterly enmeshed, and it reveals how one’s regional affinities can supersede one’s national affiliation. The tête-à-tête between Grant and Williams exposes more than two men vying to identify the true character of Virginia. That Listwell is a resident of Ohio—one of the free states—presumably accounts for his swift conversion, but, with Grant, Douglass offers the conversion of a man who not only had roots in the gateway to the South but was fully entangled in the business of slavery. With Grant’s disavowal of slavery Douglass implies that had the founding fathers atoned for their sin of owning slaves, they could have reemerged as rehabilitated Tom Grants. Imperfect and belated as his conversion is, Grant arrives as the son to redeem the fathers.

  If Grant is furnished to redeem the founding fathers, that redemption occurs in the text only when the black body acts as a forfeiture that reifies the boundaries of the United States as a site of white hegemony. Although increasingly characterized as an American, from his adoption of certain speech cadences to being recognized (in the sense that Fanon theorizes recognition) by Listwell and Grant, Washington ultimately is displaced from the United States. This displacement is as much textual as it is actual. Although he never assumes the position of narrator in “The Heroic Slave,” the number of lines dedicated to his words is markedly reduced in part 4. Instead, the concluding section features the conversation between Grant and Williams. Though his articulations in and of themselves are resonant, Washington speaks only four times here, and his voice is heard through and by the mouth of Grant. The effect created in this last section is the removal of the black physical presence from the United States. Only Grant and Williams are left, preoccupied with the project of national history.

  “The Heroic Slave” is an imperfect allegory, not because it fails to locate Washington as a particular register in the literary precincts of the American historical romance but because it can only nominally approximate the issue of colonial and postcolonial anxiety. Its function as historical romance seemingly undercuts its potential as a postcolonial text, as when Grant superimposes questions of French imperialism onto the question of slavery in the United States: “For the negro to act cowardly on shore, may be to act wisely; and I’ve some doubts whether you, Mr. Williams, would find it very convenient were you a slave in Algiers, to raise your hand against the bayonets of a whole government” (158). The final image of the text, of the cohort not returning to the United States but remaining in Nassau, overwhelmingly conveys much of the postcolonial condition of being without a home, of being an exile. “The Heroic Slave” ends not with a depiction of the United States as a “trans-national America,” as Randolph Bourne would later call it, but with a displaced cadre of transnational blacks whose affiliations and affinities are determined less by their reference to the United States than by their relationship to other blacks in the diaspora—a sentiment that Douglass himself earlier
announced when he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, “[A]s to nation, I belong to none” (17).

  Works Cited

  Andrews, William L., ed. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

  Bourne, Randolph. “Trans-national America.” Atlantic Monthly July 1916: 86–97.

  Douglass, Frederick. “The Heroic Slave.” 1853. Andrews, Reader 132–63.

  ———. “To William Lloyd Garrison.” 1 Sept. 1846. Foner 17–20.

  ———. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852.” Andrews, Reader 109–30.

  Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.

  Foner, Philip, ed. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. New York: Hall, 1999.

  Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

  Yarborough, Richard. “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. 166–83.

  1. From Ivy G. Wilson, “On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and “‘The Heroic Slave,’” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 453–68; the selection is from 461–67. Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, the Modern Language Association of America. The footnotes have been renumbered and are the author’s; the Works Cited list has been condensed so that it includes only the works referred to in this selection.

  2. As Jameson writes, “For the sea is … a place of work and the very element by which an imperial capitalism … slowly realizes its sometimes violent, sometimes silent and corrosive, penetration of the outlying precapitalist zones of the globe” (Political Unconscious 210).

  3. Yarborough’s essay on Douglass is seminal here, although my focus is different.

  CARRIE HYDE

  from “The Climates of Liberty”1

  Strangely, we know more about Listwell’s thoughts and desires than about Madison [Washington’s]; the closest we come to an understanding of Madison’s interior life is through the already externalized—and performative—expression it assumes in his speech.2 The fact that the aptly named Listwell (who listens well, as several critics note)3 forms his initial impression of Madison on the basis of voice alone—”that unfailing index of the soul”—suggests just how much their often lauded interracial friendship depends on disembodiment and spectatorship (HS, 179).4 When Listwell finally catches “a full view of the unsuspecting speaker,” his now increased perception remains one-sided (HS, 178). “As our traveler gazed upon him, he almost trembled at the thought of his dangerous intrusion. Still he could not quit the place. He had long desired to sound the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave. He was not, therefore, disposed to allow so providential an opportunity to pass unimproved” (HS, 179, emphasis mine). Here, what might otherwise have been an assumed good—an opportunity to communicate the feelings and humanity of a slave to white abolitionist readers—is given a notably sinister connotation in the depiction of Listwell’s overeager and almost eroticized surveillance of the “unsuspecting speaker.”

  If, as some critics have suggested, Douglass’s fragmentary depiction of his protagonist is conditioned in part by the limited historical sources on Madison Washington,5 this indirection also eschews the type of ostensibly benevolent spectatorship (exemplified by Listwell) that permeates abolitionism. By making, “the lack of knowledge about Washington” the gambit of his text (as William Andrews observes),6 Douglass turns the fact of historiographical obscurity into an occasion for questioning the model of agency that underwrites biographical narratives of history. Of course, this is not to suggest that Madison Washington’s evocative name did not help abolitionists situate the Creole insurrection firmly within the tradition of the American Revolution, for it did. As the New York Evangelist commented, Madison “wore a name unfit for a slave but finely expressive for a hero.”7 Still, without relinquishing either the heroic stature of Madison’s actions or the rhetorically powerful link to the Revolution, the novella insistently displaces biographical (or at least character-bound) expectations with unstable natural metaphors.

