Trappings of Nationalism in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstitions in regard to the past. (Karl Marx, Eighteenth 18)

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. (Frederick Douglass, "What" 366)

As Frederick Douglass indicates in the well-known opening chapter of his 1845 Narrative, most masters were deeply invested in keeping their slaves thoroughly ignorant. To maintain their socioeconomic power, mid-nineteenth-century slaveholders made it difficult if not impossible for slaves to develop a sense of themselves as subjects in and of history, often merely by refusing to grant them access to information about their birth dates and paternal relationships. For those masters who were also biological fathers to their slaves, the tacit disinheritance had double significance. Etienne Balibar and Emmanuel Wallerstein describe what many slaveholders already seem to have understood: that having a sense of history "is a central element in the socialization of individuals, in the maintenance of group solidarity, in the establishment of or challenge to social legitimation" (78). Denied the facts of paternity, and often forced to relinquish ties to any specific familial and cultural past, slaves were rendered coll ectively powerless to challenge their masters. Ignorant of America's revolutionary history, whether factual or mythic, slaves were in no position to comprehend the full political significance of their existence within the nation from which they were paradoxically excluded. Or so the master class hoped.

Obviously, the perpetuation of the slaveholding system during and after the American Revolution implicated every white citizen in the outrageous hypocrisy of a "republican slavocracy," but because many slaveholders believed that the republic (politically comprised solely of white gentlemen of property, despite its inclusive rhetoric of "all men") was divinely sanctioned or destined to prevail, it was fairly easy to rationalize the institution as a "peculiar" but necessary phase in a developing democratic state. Slaveholders often defended their practices by aligning themselves with the nation's glorified past. As the political descendants of the slaveholding revolutionaries of 1776, they could argue they were merely carrying on a tradition and way of life sanctified by America's holiest historical documents. After all, the unassailable Founding Fathers had themselves been slaveholders, and, many felt, the birth of this great democratic nation owed a debt of gratitude to the economic system and way of life fr om which it had emerged.

Nevertheless, slaveholders needed to circumvent another collective rebellion--a repetition of an heroic past they coveted only for themselves. Not surprisingly, Southern masters were often particularly interested in refusing slaves access to the history of the American Revolution and the ideologies of liberation that fueled it. But while national pride served many functions during the ante-bellum period, not the least of which was to conceal the atrocities of slavery behind a rhetorical facade of progress, it was also a powerful weapon in the oratory of abolitionists, who drew heavily on the familiar phrases of Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine to generate a sense of outrage in loyal Americans. Fear of insurrection prompted Southern planters to caution one another on the importance of keeping slaves away from Fourth of July orations and other patriotic events where they might be inspired by the defiant glory of the nation's beginnings. One Southern minister instructed the slaveholder to treat his slaves to a ma gnificent Independence Day dinner, and even to encourage the social mingling of blacks and whites, but to make the celebration "strictly a negro family affair.... Instead of singing 'Hail Columbia' let them sing 'Walkjaw-bone.'... instead of listening to the rehearsal of the victories over the British, let them rejoice in their long hard contest with 'General Green,' that is, with crab grass" (qtd. in Genovese 127). Certainly, slaveholders also wanted to prevent slaves from identifying themselves as equals to white men--that is, as equals to selfpossessed individuals participating in a progressive, or even providential, national scheme. Allowing slaves to participate in patriotic celebrations of "independence" might expose to them the nation's profound contradiction. Even more threatening, perhaps, was the prospect that slaves would view the nation's progress uncritically, and thus simply identify themselves and their plight with an idealistic perception of the revolutionary forefathers as righteous rebels. H ow easy it would have been to cast the master in the familiar role of a parasitic and degenerate tyrant like King George III.

But because the slaveholding system could not be maintained within a putatively democratic republic without strong ideological support, its advocates sought legitimation by any means necessary. To justify slavery in the present and guarantee its immediate future, the institution had to be rooted in the nation's past, the point of origin for America's promising destiny. The nation's philosophical contradictions had to be rendered liveable and acceptable, if not altogether invisible. Patriotism and religious ideology--discourses of values that evoked passion and loyalty in most people--were frequently called forth in defense of the status quo. And yet, aware of the potential danger and duplicity of patriotic discourse, Southern propagandists found it necessary to both praise and attack republican ideals, sometimes simultaneously. Few election campaigns proceeded without mention of the favored themes: independence, the rights of the South, the spirit of '76. Many Southerners openly cheered on the democratic rev olutions in Hungary, Greece, and elsewhere without worrying about their implications for slaves at home. But increasing incidents of slave rebellion (defended unanimously by abolitionists with the rhetoric of democratic revolution), along with growing support for the abolitionists' immediatist platform, ultimately forced proslavers to condemn as naive and misguided the public's faith in "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." In 1837, South Carolina state chancellor William Harper defended slavery as a civilized institution while he criticized the Founding Fathers for their "well-sounding but unmeaning verbiage of natural equality and inalienable rights" (qtd. in Faust 79). Inverting the doctrine of natural right, Harper posed the question, "Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal?" (qtd. in Faust 83). Along the same lines, as Reginald Horsman has noted, Southerners such as James Henry Hammond, ex-governor of South Carolina, attacked "that m uch lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson," despite the fact that Jefferson's notions about black inferiority (in Notes on the State of Virginia) had provided an authoritative basis for American slaveholding ideology in the first place (125). In the end, of course, the glaring contradiction patriotic slaveholders faced was resolved expediently by the surge in AngloSaxonism between 1776 and 1861, and the many pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference that annulled the slaves' humanity and, as a result, their eligibility for civil rights.

