Two Slave Rebellions at Sea

by Frederick Douglass

  1. The ship was named after Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), who served as the president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865.

  2. The capital and chief port of Uruguay.

  3. Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.355.

  4. Douglass had regularly compared Madison Washington to the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint-Louverture (1743–1803), the South Carolina conspirator Denmark Vesey (c. 1767–1822), and the Virginia rebel Nathaniel Turner (1800–1831). The former slave Shields Green (c. 1836–1859) and the free black John A. Copeland (1834–1859) participated in John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and were hanged on 16 December 1859.

  5. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 5.5.68. Antony ironically describes Caesar’s assassin Brutus as “the noblest Roman of them all”; Douglass probably was using these words with reference to Caesar himself.

  PART 4

  Narratives of the Creole Rebellion, 1855–1901

  THIS SECTION PRESENTS SIX narrative accounts of the Creole rebellion published after Douglass’s 1853 The Heroic Slave. Some of the accounts draw on the historical record, some draw on Douglass, and some draw on each other; William Wells Brown’s chapters on Madison Washington in his black histories of the 1860s were particularly influential. Genre is important to representations of Washington and the Creole rebellion. Whereas Douglass clearly made use of fictional techniques, the writers that follow vary in their approaches. William C. Nell’s short sketch of Madison Washington for his 1855 history of black revolutionaries works with the known facts. Samuel Ringgold Ward writes about Washington in his 1855 autobiography, and he too stays close to the historical record. William Wells Brown, however, in his 1863 and 1867 histories of black freedom fighters of the Americas (which focus on African Americans and the Civil War) goes the route of Douglass in using fictional techniques to create a lively historical narrative. Lydia Maria Child draws on Brown, but in her 1865 educational anthology for freedpeople, she uses the rebellion to offer lessons for domestic life. Later in the nineteenth century, Robert Purvis approached the rebellion through the mode of personal reminiscence, providing new information about Washington and himself. Approximately ten years later, Pauline E. Hopkins offered fresh perspectives on Brown’s and perhaps Douglass’s accounts, using fictional techniques to reimagine the Creole rebellion and its gender implications. For Hopkins, who was writing at the turn into the twentieth century, the Creole rebellion remained a compelling moment in a usable African American historical past.

  WILLIAM C. NELL

  “Madison Washington”

  The Boston-based African American William Cooper Nell (1816–1874) was a staunch Garrisonian. From 1847 to 1851, he served as assistant editor of Douglass’s newspaper the North Star, and was its original publisher; but when Douglass broke with Garrison in 1851, Nell resigned from the paper. Like Douglass, Nell believed that African Americans should have all the rights of U.S. citizenship, and to that end he campaigned to integrate Boston’s public schools. To support his argument for black citizenship, he turned to history, writing two books that sought to demonstrate blacks’ crucial military contributions to the United States: Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851) and The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, with Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons: To Which Is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of Colored Americans (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855); the latter had an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The 1851 volume focused on blacks’ participation in the wars that helped found and sustain the nation; the 1855 volume, from which this selection is taken, took a more aggressive (and decidedly non-Garrisionian) stance in adding admiring accounts of such black rebels as Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, David Walker, and Madison Washington.

  An American slaver, named the Creole, well manned and provided in every respect, and equipped for carrying slaves, sailed from Virginia to New Orleans, on the 30th October, 1841, with a cargo of one hundred and thirty-five slaves. When eight days out, a portion of the slaves, under the direction of one of their number, named MADISON WASHINGTON, succeeded, after a slight struggle, in gaining command of the vessel. The sagacity, bravery and humanity of this man do honor to his name; and, but for his complexion, would excite universal admiration. Of the twelve white men employed on board the well-manned slaver, only one fell a victim to their atrocious business. This man, after discharging his musket at the negroes, rushed forward with a handspike, which, in the darkness of the evening, they mistook for another musket; he was stabbed with a bowie knife wrested from the captain. Two of the sailors were wounded, and their wounds were dressed by the negroes. The captain was also injured, and he was put into the forehold, and his wounds dressed; and his wife, child and niece were unmolested. It does not appear that the blacks committed a single act of robbery, or treated their captives with the slightest unnecessary harshness; and they declared, at the time, that all they had done was for their freedom. The vessel was carried into Nassau, and the British authorities at that place refused to consign the liberated slaves again to bondage, or even to surrender the “mutineers and murderers” to perish on Southern gibbets.

