“The Heroic Slave,” a novella by Frederick Douglass, was published in March1853 and is now recognized as the first work of African American long fiction. Amplifying the history of Madison Washington, leader of the successful 1841 Creole slave ship mutiny, Douglass creates for him a fuller chronicle and voice to articulate his motives and champion his actions. The story opens by insisting that despite his slave origins, Washington deserves a place of honor alongside the American Revolutionary hero evoked by his name. Douglass then introduces him through a soliloquy overheard by a white Ohioan, Listwell, who becomes an abolitionist upon hearing the unseen orator's yearning for freedom. When years later the distinctively African-featured, intellectually keen, physically intimidating yet kind-spirited Washington escapes from Virginia, Listwell assists him in reaching Canada. Listwell next meets Washington years later in Virginia, where Washington, recaptured while attempting to free his wife, is bound for the New Orleans slave market aboard the Creole. In the climactic mutiny, narrated by the ship's surviving first mate, Washington displays both militancy and mercy, resolutely initiating violence that leaves two dead but temperately preventing further bloodshed. Coupling the slaves’ uprising with a contemporaneous squall, Douglass employs popular romantic sea imagery with his earlier American Revolutionary discourse to fashion a powerful statement about slaves’ natural right to freedom. Studied for its rhetorical design, its relationship to Douglass's autobiographical writing, its development of a fictive voice, its gendered conception of ideal manhood, and its endorsement of violent revolt, the tale attests to the complex motives behind early African American fiction.
Bibliography
- Richard 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 1990, pp. 166–188.
- Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, 199.
- pp. 115–124
Brad S. Bor
