Two Slave Rebellions at Sea

by Frederick Douglass

  In a spirit not unlike Webster’s, the “old salt” Williams insists that the real cause of that “whole affair” could not possibly rest solely with the slaves. The “whole disaster,” Williams declares, “was the result of ignorance of the real character of darkies in general…. All that is needed in dealing with a set of rebellious darkies, is to show that yer not afraid of ’em” (HS, 226–27). Had the sailors lost control of the ship as a result of the weather alone, Williams continues to suggest, that at least would have “relieve[d] the affair of its present discreditable features” (HS, 231). Acts of nature, as Grant remarks, are seen as unavoidable, and thus more legitimate. “For a ship to go down under a calm sky is, upon the first flush of it, disgraceful either to sailors or caulkers. But when we learn, that by some mysterious disturbance in nature, the waters parted beneath, and swallowed the ship up, we lose our indignation and disgust in lamentation of the disaster, and in awe of the Power which controls the elements” (HS, 231). By establishing a parallel between “foul play” and “foul weather,” the premise of the squall allows Douglass to maintain the agency of the slaves, while also suggesting that the revolt (and the resulting emancipation of the slaves) was prompted by an underlying “disturbance in nature.”12

  The retrospective narration of the revolt distances the reader from its drama and urgency, but this remove facilitates Douglass’s effort to present Madison’s heroism in the more authoritative terms of relative disinterestedness. Tom Grant—who discerns Madison to be “a superior man” but is unwilling to concede that the “principles of 1776” apply to men he deems inferior on the basis of “color” (HS, 238)—is pivotal to the ideological authority of “The Heroic Slave” for this very reason.13 Offering an intermediary between Listwell’s avowed (if still fairly anemic)14 abolitionism and Williams’s blatant bigotry, Grant models a form of conciliatory identification with Madison.15 The fact that the presentation of Madison’s heroism is never free from white mediation in the novella—whether in Grant’s reluctant admission of respect, or in the (fabricated) fact that Listwell provides Madison with the files that he uses to free himself and the other slaves (HS, 223; 235)16—has often been regarded as the novella’s failure fully to imagine black self-determination.17 However, the decision to narrate the revolt not only retrospectively, but also dialogically, does not thereby reproduce the ideologically compromised assumptions of the novella’s white characters. Instead, the narrative’s reliance on figures of mediation tacitly identifies public perception (not the capacity of slaves) as the principal obstacle to emancipation. Douglass’s suggestive naming of Grant, which has gone unremarked in scholarship, echoes this emphasis—suggesting that rights (even when conceptualized as natural) still require social and legal recognition.

  Despite the fact that both of the venues in which “The Heroic Slave” initially appeared—an antislavery gift book and Douglass’s newspaper—were likely to attract readers who already self-identified as abolitionists, the text self-consciously addresses itself to the unconverted reader. The conversation between Grant and Williams provides a formal mechanism for defamiliarizing commonplace stereotypes about the innate servility of slaves. Grant responds to Williams’s imputation that the sailors could have prevented the revolt through better management by arguing that the outward submission is strategic and conditioned by context.

  I deny that the negro is, naturally, a coward, or that your theory of managing slaves will stand the test of salt water…. It is one thing to manage a company of slaves on a Virginia plantation, and quite another thing to quell an insurrection on the lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty. 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 (HS, 228).

  By contrasting the state of Virginia with the open ocean, Grant intimates that slavery, far from natural, can be maintained only in the artificial environs of a plantation. For this reason, as Grant’s alternate scenario of Algerian enslavement dramatizes, slavery can as easily claim white auditors as it does the subjects of their curiosity.

  The more general perspectival distance from the insurrectionists helps enforce the objective tone of these pointed remarks, but it becomes more problematic in the representation of the revolt itself. As if to take its formal aesthetic of mediation and opacity to a comic extreme, at the beginning of the revolt, Grant, our only eyewitness, is “knocked senseless to the deck” (HS, 234). When he regains consciousness after an uncertain interval, the violent struggle and subsequent reversal of power have already occurred. Grant explains, “When I came to myself, (which I did in a few minutes, I suppose, for it was yet quite light,) there was not a white man on deck. The sailors were all aloft in the rigging, and dared not come down. Captain Clarke and Mr. Jameson lay stretched on the quarter-deck,—both dying,—while Madison himself stood at the helm unhurt” (HS, 234, emphasis mine).

  Critics tend to suggest that Douglass uses the premise of Grant’s unconsciousness to minimize the scene of violence and so facilitate the idealization of Madison as a hero,18 but violence, it is worth stressing, is not absent so much as displaced onto the portentous figure of the squall.