After the European revolutions of 1848, some Southerners took advantage of increasing criticism of capitalism to denounce the avaricious materialism of the Northern industrialists and to portray the Southern slaveholding system in turn as a humanitarian alternative to wage labor since, unlike free laborers, slaves were fed, clothed, and housed by their owners. Whereas abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison embraced the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence as the "corner-stone" of freedom (even though he condemned the Constitution), proslavers like Hammond argued that slavery was in fact the sturdier "corner-stone" of "every well-designed and durable 'republican edifice'" (qtd. in Faust 177) because a white nation, in essence, benefitted from the enslavement of an underclass of blacks. Hammond was essentially correct: Enslaving Africans made possible a limited class mobility for the poor white majority of Americans, who were needed to fight the ruling class's wars against the British and the Nati ve American population. [1] Not surprisingly, then, many slaveholders perceived the attack against slavery as an attack on free enterprise, and the American pursuit of "independence" in general. Abolitionists were often falsely labeled levelers, anarchists, and even communists by their opponents.

By the time Frederick Douglass arrived on the abolitionist scene, narratives pertaining to America's revolutionary history had established a kind of ideological theater of operations in which proslavery and antislavery fought for mass support. In their efforts to launch counter-strategies, abolitionists also found it necessary to shift rhetorically between patriotic and anti-nationalist perspectives. Some attacked the egregious omissions of the nation's manifestos; others refused to concede the possibility that the American project was deeply flawed from its conception. In his speech "Slavery and Slave Power," Douglass lamented what he perceived to be a deliberate abuse of nationalistic language by the slaveholding elite. Words such as " 'Union,' 'Constitution,' 'Harmony,' or 'American institutions,' "he argued, had come to mean "nothing more nor less than American slavery." The key concepts of patriotism--"obedience to the law," "prosperity to the country"--had come to signify, "in the mouths of these disti nguished statesmen, a mean and servile acquiescence in the most flagitious and profligate legislation in favor of slavery" (252-53). But merely pointing out the semantic slippage and logical fallacies of politicians, as Douglass so often did in speeches and articles, did not seem to effect much political change.

What was needed, Douglass believed, was a means by which to purify the tainted discourse of nationalism, thereby restoring its original philosophical intentions, and bringing it in line with the morality-based evangelical discourse of the abolitionist movement. To that end, Douglass differentiated his use of familiar terms and ideas from the rhetorical abuses of his opponents:

We have heard much of late of the virtue of patriotism, the love of country, etc., and this sentiment, so natural and so strong, has been impiously appealed to, by all the powers of human selfishness, to cherish the viper which is stinging our national way of....I, too, would invoke the spirit of patriotism; not in a narrow and restricted sense, but, I trust, with a broad and manly signification; not to cover up our national sins, but to inspire us with sincere repentance...not to explain away our gross inconsistencies as a nation, but to remove the hateful, jarring, and incongruous elements from the land....("Slavery and Slave Power" 252-53)

Abolitionists had to find ways to overcome such patriotic doublespeak, Douglass believed, if the movement were accurately to reflect the "gross inconsistencies" of a young republic still struggling to live up to its natural rights philosophy More importantly, a pure patriotic discourse--capable of "abroad and manly signification"--was needed to purge the nation's sins and help bring about America's simultaneous maturation and redemption in the Revolution's second coming. [2] In other words, for Douglass the philosophical basis for the republic was unquestionably sound; its ideals simply had yet to be fully realized. The urgent task at hand, therefore, was to clarify the nation's just and noble principles and purge once and for all its odious antidemocratic institution.

