The Heroic Slave

by Frederick Douglass

  Mr. D. spoke of Nathaniel Turner, a noble, brave and generous soul—patient, disinterested, and fearless of suffering. How was he treated, for endeavoring to gain his own liberty, and that of his enslaved brethren, by the self-same means which the Revolutionary fathers employed? When taken by his enemies, he was stripped naked, and compelled to walk barefooted, some thirty yards, over burning coals, and, when he reached the end, he fell, pierced by a hundred American bullets!1 I say to you, exclaimed Mr. Douglass, get out of this position of body-guard to slavery! Cease from any longer rendering aid and comfort to the tyrant-master!

  I know how you will reply to this; you will say that I, and such as I, are not men; you look upon us as beneath you; you look upon us as naturally and necessarily degraded. But, nevertheless, we are MEN! (Cheers.) You may pile up statutes against us and our manhood as high as heaven, and still we are not changed thereby. WE ARE MEN. (Immense cheering.) Yes! we are your brothers!

  1. Turner was tried in a local court and executed by hanging on 11 November 1831. Before the trial, whites killed approximately 120 blacks in retaliation.

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  from “Address at the Great Anti-Colonization Meeting in New York”

  On 23–24 April 1849, African American leaders met in New York City to voice their opposition to the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization established in 1816 by whites who hoped to ship the nation’s blacks to Africa. In an effort to achieve their goals, the colonizationists purchased land in Africa and founded the country of Liberia. In 1847, Liberia became an independent nation, but it continued its association with the ACS. During the summer of 1848, Liberia’s first president, J. J. Roberts, toured New York City and, with the support of the ACS, tried to entice free blacks to immigrate to his country. Douglass and other abolitionists, black and white, were infuriated by what they regarded as the ACS’s racist agenda of trying to create a white America by insisting that Africa was blacks’ “natural” home. At the 1849 meeting, Douglass reiterated his opposition to the ACS, arguing for African Americans’ rights to citizenship in their native country while warning of the possibility of black violence from the Madison Washingtons of the United States. The minutes of the meeting were published in an article titled “Great Anti-Colonization Meeting in New York,” which appeared in the 11 May 1849 issue of Douglass’s North Star, the source of the excerpt below.

  The cry of the slave goes up to heaven, to God, and unless the American people shall break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free, that spirit in man which abhors chains, and will not be restrained by them, will lead those sable arms that have long been engaged in cultivating, beautifying and adorning the South, to spread death and devastation there. (Great applause.) Some men go for the abolition of Slavery by peaceable means. So do I; I am a peace man; but I recognize in the Southern States at this moment, as has been remarked here, a state of war. Sir, I know that I am speaking now, not to this audience alone, for I see reporters here, and I learn that what is spoken here is to be published, and will be read by Colonizationists and perhaps by slaveholders. I want them to know that at least one colored man in the Union, peace man though he is, would greet with joy the glad news should it come here tomorrow, that an insurrection had broken out in the Southern States (Great Applause.) I want them to know that a black man cherishes the sentiment—that one of the fugitive slaves holds it, and that it is not impossible that some other black men (A voice—we are all so here,) may have occasion at some time or other, to put this theory into practice. Sir, I want to alarm the slaveholders, and not to alarm them by mere declamation or by mere bold assertions, but to show them that there is really danger in persisting in the crime of continuing Slavery in this land. I want them to know that there are some Madison Washingtons in this country (Applause.) The American people have been accustomed to regard us as inferior beings. The Colonization Society has told them that we are inferior beings, and that in consequence of our calm and tame submission to the yoke which they have imposed upon us; to their chains, fetters, gags, lashes, whipping-posts, dungeons and blood-hounds, we must be regarded as inferior—that there is no fight in us,—and that is evidence enough to prove that God intended us to retain the position which we now occupy. I want to prevent them from laying this flattering unaction to their souls. There are colored persons who hold other views, who entertain other feelings, with respect to this matter.