  By this time the apprehended squall had burst upon us. The wind howled furiously,—the ocean was white with foam, which, on account of the darkness, we could see only by the quick flashes of lightning that darted occasionally from the angry sky. All was alarm and confusion. Hideous cries came up from the slave women. Above the roaring billows a succession of heavy thunder rolled along, swelling the terrific din. Owing to the great darkness, and a sudden shift of the wind, we found ourselves in the trough of the sea. When shipping a heavy sea over the starboard bow, the bodies of the captain and Mr. Jameson were washed overboard…. A more savage thunder-gust never swept the ocean. (HS, 236–37)

  Recalling the constellation of natural metaphors that organizes the elliptical presentation of Madison in the preface—”howling tempests,” “the menacing rock on a perilous coast” and “angry lightning” (HS, 175)—Douglass uses the squall to both express and contain the uncomfortable violence of the revolt. With their precise physical condition undisclosed, and with causality eclipsed in the passive voice, we are thus told that “the bodies of the captain and Mr. Jameson were washed overboard.” Admittedly less gory than the official account of the insurrection (which includes a knife fight and a shooting), the squall, nonetheless, is not only sublime, but “furious,” “terrific,” “hideous.” “The Heroic Slave,” in this respect, does not repress the violence of the insurrection so much as reconfigure its underlying cause. Douglass presents the revolt as an effect of nature—more fundamental, if also more fitful, than the actions of an individual agent.

  Evoking a long tradition of representing national turmoil through the figure of the ship of state tossed to and fro at sea, Douglass uses the ocean as a symbolic counterpoint to extant national law. This is particularly emphatic in the passage that appears to have served as the prototype for Madison Washington’s often quoted proclamation in “The Heroic Slave” that “you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free” (HS, 237).19 In his 1849 speech—whose title, “Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano,” itself imagines emancipation as an imminent natural force—Douglass uses the “restless waves” of the ocean as a rhetorical directive for reform:

  Sir, I thank God that there is some part of his footstool upon which the bloody statutes of Slavery cannot be written. 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; those foaming billows forbid it; old ocean gnawing with its hungry surges upon our rockbound coast preaches a lesson to American soil: ‘You may bind chains upon the limbs of your people if you will; you may place the yoke upon them if you will; you may brand them with i
rons; you may write out your statutes and preserve them in the archives of the nation if you will; but the moment they mount the surface of our unsteady waves, those statutes are obliterated, and the slave stands redeemed, disenthralled.’ This part of God’s domain then is free, and I hope that ere long our own soil will also be free.20

  Douglass conceptualizes the ocean as an explicitly denationalizing force. The Atlantic is not only outside of the nation proper; it erodes the coasts that give it form. The analogy between the soil and the laws is significant in this respect. For in underscoring the link between territoriality and positive law, Douglass presents the ocean as a model for an essentially anarchic freedom. Freedom here, as is so often the case, is an expressly negative concept, imagined alternately as baptism and destruction.

  The Atlantic—as the personification of natural law—didactically “preaches a lesson to American soil,” but it remains an episodic force, unsteady and transient. Drawing together the archetypal liberal tropes of the state of nature and the founding scene of revolution, Douglass represents the ocean as a political tabula rasa that is both a precondition for constructing political ideals and, if they are not fulfilled, for periodically dissolving and reforming individual communities. Thus, as much as Douglass might idealize the ocean as an extra-national utopian space (which if not “nowhere” is still foremost not the nation),21 his ultimate objective is not properly transnational or cosmopolitan, as several recent critics have suggested.22 Instead, Douglass prescriptively uses the universalizing rhetoric of natural law as a model for national reform.

  1. From Carrie Hyde, “The Climates of Liberty: Natural Rights in the Creole Case and ‘The Heroic Slave,’” American Literature 85, no. 3 (September 2013): 475–504; the excerpt is from 487–94. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press (www.dukeupress.edu); all rights reserved. The footnotes have been renumbered and in some cases reframed by the author. Our thanks to Carrie Hyde for her help in adapting the selection for our volume.

  2. Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” in Autographs for Freedom, Michigan Historical Reprint Series (1853; rpt. Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office, 2005), 179–80. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HS.

  3. Listwell, as [Robert] Stepto was the first to point out, “is indeed a ‘Listwell’ in that he enlists as an abolitionist and does well by the cause—in fact he does magnificently. He is also a ‘Listwell’ in that he listens well” (“Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’ ‘The Heroic Slave,’” The Georgia Review 36.2 [1982]: 365).

  4. Marianne Noble, for example, reads this gesture more affirmatively, arguing that “The Heroic Slave” “rejects the visual/corporeal model of persuasion … and promotes instead a complex idea of sympathy grounded in listening” (“Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and My Bondage and My Freedom,” Studies in American Fiction 34.1 [2006]: 59).

  5. Both Maggie Sale and Paul Jones read Douglass’s prefatory remarks as acknowledging his limited archive. Maggie Sale, “To Make the Past Useful: Frederick Douglass’ Politics of Solidarity,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 51.3 (1995): 25–60, esp. 47; Paul Christian Jones, “Copying What the Master Had Written: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and the Southern Historical Romance,” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 38.4 (2000): 5.