It is well known that Douglass sided against Garrison on the question of the constitutionality of slavery. Like Lysander Spooner, William Goodell, and many others, Douglass also felt that abolitionists were unlikely to succeed in converting Northerners to antislavery if they attacked, as slaveholders did, the revered American tradition; they were far more likely to win the support of the North if they could prove slavery to be unconstitutional. Douglass likewise understood the need to match the manipulative artistry of the powerful planter class and their supporters, without sacrificing political principles or alienating the general public. Despite the important exegeses by legal theorists such as Spooner, Douglass felt that the power of political interpretation, and, by extension, the power to make and (re)write history, had to be returned to the American people, namely, the uneducated working class. In his famous "What to the Slaves is the Fourth of July?"

speech, Douglass insisted that the masses need not succumb to the tyrannical obfuscations of rhetoricians. The rules of interpretation, he declared, "are plain, common sense rules such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people" (386). Such faith in the innate ability of "the people" to understand the injustice of slavery also seems predicated on the belief that democratic ideals, and the genuine or "pure" discourse through which they ought to be expressed, necessarily originate in the masses. So, it had to be the common people (perceived as a more or less unified social entity), not statesmen and lawyers, and certainly not a handful of well-spoken abolitionists alone, who would bring to fruition the dormant ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Because of these beliefs, Douglass put aside his career as orator momentarily to try his hand at an expressive-form with a more popular appeal, a work of fiction, and the only one he wrote. The Heroic Slave, published in 1853, is a novella based on the celebrated, successful slave rebellion on board the brig Creole. In this work, Douglass sets out to reclaim a genuine republican language and ideology for the purposes of abolition. [3] He also aims to recuperate what he believes is America's true history--ironically, in the form of fiction--and thereby symbolically liberate the rebel slaves whose story would otherwise remain trapped in the chattel records. [4] The Heroic Slave aims to present an alternative to the masters' deceptive historical discourse because it takes the form of a deliberately unofficial and so, in Douglass's view, all the more trustworthy, account, a kind of fragmented folktale constructed to appeal to and circulate among average citizens in taverns and coffeehouses around the country. Th rough its revival of what Benedict Anderson calls revolutionary time--the representation of the nation as a unified community moving progressively through history--The Heroic Slave tries to affirm the Northern white audience's tenuous faith in the "collective solidarity" of the American project and to redirect misguided patriotic values toward unconditional and immediate abolition--the fulfillment of the nation's true destiny. Ideally, the reader should reject slavery because it is first and foremost anti-American.

While complex and engaging, Douglass's strategy in this story to "purify" his reader's values is nonetheless tainted with a number of problematic assumptions. He adopts without criticism a host of nationalistic suppositions underpinning the ideology of American slavery: the primacy of Eurocentric historical and cultural perspectives, the belief in America's glorious origins, the projection of a kind of manifest destiny based on such origins, and the necessary adherence to patriarchal values. Douglass also downplays the importance of racial or ethnic chauvinism as a key component of nationalism by rendering his black hero virtually raceless. The racial hatred of the Southern white characters in the story is diffused if not entirely overcome because the rebel slaves they encounter are portrayed as heroic patriots. What we have in The Heroic Slave, therefore, is a story that criticizes or simply invalidates aspects of the dominant American ideology, yet remains trapped within this nationalistic perspective--a p erspective which only served the interests of the master class.

At its outset, The Heroic Slave addresses the slave's expulsion from the nation's revolutionary register. But for the "strange neglect" of historians, we are told, Madison Washington's story would have been indistinguishable from those of "the multitudinous array of... [America's] statesmen and heroes." He was born, after all, in Old Dominion, the birthplace of so many of our great national figures. And yet, even though he "loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry," "deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson," and "fought for it with a valor as high, and arms 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," his story "lives now only in the chattel records of his native State" (17576). Douglass's first effort to recuperate the lost hero is to reclaim his birthright as a Virginian, thereby forging a familial link to a mystified place and a memorial past so essential to a unified national identity. More significantly , by connecting Washington to a motherland of white revolutionaries rather than a slave mother or father, Douglass supplants the slave's stigmatized racial identity with a glorified nationalistic identity, giving his Northern white readers a ready means of identifying or sympathizing with a black man. It should also be noted that the heroes of the novella (Washington, Listwell, and Grant) use a flawless form of the King's English, in stark contrast to the profane, grammatically incorrect slang used by the story's racist characters. Thus, proper speech, together with a noble place of origin, signifies Washington's inclusion in a "legitimate" national community. That Douglass also implicitly devalues an African American cultural identity by rendering Washington's "blackness" merely circumstantial and by stripping him of a Southern slave dialect may have seemed inconsequential in light of the possible rewards of a unified, all-American political identity.

