One of the ironies, or tragedies, of “The Heroic Slave” is that while Douglass wants to impress on his readers the intrinsic eligibility of African Americans for citizenship, the protagonist can find refuge only in another country. This irony makes the work an eerie precursor to James Baldwin. Yet for Douglass to appeal to his audience, he must privilege 1776 and the Declaration of Independence as constitutive elements of American nationalism. He therefore has both Tom Grant and Washington position the events aboard the Creole as similar to those that inspired the American Revolution. Despite Grant’s earlier admission that Washington and company were motivated by the “principles of 1776” (163), Washington, while laying no less a claim to the national narrative, is more conscious that the cultural apparatus that shapes the narrative is usually regulated by those in possession of political authority.
God is my witness that LIBERTY, not malice, is the motive for this night’s work. I have done no more to those dead men yonder than they would have done to me in like circumstances. We have struck for our freedom, and if a true man’s heart be in you, you will honor us for the deed. We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they. (161)
Douglass knew that the underlying impulses of both 1776 and the Declaration of Independence were global. A year earlier in his Fourth of July speech, he admitted that while he drew “encouragement from the Declaration of Independence,” his spirit was also “cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age” (128). Hence, one of the tasks of “The Heroic Slave” is to make manifest and ubiquitous what the Declaration says is self-evident. Philosophically, he may feel that all people are born equal or that they all possess the same right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but he recognizes that such ontological presuppositions must be politically guaranteed. As author, he uses contrast to underscore his position: what is only property in the United States is recognized as a person in British Canada. What should be self-evident in America is truly self-evident in the British Commonwealth.
Notwithstanding his frequent appeals to the Declaration of Independence throughout “The Heroic Slave,” ultimately Douglass is not convinced of its proper implementation in the United States and must instead depend on the laws of another nation. The closing scene of part 4, in which Grant details the events aboard the Creole when they land at Nassau, illustrates that one’s rights must be legally inscribed by a nation. At the marine coffeehouse in Richmond, Grant informs a company of sailors that after a storm on the high seas, Washington leaned toward him and stated, “Mr. mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free” (162–63). The debate between state law versus natural law is articulated in a conversation between Grant and Jack Williams. Williams maintains that the events aboard the Creole were the result of mismanagement by the white crew. Grant’s retort discloses the violent apparatuses that support the institution of slavery:
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).
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.