  SAMUEL RINGGOLD WARD

  “Men and Women of Mark”

  The black abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–ca. 1866) began his career as an antislavery lecturer for William Lloyd Garrison but broke with him in 1840 to embrace the religious and political abolitionism of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In 1849 and 1850, he debated Douglass on whether the Constitution was a proslavery or antislavery document. Influenced by Garrison, Douglass in these debates argued that the Constitution was a proslavery document, but by 1851 he had adopted Ward’s politically pragmatic view that it was antislavery. By the early 1850s, Douglass had also publicly rejected Garrison’s insistence on nonviolent moral suasion and found himself more congenial with Ward’s position on the value of violent black resistance. In 1851, Ward joined the Syracuse Vigilance Committee and helped free the fugitive slave William “Jerry” McHenry from federal custody. Disillusioned with the United States, he moved to Canada and eventually to Jamaica. Ward’s account of Madison Washington and the Creole rebellion is taken from the chapter “Resistance to Slave Policy” in his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England (London: John Snow, 1855).

  The slaves advertised as having run away, or as having been arrested upon suspicion of being runaways—as any one may see in any Southern newspaper, political or religious—are men and women of mark. “Large frames” are ascribed to them; “intelligent countenances;” “can read a little;” “may pass, or attempt to pass, as a freeman;” “a good mechanic;” “had a bold look;” “above the middle height, very ingenious, may pass for white;” “very intelligent.” No one who has seen such advertisements can fail to be struck with them. A mulattress left her master, Mr. Devonport, in Syracuse, in 1839, who “had no traces of African origin”: as advertised. Mr. D. said she was worth 2,500 dollars, nearly £500. Such are the slaves who run away, as a rule. I do not deny that some of “inferior lots” come too, but such as those described form the rule.

  Then, as fugitives, when we recollect what they must undergo in every part of their exodus, we can but see them as among the most admirable of any race. The fugitive exercises patience, fortitude, and perseverance, connected with and fed by an ardent and unrestrained and resistless love of liberty, such as cause men to be admired everywhere—that is, white men everywhere, but in the United States. The lonely, toiling journey; the endurance of the excitement from constant danger; the hearing of the yell and howl of the bloodhound; the knowledge of close, hot pursuit; the dread of capture, and the determination not to be taken alive—all these, furnaces of trial as they are, purify and ennoble the man who has to pass through them. All these are inseparable from the ordinary incidents in the northward passage of the fugitive: and when he reaches us, he is, first, wha
t the raw material of nature was; and, secondly, what the improving process of flight has made him. Both have fitted him the more highly to appreciate, the more fully to enjoy, and the more wisely to use, that for which he came to us, for which he was willing to endure all things, for which, indeed, he would have yielded life itself—liberty.

  Let me illustrate these points by a few facts. A Negro, Madison Washington by name—a name, a pair of names, of which he was well worthy—was a slave in Virginia. He determined to be free. He fled to Canada and became free. There the noble fellow was dissatisfied—so dissatisfied, that he determined to leave free Canada, and return to Virginia: and wherefore? His wife was there, a slave. Freedom was too sweet to be enjoyed without her. That she was a slave marred his joys. She must share them, even at the risk of his losing them. So in 1841 he went back to Virginia, to the neighbourhood in which his wife lived, lingered about in the woods, and sent word to her of his whereabouts; others were unfortunately informed as well, and he was captured, taken to Washington, and sold to a Negro-trader. One scarcely knows which most to admire—the heroism this man displayed in the freeing of himself, or the noble manliness that risked all for the freedom of his wife. One cannot help thinking that, as his captors led Madison Washington to the slave pen, they must have been smitten with the thought that they were handling a man far superior to themselves. When a load of Negroes had been made up, Madison Washington, with a large number of others—119, I think—was put on board the schooner “Creole,” to sail out of the mouth of the Potomac River and southwards to the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi, and to New Orleans, the great slave-buying port of America. But on the night of the 9th of November, 1841, Madison Washington and two others, named respectively Pompey Garrison, and Ben Blacksmith, arose upon the captain and crew, leading all the other slaves after them, and gave the captain the alternative of sailing the vessel into a British port, one of the Bahamas, or of going overboard. The captain, wisely and safely for himself, chose the former; and these three brave blacks, naturally distrusting the forced promise of the Yankee captain, stood sentry over him until he did steer the “Creole” into the port of Nassau, island of New Providence, touching which they became freemen. The United States Government, through the Honourable Edward Everett, demanded of Lord Palmerston gold to pay for these men.1 The Court of St. James2 entertained the demand—not one moment. What lacked these men of being Tells, Mazzinis, and Kossuths,3 in their way, except white or whitish skins?

  1. Ward included this note: “This was during the time when the Honourable Daniel Webster first was Secretary of State. It was the first time the British Government had rejected such a demand, I am sorry to say.” See the selection from Webster in part 2 of the volume.

  2. The central court of Great Britain and the official residence of the British monarchy.

  3. Renowned revolutionaries: William Tell was the legendary Swiss revolutionary of the fourteenth century; Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) fought for Italian unification and was the leader of the Roman Revolution of 1848–49; and the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894) led the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49.