The substitution of birthplace and language for race as essential markers of national identity is in keeping with the rhetoric, if not the practice, of the republic. Douglass makes these substitutions so he can portray Madison Washington as a national hero, a black George Washington--the true hero of universal suffrage that his symbolic "forefather" and namesake never was. In spite of his desire "not to cover up our national sins," Douglass fails to mention the contradictions and hypocrisies of the Founding Fathers in The Heroic Slave, although elsewhere he chose to provoke his audience by pointing out the complicity of American revolutionaries and their descendants in the slaveholding system. "Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves," Douglass argued in his "Fourth of July" speech, "yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout--'We have Washington to [sic] our father'" (367). He might have gone on to quote George Washington, who, in addition to leaving a will providing for the emancipation of his 277 slaves upon his death, acknowledged the contradiction faced by ruling-class colonists when he urged them to either "assert their rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway" (qtd. in Jordan 291).

Furthermore, even though elsewhere Douglass frequently mentioned the fact that the American Revolution owed its success, in part, to the black soldiers in the patriot army (but seldom included the fact that the first American patriot to die in open struggle in the Revolution was Crispus Attucks, a black sailor killed in the Boston massacre of March 5, 1770), Douglass chose not to make this association in the story. Nor does he refer to the mass flight of slaves from Southern plantations to the British lines during the Revolutionary War, even though in an 1845 speech he alluded to the repetition of this history when he pointed out the irony of the real Madison Washington's actions (and name): "It has been made the ground of some diplomacy:--he fled from Virginia for his freedom--he ran from American republican slavery, to monarchical liberty, and preferred one decidedly to the other" ("American Prejudice" 67). Rather, like most prospective readers of the period, in this work Douglass overlooks the actual hist orical agency of African Americans within white supremacist society. He eliminates the complexity and contradiction--the "gross inconsistencies"--from this potentially quite incendiary story, reconstructing instead an unproblematic, far less threatening backdrop for the drama--a simpler vision of an American revolution fought solely on the purest of principles. In doing so, he ends up portraying the abolitionist cause not as a legitimate liberation movement grounded in a critique of political economy or an analysis of history but an unquestionably heroic cause worthy of every true-blooded American's passionate commitment.

Douglass works to achieve this commitment through a providential narrative familiar to readers of American histories. Although the narrator begins the story by lamenting the loss of historical information and assuring us that we have little more than "marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities" by which to understand Washington's life, it soon becomes clear that there is nothing probable about the plot of this story, revolving as it does around a series of bizarre coincidences. In this way, The Heroic Slave exploits the notion of national destiny so often invoked to rationalize slavery, imperialism, and expansion, but now for the purposes of abolition. In addition, virtually all of the important information pertaining to Washington, the slave trade, and the actual rebellion on the Creole is delivered to the reader in the secondary forms of gossip, hearsay, and eavesdropping. In Part I, Listwell--the good listener, hence a figure for the ideal reader--eavesdrops on Washington's soliloquy in a Virginia forest , and, having clandestinely learned the mysterious thoughts and feelings of a slave, vows, "I have seen enough and heard enough, and I shall go to my home in Ohio resolved to atone for my past indifference to this ill-starred race, by making such exertions as I shall be able to do, for the speedy emancipation of every slave in the land" (182). In Part II, five years later, Washington, now a fugitive seeking shelter from the night, just happens to come knocking at the Listwells' door in rural Ohio. This coincidence affords him the opportunity to recount his trials and experiences during the past five years. In Part III, a year after he helped Washington escape to Canada, Listwell happens upon Washington again, this time in a slave coffle in Virginia. Had he "been confronted by one risen from the dead," we are told, "he could not have been more appalled. He was completely stunned. A thunderbolt could not have struck him more dumb" (216). But clearly this is another case of authorial kismet since, prior to spott ing Washington, Listwell had embarked on an "accidental" journey into the seedier side of slaveholding society, where he learned--again through eavesdropping-exactly how an abolitionist must behave in the presence of slaveholders and traders, information, in other words, that would enable him to assist Washington once again. When he stops to ponder such coincidences, Listwell begins to wonder whether "a supematural power, a wakeful providence, or an inexorable fate, had linked their destiny together; and that no efforts of his could disentangle him from the mysterious web of circumstances which enfolded him" (222). Douglass has left nothing to chance in his effort to win over his readers to a cause they cannot help but support-America's future as the motherland of democracy. The future must shape the past. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson notes, "It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny" (19).

