The Heroic Slave

What is known about the real Madison Washington

The Creole left Richmond, Virginia, at midnight on 25 October 1841, under Captain Robert Ensor. She carried 135 enslaved African Americans bound for sale in New Orleans. About a week into the voyage, at night, a group of the captives rose. Anita Rupprecht's study of the revolt, drawn from sworn statements taken at Nassau, describes what followed. A slave trader's agent named John Hewell was stabbed and bled to death, and Captain Ensor was badly wounded but survived.

The rebels made the crew sail for the Bahamas and reached Nassau on the morning of 9 November. British law no longer recognized anyone there as property. Most of the captives walked free, and many accepted a British offer of passage to Jamaica. The British held the nineteen men named as mutineers for nearly six months, but the charge of piracy against them collapsed. The Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware records that they too were freed in 1842.

Some of what sounds like invention in the novella is true. Madison Washington had escaped to Canada. Early in 1841 he went back to Virginia to find his wife. Abolitionists advised him against it, among them Robert Purvis, who had helped him reach Canada. He was captured and sold. After the revolt, Rupprecht writes, Washington and his companions disappear from the records.

Douglass changed a good deal. In the novella the captain and the slave owner, Mr. Jameson, both die on deck, and their bodies wash overboard in a storm. In the real revolt the dead man was Hewell, and the captain lived. Douglass sets the uprising at twilight, while the sworn statements put it in the dark of night. He also invents the white characters who carry the story, Mr. Listwell and the first mate Tom Grant.

A white man who listens

Madison Washington is the hero, but the reader rarely sees him directly. Much of what we learn comes through Mr. Listwell, a white farmer from Ohio who overhears him in the Virginia woods. Patrick E. Horn, writing for the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South, points out the name. Listwell is the man who listens well, and the novella asks its white readers to do the same.

Listwell's change of heart is immediate. From this hour I am an abolitionist, he thinks after Madison has gone, and he goes home to Ohio resolved to make up for his past indifference. Five years later he keeps his word. He gives the fugitive the best room in the house, a new winter suit and five dollars in silver, and drives him through the night to a steamer on Lake Erie bound for Canada.

Douglass does not make him a saint. At a Virginia tavern full of slave traders in Part III, Listwell lets the bar believe he has come to buy slaves. The narrator is blunt about why. Listwell hated slavery and believed every man should speak out against it, but bodily fear, not conscientious scruples, prevailed.

The same man then commits the most dangerous act in the book. In a Richmond hardware store he buys three strong files. At the wharf he slips them into Madison's pocket as the chained captives are rowed out to the ship. Robert S. Levine, one of the editors of the Yale edition, points out what the files do. They tie the white abolitionist to the violence that follows.

The principles of 1776, argued on deck

The revolt itself is told at second hand, in a Richmond coffee-house, by the Creole's first mate, Tom Grant. A loud old sailor named Jack Williams has been saying that he could have put the rebels in irons with half a dozen men. Grant answers him with the whole story. Douglass builds the climax as an argument between two white men in a bar.

In Grant's telling, Madison stands at the helm with the captain dying on the deck behind him and refuses the word murderer. God is my witness that LIBERTY, not malice, is the motive for this night's work, he says. Then comes the line the argument turns on. We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they.

Mr. mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.

Grant then makes an admission. He says that Madison's principles were not wrong in the abstract, for they are the principles of 1776. He simply could not bring himself to apply them to a man he thought his inferior. Douglass had made the same charge against the country from a platform in Rochester the summer before, in the speech now known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

The last scene is a march. British authorities send Black soldiers on board to protect the property. The soldiers reply that they do not recognize persons as property. The freed captives gather their baggage, form a procession on the Nassau wharf and walk ashore under their leader, cheered by the crowd.

Why Douglass wrote fiction in 1853

Robert S. Levine argues that Douglass could not have written the novella while he was still a follower of William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison argued that the campaign against slavery had to be nonviolent. In 1850 Douglass announced publicly that he was no longer a Garrisonian. He had come to see slavery as an act of violence that should be met with violence.

Madison Washington had been in his speeches for years before the novella. Levine traces the thread:

• 1845, in Cork, Ireland: Douglass praises Washington for his love of freedom.
  • — Robert S. Levine, Frederick Douglass Once Turned to Fiction to Describe What He Considered True Heroism (2018)
• 1849, in New York City: he tells an audience he would welcome news that an insurrection had broken out.
  • — Robert S. Levine, Frederick Douglass Once Turned to Fiction to Describe What He Considered True Heroism (2018)
• 1857: he calls Madison Washington more worthy to be remembered than some figures of the Revolutionary War.
  • — Robert S. Levine, Frederick Douglass Once Turned to Fiction to Describe What He Considered True Heroism (2018)

The novella came out in 1853 in two places. One was Autographs for Freedom, a fundraising gift book of antislavery writing edited by Julia Griffiths and published by John P. Jewett and Company in Boston. The other was Douglass's own newspaper, Frederick Douglass' Paper, which ran it as a four-part serial in March 1853. Levine puts the book first. Horn's summary puts the newspaper first.

Penguin's description of its 2021 edition says the novella was written in part as a response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The two writers were in touch that same month. Stowe invited Douglass to her house in Andover, Massachusetts, before she sailed for England. He set out his ideas on her fundraising in a letter dated Rochester, 8 March 1853.