  6. William L. Andrews, “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative,” PMLA 105.1 (1990), 23–34, esp. 29.

  7. “The Hero-Mutineers,” New York Evangelist, December 25, 1841, 206.

  8. Peter C. Meyers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 15.

  9. Senate Document 51: Message from the President … January 20, 1842, 27th Congress, 2nd Session, 37.

  10. Webster analogizes the revolt to the ungovernable effects of the “weather” in order to deemphasize the agency of the insurrectionists. See Senate Document 1: Message from the President…. December 7, 1842, 27th Congress, 3rd Session, 121.

  11. Douglass refers to Webster’s role in (and characterization of) the diplomatic dispute in his earlier speeches on the Creole. In “Slavery the Slumbering Volcano,” Douglass mentions Webster’s earlier letter to Edward Everett, as well as Ashburton’s role in the dispute. For other allusions to the controversy, see, “American and Scottish Prejudice Against the Slave: An Address Delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 1 May 1846” and “America’s Compromise with Slavery,” The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame, 5 volumes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–92): 2:157–8; 1:245; 1:211. [Earlier in the essay, Hyde discusses the role of Secretary of State Daniel Webster in the diplomatic exchanges between U.S. and British government officials. Webster demanded that the British return the slaves to the U.S. slave traders who claimed them as their property; the British refused to honor his request. Eds.]

  12. As Krista Walter notes, Grant’s counterfactual example of ships foundering as a result of natural forces indicates that he can “plainly see the hand of Providence” in the revolt (“Trappings of Nationalism in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave,” African American Review 34.2 [2000]: 240).

  13. For an alternate reading of the political significance of the narrative’s dependence on white voice, see Ivy G. Wilson, “On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave,’” PMLA 121.2 (2006): 461.

  14. The fact that Listwell allows himself to be mistaken as a slaveholder while in the South (in order to avoid disagreeable disputations with the locals) is one of several passages that emphasize his self-interested complacency (HS, 214).

  15. As Walter notes, Grant functions as a “figure for the reluctant reader” (“Trappings,” 239).

  16. Before the actual revolt in 1841, the slaves on the Creole, in fact, were neither chained nor fettered.

  17. The problem, as William Andrews phrases it, is the text’s “rhetorical dependence on white precedents for the sanctioning of acts of black violence”; see To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 187.

  18. Maggie Sale, for example, argues that “Douglass disarms gendered, racialist discourses that would figure Washington as a ‘black murderer’ or raging savage.” However, the evasion of violence has led many critics to suggest that the tale is too conciliatory in its address. Richard Yarborough observes that Douglass “strips his fictional slave rebel of much of his radical, subversive force,” while Ivy Wilson argues that by narrating the revolt indirectly through a white sailor the story reproduces the authenticating logic of the white abolitionist preface. Without ignoring these tensions, I would like to suggest that this indirection is not a symptomatic omission confined to the depiction of insurrectionary violence, but something that Douglass insists on self-consciously throughout “The Heroic Slave”—and which significantly informs his conception of the project of liberty. Sale, “To Make the Past Useful,” 51–2; Yarborough, “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 166–88, esp. 181; Wilson, “On Native Ground,” 461.

  19. Douglass’s characterization of the “restless[ness]” of the ocean echoes one of the most compelling passages in William Ellery Channing’s book-length consideration of the implications of the Creole revolt. “The sea is the exclusive property of no nation … No state can write its laws on that restless surface.” William E. Channing, The Duty of the Free States, or Remarks Suggested by the Case of the Creole (Boston: William Crosby & Company, 1842), 28.

  20. Douglass Papers, 2:158.

  21. As Carl Schmidt suggests in his discussion of the utopian character of the oceanic order, implicit in More’s Utopia (
1516) “and in the profound and productive formulation of the word Utopia, was the possibility of an enormous destruction of all orientations based on the old nomos of the earth…. Utopia did not mean any simple and general nowhere (or erewhon), but a U-topos, which, by comparison even with its negation, A-topos, has a stronger negation in relation to topos.” Carl Schmidt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006), 178.

  22. As William Boelhower notes, the Creole case and its depiction in “The Heroic Slave” have “become a flashpoint for tracing Atlantic-world trajectories” (“The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix,” American Literary History 20, no. 1 [2007], 83–101, esp. 97). See also Ivy G. Wilson, “On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave,’” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 453–68. There also has been a surge of interest in the Atlantic contours of Douglass’s career more generally—especially his lectures abroad and his post as U.S. consul in Haiti. The recent Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, for example, includes two pieces on the topic (see Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, “Douglass’s Black Atlantic: The Caribbean,” and Paul Giles, “Douglass’s Black Atlantic: Britain, Europe, Egypt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Maurice Lee [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2009]: 146–59 and 132–45.)

  Chronology of Frederick Douglass, Madison Washington, and Resistance to Slavery