The plot of The Heroic Slave aims to demonstrate that abolition, as a phase of America's progression, is irresistible and inevitable. God and Nature will collaborate to bring about the end of slavery. But the indirect means by which the characters, and by extension the reader, learn about the past and present of slavery suggests that human beings do play some role. Everyone must listen carefully to what is being said, to the discourse of ordinary people as opposed to leaders, in order to find one's place in the divinely guided drama that is unfolding. But whether or not they realize it, all of the characters in the story, including racists and slavetraders, become the agents of abolition and the inexorable logic of American history. To underscore this sense of a collective national destiny, Douglass shifts the reader's attention away from the authorizing voice of the narrator. Authority rests not with a single individual but resides in the collective experience of the various persons who come into contact with the heroic slave. By Part IV, both Listwell and Washington have virt ually disappeared from the narrative. The reader is now afforded the opportunity to listen in on a conversation between sailors, one of whom happens to be Tom Grant, the first mate on the Creole and a figure for the reluctant reader forced on principle to grant the slaves their rights. It is here the details of the actual revolt-what would seem to be the culmination of the story-are represented after the fact in the form of a sea story told in a coffeehouse to an unsympathetic, overtly racist listener. As he gives his eyewitness account, Grant compares the slave rebellion to the loss of a ship by the omnipotent forces of nature: "'There are a great many discreditable things in the world ... 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'" (231). Reminiscent of deistic writings of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, Douglass's character Grant can plainly see the hand of Providence in what transpired; the rebellion appears to him as a people's heroic struggle against despotic rule rather than a fight between blacks and whites over racial equality.

To add stress to the idea of America's great destiny, Douglass also draws on familiar representations of the heroic, particularly those associated with the bourgeois-democratic revolution and its inspired literary movement, Romanticism. It is significant that a large portion of the story takes place in a primeval forest, where Washington seeks refuge from the "savage torpor" not of the city but of the slave system. Washington's secluded bower in the woods is similar to Wordsworth's natural "place" of liberated selfhood. Like the poet at Tintern Abbey, Washington "shuns the church, the altar, and the great congregation of Christian worshippers, and wanders away to the gloomy forest, to utter in the vacant air complaints and griefs, which the religion of his times and his country can neither console nor relieve" (181). But Washington himself resembles Byron or Shelley more so than Wordsworth. Ultimately, he finds little comfort living an isolated life in nature's realm. When the reader first encounters the sla ve, he is delivering a soliloquy in the tradition of Shelley's Prometheus or Byron's Childe Harold:

"What, then, is life to me? It is aimless and worthless, and worse than worthless. Those birds, perched on yon swinging boughs, in friendly conclave, sounding forth their merry notes in seeming worship of the rising sun, though liable to the SPORTSMAN'S fowling-piece, are still my superiors. They live free, though they may die slaves.... But what is freedom to me, or I to it? I am a slave,--born a slave, an abject slave ...." (176-77)

The slave is forced by necessity to fight for his freedom within the confines of society. Not surprisingly, then, the forest is utterly destroyed in a sublime conflagration soon after this realization. The romantic tropes and language of the story as a whole might have been inspired by Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, in which the invisible spirit of Hope, mingled with the spirit of direct action, enters the collective thoughts of the oppressed masses to explain the nature of their enslavement: "'Tis to be a slave in soul / And to hold no strong control / Over your own wills, but be / All that others make of ye..." (11. 184-87). Washington's scathing denunciations of spiritual as well as physical slavery, like the inspiring language of Shelley's Hope, penetrate the "chambers" of the listener's soul. After overhearing this, Listwell declares with the utmost conviction, "'From this hour I am an abolitionist'" (182). Douglass's use of Romanticism's overdetermined tropes of "slavery" and "liberty," along with his c reation of a character who unites sensibility, virtue, strict morality, honor, courage, and sympathy, functions to codify and legitimate one's becoming an abolitionist. And, as a romantic hero, Washington is but a catalyst in this larger collective process of becoming.

Perhaps this is the reason that Douglass does not emphasize Washington's own coming to consciousness--the "slave" becoming a "man"--through an autobiographical act of liberation. Denied a place in the victor's annals of the country that owes its very existence to the stolen labor and lives of millions of Africans, the slave's history will have to take another, perhaps even more useful form, according to Douglass--that of a circulating story, a folktale or fiction told by diverse individuals, each a common "hero," none a traditional figure of authority. Rather, the story is a kind of conversion narrative in which white men come to acknowledge black men as equals. Listwell and Grant provide two different models (from two distinct classes) for conversion: one, the thoughtful Northerner, an independent farmer who has been sheltered on the Ohio frontier from the brutal realities of slavery, but whose innate and noble romantic sentiments are permitted to blossom after his encounter with Washington; the other, a wo rldly man of action--a sailor--who confesses his own racist feelings, yet is nonetheless so moved by Washington's dignified acts and eloquent oratory throughout the rebellion he witnesses that he "grants" or vows never again to work in the slave trade. Listwell is the figure through whom Douglass educates the timid and naive reader unlikely to take a stand without encouragement and some assurance of protection. He listens and learns, but always from a safe distance. His valuable assistance comes in the form of practical and simple gestures, from providing food, shelter, and transportation to purchasing metal files for the coffle. In contrast, Grant allows Douglass to accommodate a more aggressively patriotic, working-class, and racist reader. Although he witnesses the rebellion firsthand, Grant does not become a devoted abolitionist, but feels he must honor the heroic achievement of Washington nonetheless. His change in conscience, however mitigated, is based solely on two principles: Washington acted in the spirit of 1776, and in accordance with the standards of "manliness."

