The Heroic Slave: A Cultural and Critical Edition

by Frederick Douglass

Book Overview

Frederick Douglass's only work of fiction--an imaginative retelling of the most successful slave revolt in American history--accompanied by an interpretive introduction, notes, and a selection of related writings by Douglass and others

First published nearly a decade prior to the Civil War, The Heroic Slave is the only fictional work by abolitionist, orator, author, and social reformer Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 030018462X
• ISBN13: 9780300184624
• Release Date: March 2015
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Frederick Douglass' Novel

Although he is best-known for his autobiographies, the great abolitionist and African American leader Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) also wrote an important novel. I learned of it in reading about Douglass. I was pleased to have the opportunity to find the book and to discuss it here. Douglass's novel, in fact an extended short story, is available in this new, inexpensive edition as well as in anthologies of his writings. Written in 1853, "The Heroic Slave" is among the first works of fiction by an African American. It is based upon a historical incident: the slave mutiny in November,1841 on the American ship, Creole. The Creole had sailed from Richmond with a cargo of 134 slaves to be sold in New Orleans. A slave with the name of Madison Washington escaped his irons and, together with 18 other slaves, took over the ship and sailed it to the British port of Nassau in the Bahamas. The British refused to return the slaves to their owners, and they remained in Nassau as free people. The United States government did not object. Many Americans responded to the incident by debating whether the United States should have been more aggressive in approaching Britain. However, Madison Washington became a hero to many abolitionists, including Douglass. The Creole incident is similar to the better-known slave rebellion involving the Amstead. Douglass' equates the actions of Madison Washington in commandeering the Creole with the actions of his namesakes, (Madison and Washington) among others, in the Revolutionary War of 1776. Here is how he opens the novel: "The State of Virginia is famous in American annals for the multitudinous array of her statesmen and heroes. She has been dignified by some the mother of statesmen...... Yet not all the great ones of the Old Dominion have, by the fact of their birth-place escaped undeserved obscurity. By some strange neglect, one of the truest manliest, and bravest of her children .... hold now no higher place in the records of that grand old Commonwealth than is held by a horse or an ox. Let those account for it who can, but there stands the fact, that a man who loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry, - who deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson, - and who fought for it with a valor as high, an arm as strong, and against odds as great, as he who led all the armies of the American colonies through the great war for freedom and independence, lives now only in the chattel records of his native State." Douglass' short novel is in four parts, the last of which recounts the story of Madison Washington and the Creole. In the preceding three parts of the book, Douglass gives an imaginative portrayal of the earlier life of Madison Washington and his struggle for "freedom and independence". The earlier three parts tell of encounters over a space of years between Washington and a white northerner named Listwell. The first encounter was in 1835 when Listwell was traveling in Virginia and, on a Sunday, hears