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.)