Indeed, Douglass portrays Washington as a repository for a set of patriarchal values that prove to be thickly interwoven with nationalistic sentiments. Manliness is a dominant theme throughout this story (and abolitionist writings in general). Masculinity serves as a basis for a new imagined community that transcends class and race differences. Given such a belief, Douglass cannot overemphasize the masculine nobility of his hero, perhaps, as Richard Yarborough has argued, because he felt the need to render African American manhood exceptional if it was to be acknowledged at all. [5] Washington, we are told, has a "heart full of honest manliness" (204). Although a kind and gentle individual, in his movements he also "seemed to combine, with the strength of a lion, a lion's elasticity. His torn sleeves disclosed arms like polished iron....His whole appearance betokened Herculean strength" (179). Tom Grant is also described as sturdy and commanding, and as quick to defend his own manhood as he is to praise the courage of the Creole's slaves.

Against such descriptions, Douglass juxtaposes the opinions of common white racists, embodied in the seedy character of Wilkes, the boastful character of Williams, and in the other "hangers-on" and "tars" at the Virginian tavern and Marine Coffee-House. Both Wilkes and Williams equate abolitionists and blacks with femininity and weakness. After Listwell retires to his room for the evening to avoid further contact with Wilkes, he overhears the conversation of the rough crowd, who question his character because he refuses to "come straight into the bar-room, and show that he's a man among men" (212). More importantly, they impugn his masculinity because he does not exude the sense of power or superiority associated with Southern white men. Wilkes says, "'Tis my opinion that that fellow who took his long slab-sides up stairs, for all the world just like a halfscared woman, afraid to look honest men in the face, is a Northerner, and as mean as dish-water'" (212).

Using images of masculinity and physical power to undermine racist ideas, Douglass reminds us of the fact that male slaves were usually not considered "manly" by their captors; the ready rationale for such oppression had always been the African's physical and mental inferiority. Not surprisingly, those who opposed the injustice of slavery and other expressions of conscientiousness were likewise deemed childlike, effeminate, and weak in Southern society (although such beliefs were probably more widespread). Accordingly, Williams rebukes Grant and the rest of the Creole's white crew for failing to crush the mutiny with their bare hands and superior intelligence. Grant's reasonable and eloquent attempts to explain why the rebellion succeeded and why he will never again set foot on the deck of a slave ship only further provokes Williams. When Grant says," 'I dare say here what many men feel, but dare not speak, that this whole slave-trading business is a disgrace and a scandal to Old Virginia,' "Williams accuses him of being" 'as good an abolitionist as Garrison himself' " (230), apparently intending this as the worst sort of insult. To be like Garrison is first and foremost to be a creature of conscience rather than courage. Even though Grant admits to having undergone a profound change in conscience--daring to "feel" that slavery is wrong--he will not stand by while Williams abuses him, and so counters the slur on his conscience by insisting that he "did all that any man with equal strength and presence of mind could have done" (230). He then goes on to describe the impressive courage and physical power of the rebel slaves rather than the moral rectitude of their actions. Nevertheless, with great irony Douglass reverses the racist expectation: It was Madison Washington's muscular strength and presence of mind that sent the terror-stricken sailors, "like so many frightened monkeys," to the rigging (236).

Despite his attempt to found nationalism on common principles, Douglass substitutes the racist's biological criterion for nationhood with the biological/ethical criterion of "manliness." As a rejoinder to William's claim that"'an-----r'sa n------ronseaor land, and is a coward, find him were you will,' "Douglass suggests that a real man is a real man, regardless of skin color or ethnicity. True "manhood" is innately ennobling and therefore entitles one to citizenship in a democracy. By representing (male) abolitionists, Northerners, and slaves collectively as victims of Southern prejudice, discriminated against on the basis of gender stereotypes rather than race, Douglass reinforces their heroism. He suggests to his male readers that they, too, can retain their "American manhood" and still become part of an illustrious struggle for emancipation. Or, more precisely, Douglass suggests that, like Listwell and Grant, his readers can themselves become part of the patrilineal heroic tradition of the United States. Madison Washington tells the Creole's mate in no uncertain terms:

"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." (234-35)

Knowing full well that his audience would not identify the American Revolutionaries with murderers, Douglass creates a complex set of associations comprised of patriarchal, patriotic, and abolitionist sentiments. In essence, he suggests that his readers become more patriotic--truer sons (and perhaps daughters) to the patris and the pater, by joining the abolitionist cause.