  WILLIAM WELLS BROWN

  “Slave Revolt at Sea”

  Born into slavery, William Wells Brown (1814–1884) escaped in 1834 and quickly emerged as a black abolitionist leader. Over the years, he also became a man of letters, writing novels, plays, autobiographies, travel narratives, and histories. Among his published works are Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847); Clotel (1853), generally regarded as the first novel by an African American; The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. A Drama in Five Acts (1858); and My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People (1880). Initially linked with William Lloyd Garrison, who published his Narrative, Brown soon went his own way, and during the late 1850s he became involved with the movement encouraging blacks to immigrate to Haiti. But with the coming of the Civil War, he abandoned that cause and argued for blacks’ rights to citizenship in the United States. To make his case, he wrote a series of histories showing blacks’ contributions to the nation, emphasizing the important role of black soldiers in the Civil War. But he also highlighted blacks’ willingness to use violence to gain their freedom, and in both The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) and The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1867), the source of the text below, he presents portraits of a number of revolutionary blacks. He first wrote about Madison Washington in The Black Man, and that chapter influenced Lydia Maria Child’s account of the Creole rebellion in her 1865 The Freedmen’s Book. For his 1867 chapter on Washington, Brown added new material, connecting Washington with such black revolutionary heroes as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner.

  The revolt on board of the brig “Creole,” on the high seas, by a number of slaves who had been shipped for the Southern market, in the year 1841, created at the time a profound sensation throughout the country. Before entering upon it, however, I will introduce to the reader the hero of the occasion.

  Among the great number of fugitive slaves who arrived in Canada towards the close of the year 1840, was one whose tall figure, firm step, and piercing eye attracted at once the attention of all who beheld him. Nature had treated him as a favorite. His expressive countenance painted and reflected every emotion of his soul. There was a fascination in the gaze of his finely cut eyes that no one could withstand. Born of African parentage, with no mixture in his blood, he was one of the handsomest of his race. His dignified, calm, and unaffected features announced at a glance that he was endowed with genius, and created to guide his fellow-men. He called himself Madison Washington, and said that his birthplace was in the “Old Dominion.”1 He might have been twenty-five years; but very few slaves have any correct idea of their age. Madison was not poorly dressed, and had some money at the end of his journey, which showed that he was not from amongst the worst-used slaves of the South. He immediately sought employment at a neighboring farm, where he remained some months. A strong, able-bodied man, and a good worker, and apparently satisfied with his situation, his employer felt that he had a servant who would stay with him a long while. The farmer would occasionally raise a conversation, and try to draw from Madison some account of his former life, but in this he failed; for the fugitive was a man of few words, and kept his own secrets. His leisure hours were spent in learning to read and write; and in this he seemed to take the utmost interest. He appeared to take no interest in the sports and amusements that occupied the attention of others. Six months had not passed ere Madison began to show signs of discontent. In vain his employer tried to discover the cause.

  “Do I not pay you enough, and treat you in a becoming manner?” asked Mr. Dickson one day when the fugitive seemed in a very desponding mood.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Madison.

  “Then why do you appear so dissatisfied of late?”

  “Well, sir,” said the fugitive, “since you have treated me with such kindness, and seem to take so much interest in me, I will tell you the reason why I have changed, and appear to you to be dissatisfied. I was born in slavery, in the State of Virginia. From my earliest recollections I hated slavery, and determined to be free. I have never yet called any man master, though I have been held by three different men who claimed me as their property. The birds in the trees and the wild beasts of the forest made me feel that I, like them, ought to be free. My feelings were all thus centred in the one idea of liberty, of which I thought by day and dreamed by night. I had scarcely reached my twentieth year, when I became acquainted with the angelic being who has since become my wife. It was my intention to have escaped with her before we were married, but circumstances prevented.

  “I took her to my bosom as my wife, and then resolved to make the attempt. But, unfortunately, my plans were discovered; and, to save myself from being caught and sold off to the far South, I escaped to the woods, where I remained during many weary months. As I could not bring my wife away, I w
ould not come without her. Another reason for remaining was that I hoped to get up an insurrection of the slaves, and thereby be the means of their liberation. In this, too, I failed. At last it was agreed, between my wife and I, that I should escape to Canada, get employment, save my earnings, and with it purchase her freedom. With the hope of attaining this end, I came into your service. I am now satisfied, that, with the wages I can command here, it will take me not less than five years to obtain by my labor the amount sufficient to purchase the liberty of my dear Susan. Five years will be too long for me to wait; for she may die, or be sold away, ere I can raise the money. This, sir, makes me feel low spirited; and I have come to the rash determination to return to Virginia for my wife.”