Strangely, we know more about Listwell’s thoughts and desires than about Madison [Washington’s]; the closest we come to an understanding of Madison’s interior life is through the already externalized—and performative—expression it assumes in his speech.2 The fact that the aptly named Listwell (who listens well, as several critics note)3 forms his initial impression of Madison on the basis of voice alone—”that unfailing index of the soul”—suggests just how much their often lauded interracial friendship depends on disembodiment and spectatorship (HS, 179).4 When Listwell finally catches “a full view of the unsuspecting speaker,” his now increased perception remains one-sided (HS, 178). “As our traveler gazed upon him, he almost trembled at the thought of his dangerous intrusion. Still he could not quit the place. He had long desired to sound the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave. He was not, therefore, disposed to allow so providential an opportunity to pass unimproved” (HS, 179, emphasis mine). Here, what might otherwise have been an assumed good—an opportunity to communicate the feelings and humanity of a slave to white abolitionist readers—is given a notably sinister connotation in the depiction of Listwell’s overeager and almost eroticized surveillance of the “unsuspecting speaker.”
If, as some critics have suggested, Douglass’s fragmentary depiction of his protagonist is conditioned in part by the limited historical sources on Madison Washington,5 this indirection also eschews the type of ostensibly benevolent spectatorship (exemplified by Listwell) that permeates abolitionism. By making, “the lack of knowledge about Washington” the gambit of his text (as William Andrews observes),6 Douglass turns the fact of historiographical obscurity into an occasion for questioning the model of agency that underwrites biographical narratives of history. Of course, this is not to suggest that Madison Washington’s evocative name did not help abolitionists situate the Creole insurrection firmly within the tradition of the American Revolution, for it did. As the New York Evangelist commented, Madison “wore a name unfit for a slave but finely expressive for a hero.”7 Still, without relinquishing either the heroic stature of Madison’s actions or the rhetorically powerful link to the Revolution, the novella insistently displaces biographical (or at least character-bound) expectations with unstable natural metaphors.
Douglass forswears the possibility of fathoming Madison’s character before the novella proper has even begun.
Curiously, earnestly, anxiously we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness, and we return from the pursuit like a wearied and disheartened mother, (after a tedious and unsuccessful search for a lost child,) who returns weighed down with disappointment and sorrow. Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities, we come before our readers. (HS, 175–76)
With Madison’s interior motivations insistently undisclosed, the narrative uses metaphors of natural phenomena to contextualize actions that (without the causal explanation of intentions) appear not only inscrutable but also erratic. Though glimpsed only in fits and starts—”through the parted clouds and howling tempests … the quivering flash of angry lightening” (HS, 175)—what we know most emphatically about Madison derives from the organizing correspondences between his character and nature. “The Heroic Slave,” in this way, refrains from the type of exceptionalist individualism that its title leads us to expect—instead establishing Madison’s moral character by elaborating its basic comparability with the natural world.
The proliferation of natural imagery in “The Heroic Slave” shapes more than the presentation of Madison’s character. Natural phenomena (clouds, conflagrations, and storms) also provide the logic and impetus for the novella’s highly episodic structure. Although Madison first attempts to escape just weeks after his forest soliloquy, “a season of clouds and rain set in, wholly preventing me from seeing the North Star, which I had trusted as my guide, not dreaming that clouds might intervene between us” (HS, 189, emphasis mine). This “circumstance,” Madison explains, “was fatal to my project, for in losing my star, I lost my way; so when I supposed I was far towards the North, and had almost gained my freedom, I discovered myself at the very point from which I had started” (HS, 189–90). Nature, here, is a practical obstacle to freedom rather than a metaphor for its inevitability. The passage, however, does not belie the novella’s use of natural imagery as a figure for natural rights. Instead, it underscores, as Peter Meyers argues in another context, that Douglass’s imagination of natural law as “self-executing” “did not betray a naive or willful idealism … More painfully than most, he was mindful that the dynamism of nature and history brought reversals for ill as for good.”8 Douglass’s attention to the erratic character of natural phenomena in “The Heroic Slave” has a similar effect—suggesting that despite its rhetorical and political force, the discourse of natural law does not have the same empirical self-evidence as the physical laws that govern nature. Douglass, however, does more than emplot the prerogatives of natural law; he takes the very restlessness of nature as a model for liberty and reform.
The plot of “The Heroic Slave” does not develop as a consequence of Madison’s individual agency, but through the sporadic shifts of weather, which structure and contain the virtual world of the novella. Although a “season of clouds” frustrates Madison’s initial attempt to reach the North, he is later forced back on his journey by a wildfire that drives him out of his hiding place in the neighboring swamps.
The whole world seemed on fire, and it appeared to me that the day of judgment had come; that the burning bowels of the earth had burst forth, and the end of all things was at hand…. The very heavens seemed to rain down fire through the towering trees; it was by the merest chance that I escaped the devouring element. Running before it, and stopping occasionally to take breath, I looked back to behold its frightful ravages, and to drink in its savage magnificence. It was awful, thrilling, solemn, beyond compare. When aided by the fitful wind, the merciless tempest of fire swept on, sparkling, creaking, cracking, curling, roaring, out-doing in its dreadful splendor a thousand thunderstorms at once…. It was this grand conflagration that drove me hither; I ran alike from fire and from slavery (HS, 193–94, emphasis mine).
Employing the rhetoric of millennialism, Douglass presents the fire as a divine “judgment” against slavery, which returns Madison on his journey for freedom. Admittedly, the depiction of Madison as all but bereft of agency generates tensions in a text that tacitly invokes heroism as a condition for political legitimacy. However, by depicting nature as the principle agent, Douglass is able to suggest that the opposition to slavery is more fundamental than the actions of any one individual or group.
This insistent downplaying of human agency is most dramatic in the representation of the revolt onboard the Creole. The force of the insurrectionists is diminished, on a formal level, by the fact that the revolt is narrated only retrospectively, and narrated, moreover, by a sailor who was unconscious during the event in question. The details of the revolt emerge in the course of a dialogue between two white sailors in a Richmond coffeehouse. Jack Williams, “a regular old salt” “tauntingly” addresses the “first mate” of the Creole: “I say, shipmate, you had rather rough weather on your late passage to Orleans?” (HS, 226). The fictional mate, named Tom Grant, replies “Foul play, as well as foul weather” (HS, 226). Williams speaks of bad weather during the insurrection, but it is worth noting that the premise of the squall is one of the fictional elements of Douglass’s portrayal. The weather during the revolt was, in fact, unremarkable—there was, to quote the Congressional report, “a fresh breeze, and the sky [was] a little hazy, with trade-clouds flying.”9 Douglass invented the squall, but this fictionalization also responded to the diplomatic history of the revolt—and to [Daniel] Webster’s imagined “stress[es] of weather,” in particular.10 We know that Douglass was familiar with Webster’s letters, because he refers to them explicitly in two of his speeches.11 The squall, then, can be seen as a rewriting of Webster, which strategically reappropriates natural metaphors as a figure for natural rights.
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 irons; 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.