Douglass's reliance on the trope of masculinity may be an attempt to accommodate the male or male-identified reader's fear of being dubbed an "Aunt Nancy Man." After all, abolition was a controversial movement in part because so many women had dared to leave the narrow confines of the domestic sphere in order to support or participate in it. Even so, Douglass's characterization of manly men is predicated on a stereotypical representation of nineteenth-century women as powerless, passive, fearful, and helpless. Although presumably she, too, is converted to abolition, Mrs. Listwell is characterized solely as a "good wife" and maternal creature, her only voiced concern being whether or not Madison Washington was able to cook his food while a fugitive. (He assures her that he was able to do so.) The narrator interrupts to assert that "women have a perfect horror of eating uncooked food" (202), apparently siding with the perspective of the average male American who outwardly shuns effeminacy in all its manifestat ions.

Madison's wife Susan has only a slightly bigger part to play. She is figured two-dimensionally as the damsel in distress awaiting her hero's courageous rescue. Washington is caught in a classic sentimental bind: He has a singular opportunity to escape, yet cannot bring himself to leave his wife behind. With his heart's cord "screwed up to snapping tension," he wonders, "Poor thing! What can she do when I am gone?" (180). When she is finally about to be rescued, Susan lives up to her role as a feeble female by screaming and fainting as her husband foolishly but heroically attempts to save her "from the cruel jaws of slavery" (219). To their detriment, her screams awaken the white folks, who fire upon them as they flee, killing her and wounding him. Hearing this account, Listwell exclaims that "it was madness to have returned" (220), echoing Douglass's mixed feelings in the 1845 Narrative about the extent to which familial ties can emotionally inhibit the slaves' attainment of freedom. But Washington explains, romantically, that, "with her in slavery, my body, not my spirit, was free" (220). Still, a slave husband's love for his wife proves to be his--and, of course, her--downfall. [6] The pursuit of freedom will only be hindered by the weak sentimentality that inheres in domestic relationships. One could even say the story implies that emancipation is not properly a woman's pursuit or destiny.

Of course, it seems unlikely that Douglass really believed such a notion; instead he probably chose to represent women in the stereotypically passive roles of household savior or helpless martyr for the benefit of his projected reader and the supposed appeal of the romance genre, which confirms traditional gender roles. After all, Douglass was an outspoken member of the women's rights movement. When he addressed the National Women's Rights Convention at Worcester in 1851, Douglass spoke for both the abolitionist and women's rights movements: "We advocate woman's rights, not because she is an angel, but because she is a woman, having the same wants, and being exposed to the same evils as man" ("Women's Rights Convention" 55). One year prior to this speech he had said:

Women may write books of poetry, travels, &c. and they will be read with avidity. Let them strike out in some other path where they are not now allowed to go. If there is some kind of business from which they are excluded, let some heroic Woman enter upon that business.... Let Woman take her rights, and then she shall be free." ("Let Woman Take Her Rights" 249)

In 1853, the same year that he completed The Heroic Slave, Douglass composed the call for the annual convention, radically demanding the passage of a law that would " 'place Married Women on an equality with Married Men in regard to the holding, and division of real and personal property'" (qtd. in Foner 18). What is more, the volume in which the story appeared was published by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society and was edited by a female abolitionist and women's rights activist. Obviously, in choosing to limit himself strictly to portraits of masculine heroism at the expense of his egalitarian ideal, particularly during that period in his political career in which he distinguished himself as a spirited advocate of woman suffrage, Douglass took an enormous risk. He may have intended that The Heroic Slave speak specifically to the male would-be abolitionist. Nevertheless, his reliance on the popular tropes of masculinity resulted in a work that failed to challenge a fundamental injustice of the social order he sought to reform.

After the Civil War, Douglass would find himself in the predicament of having to choose between black (male) suffrage and woman suffrage in the political arena. Ultimately, he would choose the former, not as a defense of male superiority, but as an indispensable step toward eradicating the last vestiges of slavery. Debate over the Fifteenth Amendment in particular would expose the latent and pernicious racism (and classism) among the ranks of woman suffrage activists and virtually destroy the powerful alliance between blacks and white women. The ideal of unity that formed the basis for the Equal Rights Association would be lost.