  As an illustration of the spirit that is in the black man, let me refer to the story of Madison Washington. The treatment of that man by this Government was such as to disgrace it in the eyes of the civilized world. He escaped some years ago from Virginia, and succeeded in reaching Canada, where, nestled in the mane of the British Lion, the American Eagle might scream in vain above him, from his bloody beak and talons he was free. There he could repose in quiet and peace. But he remembered that he had left in bondage a wife, and in the true spirit of a noble minded and noble hearted man, he said; while my wife is a slave I cannot be free. I will leave the shores of Canada, and God being my helper, I will go to Virginia, and snatch my wife from the bloody hands of the oppressor. He went to Virginia, against the entreaties of friends, against the advice of my friend Gurney,1 whom to name here ought to secure a round of applause. (Loud applause.) He went, contrary to the advice of another—I was going to say, a nobler hero, but I can scarcely recognize a nobler one than Gurney. Robert Purvis2 was the man: he advised him not to go, and for a time he was inclined to listen to his counsel. He told him it would be of no use for him to go, for that as sure as he went he would only be himself enslaved, and could of course do nothing towards freeing his wife. Under the influence of his counsel he consented not to go; but when he left the house of Purvis, the thoughts of his wife in Slavery came back to his mind to trouble his peace and disturb his slumbers. So he resolved again to take no counsel either on the one hand or the other, but to go back to Virginia and rescue his wife if possible. That was a noble resolve (applause;) and the result was still more noble. On reaching there he was unfortunately arrested and thrown into prison and put under heavy irons. At the appointed time he was brought manacled upon the auctioneer’s block, and sold to a New Orleans trader. We see nothing more of Madison Washington, until we see him at the head of a gang of one hundred slaves destined for the Southern market. He, together with the rest of the gang, were driven on board the brig Creole, at Richmond, and placed beneath the hatchway, in irons; the slave-dealer—I sometimes think I see him—walking the deck of that ship freighted with human misery, quietly smoking his segar, calmly and coolly calculating the value of human flesh beneath the hatchway. The first day passed away—the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh passed, and there was nothing on board to disturb the repose of this iron-hearted monster. He was quietly hoping for a pleasant breeze to waft him to the New Orleans market before it should be glutted with human flesh. On the 8th day it seems that Madison Washington succeeded in getting off one of his irons, for he had been at work all the while. The same day he succeeded in getting the irons off the hands of some seventeen or eighteen others. When the slaveholders came down below they found their human chattels apparently all with their irons on, but they were broken. About twilight on the ninth day, Madison, it seems, reached his head above the hatchway, looked out on the swelling billows of the Atlantic, and feeling the breeze that coursed over its surface, was inspired with the spirit of freedom. He leapt from beneath the hatchway, gave a cry like an eagle to his comrades beneath, saying, we must go through (Great Applause.) Suiting the action to the word, in an instant his guilty master was prostrate on the deck, and in a very few minutes Madison Washington, a black man, with woolly head, high cheek bones, protruding lip, distended nostril, and retreating forehead,3 had the mastery of that ship, and under his direction, that brig was brought safely into the port of Nassau, New Providence (Applause.)

  Sir, I thank God that there is some part of his footstool upon which the bloody statutes of Slavery cannot be wri
tten. They cannot be written on the proud, towering billows of the Atlantic. The restless waves will not permit those bloody statutes to be recorded there. This part of God’s domain is free, and I hope that ere long our own soil will be also free. (Applause.)

  1. The British abolitionist and Quaker Joseph John Gurney (1788–1847) spoke against slavery during tours of North America and the West Indies during 1837–40. He may have met Madison Washington in Canada.

  2. The African American abolitionist Robert Purvis (1810–1898) resided most of his life in Philadelphia. He used his considerable wealth to support abolitionism and black uplift. He met Madison Washington when Washington was traveling from Canada to Virginia; see Purvis’s account of their meeting in “A Priceless Picture,” in part 4.

  3. Here Douglass is mocking the derogatory descriptions of blacks popularized by the era’s racial ethnologists. See Douglass’s attack on the “science” of ethnology in his The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered: An Address, Before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, N.Y., 1854).

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  from “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

  On 5 July 1852, Douglass delivered his famous Fourth of July speech before a racially mixed audience of approximately six hundred people in Rochester, New York. He spoke on 5 July because of a tradition among black and white abolitionists to postpone Fourth of July celebrations as a way of highlighting the nation’s failure to live up to the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. By year’s end, when Douglass had composed The Heroic Slave, he had come to conceive of Madison Washington as, in part, a black rebel in the Jeffersonian tradition, but one who was willing to fight for the principles that the slaveholding Jefferson and the nation itself had been willing to abandon. Douglass published the speech as a pamphlet in 1852, and then in 1855 published “Extract from the Oration” (several key pages from the longer work) in the appendix to his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), the source of the text below.

  Fellow-Citizens—Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings, resulting from your independence to us?

  Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”1

  But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

  “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”2

  Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July. Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;”3 I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

  But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the state of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be,) subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being. The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

  For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the negro race. Is it
not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that, while we are reading, writing, and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men—digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and, above all, confessing and worshiping the christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave—we are called upon to prove that we are men!

  Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day in the presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.