  Douglass forswears the possibility of fathoming Madison’s character before the novella proper has even begun.

  Curiously, earnestly, anxiously we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness, and we return from the pursuit like a wearied and disheartened mother, (after a tedious and unsuccessful search for a lost child,) who returns weighed down with disappointment and sorrow. Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities, we come before our readers. (HS, 175–76)

  With Madison’s interior motivations insistently undisclosed, the narrative uses metaphors of natural phenomena to contextualize actions that (without the causal explanation of intentions) appear not only inscrutable but also erratic. Though glimpsed only in fits and starts—”through the parted clouds and howling tempests … the quivering flash of angry lightening” (HS, 175)—what we know most emphatically about Madison derives from the organizing correspondences between his character and nature. “The Heroic Slave,” in this way, refrains from the type of exceptionalist individualism that its title leads us to expect—instead establishing Madison’s moral character by elaborating its basic comparability with the natural world.

  The proliferation of natural imagery in “The Heroic Slave” shapes more than the presentation of Madison’s character. Natural phenomena (clouds, conflagrations, and storms) also provide the logic and impetus for the novella’s highly episodic structure. Although Madison first attempts to escape just weeks after his forest soliloquy, “a season of clouds and rain set in, wholly preventing me from seeing the North Star, which I had trusted as my guide, not dreaming that clouds might intervene between us” (HS, 189, emphasis mine). This “circumstance,” Madison explains, “was fatal to my project, for in losing my star, I lost my way; so when I supposed I was far towards the North, and had almost gained my freedom, I discovered myself at the very point from which I had started” (HS, 189–90). Nature, here, is a practical obstacle to freedom rather than a metaphor for its inevitability. The passage, however, does not belie the novella’s use of natural imagery as a figure for natural rights. Instead, it underscores, as Peter Meyers argues in another context, that Douglass’s imagination of natural law as “self-executing” “did not betray a naive or willful idealism … More painfully than most, he was mindful that the dynamism of nature and history brought reversals for ill as for good.”8 Douglass’s attention to the erratic character of natural phenomena in “The Heroic Slave” has a similar effect—suggesting that despite its rhetorical and political force, the discourse of natural law does not have the same empirical self-evidence as the physical laws that govern nature. Douglass, however, does more than emplot the prerogatives of natural law; he takes the very restlessness of nature as a model for liberty and reform.

  Restless Liberties

  The plot of “The Heroic Slave” does not develop as a consequence of Madison’s individual agency, but through the sporadic shifts of weather, which structure and contain the virtual world of the novella. Although a “season of clouds” frustrates Madison’s initial attempt to reach the North, he is later forced back on his journey by a wildfire that drives him out of his hiding place in the neighboring swamps.

  The whole world seemed on fire, and it appeared to me that the day of judgment had come; that the burning bowels of the earth had burst forth, and the end of all things was at hand…. The very heavens seemed to rain down fire through the towering trees; it was by the merest chance that I escaped the devouring element. Running before it, and stopping occasionally to take breath, I looked back to behold its frightful ravages, and to drink in its savage magnificence. It was awful, thrilling, solemn, beyond compare. When aided by th
e fitful wind, the merciless tempest of fire swept on, sparkling, creaking, cracking, curling, roaring, out-doing in its dreadful splendor a thousand thunderstorms at once…. It was this grand conflagration that drove me hither; I ran alike from fire and from slavery (HS, 193–94, emphasis mine).

  Employing the rhetoric of millennialism, Douglass presents the fire as a divine “judgment” against slavery, which returns Madison on his journey for freedom. Admittedly, the depiction of Madison as all but bereft of agency generates tensions in a text that tacitly invokes heroism as a condition for political legitimacy. However, by depicting nature as the principle agent, Douglass is able to suggest that the opposition to slavery is more fundamental than the actions of any one individual or group.

  This insistent downplaying of human agency is most dramatic in the representation of the revolt onboard the Creole. The force of the insurrectionists is diminished, on a formal level, by the fact that the revolt is narrated only retrospectively, and narrated, moreover, by a sailor who was unconscious during the event in question. The details of the revolt emerge in the course of a dialogue between two white sailors in a Richmond coffeehouse. Jack Williams, “a regular old salt” “tauntingly” addresses the “first mate” of the Creole: “I say, shipmate, you had rather rough weather on your late passage to Orleans?” (HS, 226). The fictional mate, named Tom Grant, replies “Foul play, as well as foul weather” (HS, 226). Williams speaks of bad weather during the insurrection, but it is worth noting that the premise of the squall is one of the fictional elements of Douglass’s portrayal. The weather during the revolt was, in fact, unremarkable—there was, to quote the Congressional report, “a fresh breeze, and the sky [was] a little hazy, with trade-clouds flying.”9 Douglass invented the squall, but this fictionalization also responded to the diplomatic history of the revolt—and to [Daniel] Webster’s imagined “stress[es] of weather,” in particular.10 We know that Douglass was familiar with Webster’s letters, because he refers to them explicitly in two of his speeches.11 The squall, then, can be seen as a rewriting of Webster, which strategically reappropriates natural metaphors as a figure for natural rights.