The rhetorical and literary strategies undertaken by abolitionists to appeal to the traditional values of the unconverted masses may have contributed, in the long run, to the dissolution of the equal rights movement. From an historical perspective, it is difficult to say whether or not radical abolitionism could have resolved the conflict between ideologies of race and gender without fundamentally altering or discarding altogether the nationalistic discourse of popular ante-bellum culture. Whether it is possible to use the same figures and discourses advantageously employed by the oppressive powers without on some level inadvertently preserving oppressive ideology remains a burning question, for such a strategy may be doomed to leave intact the ideological and institutional structures of a republic, grounded in an illusory past, and thriving in spite of its philosophical contradictions.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire, written contemporaneously with The Heroic Slave, Marx warned that "the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstitions in regard to the past." For fear of repeating the mistakes of 1848, Marx paradoxically would have the working class draw its "poetry" only from the future, from the promise of a classless society. Marx concedes that, like the ruling class, the proletariat has no choice but to make their own history "under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past," and, therefore,

just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (1)

While the bourgeois revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had succeeded in using the trappings of their ancestors to glorify and universalize their struggles for power, to create the grand illusion of an heroic "people's" revolution, Marx argues, the citizens of 1848 were duped by their own historical masquerade. Draping himself in Napoleon's garb, Louis Bonaparte merely parodied a revolution, which resulted in a short-lived parody of democracy. France's new order quickly returned to the old order, thinly disguised by the romantic ideals of republicanism and universal suffrage. The Eighteenth Brumaire is an emphatic warning to would-be revolutionaries: The national bourgeoisie use the patriotic "poetry" of "heroic" histories to conceal the class content of their revolutions. A true social revolution must therefore eschew the grandiloquence of "great men" and the melodrama of their historical actions. [7]

The aftermath of the Civil War provides a striking parallel to that of the revolutions of 1848. For all of the rhetoric about preserving the Union and fulfilling the promises of 1776, the post-bellum South remained the most oppressive area of the country (or, some would say, still another country altogether), a new arena for Northern capital, debt-peonage, racial hatred, segregation, and patriarchal oppression. One could argue that, by making concessions to the Eurocentric, providential, and patriarchal ideologies that have been endemic to American nationalism from its outset, Douglass and other abolitionists failed to address fully the roots of the inequality they so passionately opposed.

The contradiction, bordering on hypocrisy, that we discover on reading of Douglass's other writings reveals a The Heroic Slave in the context of some greater truth about his limited political options; that is, that the popular nineteenth-century discourse of nationalism that he found so attractive--with its brilliant utopian narratives of social community founded on equal rights and democracy--was at the same time necessarily exclusive, the invention of men of a European aristocracy who desired to lay claim to a political, cultural, and social difference unmatched worldwide. Simply put, by adopting the rhetoric of American nationalism, Douglass was forced to sound a chauvinistic note, a note whose political reverberations he was perhaps only partly able to comprehend given his historical moment. In retrospect, the abolitionists' concessions were successful in helping to end the legal institution of slavery, obviously no minor accomplishment, but they left many of slavery's supporting ideas unchallenged. It m ay be that Douglass deliberately avoided such challenges in the interest of political expediency. Or it may be that Douglass, like so many of his contemporaries, was finally unable to resist the powerful ideological and rhetorical appeal of nationalism.

Krista Walter received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, in 1991 and is currently a professor of English at Pasadena City College. She specializes in the fields of early African American writing, U.S cultural studies, and critical theory.

Notes

(1.) As convoluted as it appears, Hammond's argument actually derives from those of the Founding Fathers. American republicanism had evolved out of a philosophy of liberty threatened as much by poverty and indigence, significant markers of the feudalistic economy they had yet entirely to overcome, as it was by monarchical tyranny. "Freedom" from tyranny could only really be guaranteed for a nation of financially independent property-owners, or so it was thought. Even Thomas Jefferson had warned that" 'dependance [sic] begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germs of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition'" (qtd. in Morgan 384). The ruling-class colonists' solution, therefore, was to replace the free labor force of "dependent" and potentially rebellious workers with slaves. By 1776, historian Edmund Morgan writes, "Two-fifths of Virginia's people were as poor as it was possible to get; but they were all enslaved, and all worked productively for private masters, who were thereby str engthened in their independence and able to take the lead in resisting British tyranny. As if to underline the connection, the Virginia assembly voted in 1780 to reward its soldiers in the fight for freedom with a bounty of 300 acres of land and a slave" (385).

(2.) The idea of purification is prevalent throughout abolitionist writings. Lydia Maria Child's "Talk about Political Party," which appeared in The Liberator on August 5,1842, explains that the goal of the American Antislavery Society "was to change public opinion on the subject of slavery, by the persevering utterance of truth. This change they expected would show itself in a thousand different forms:--such as conflict and separation in churches; new arrangements in colleges and schools; new customs in stages and cars; and new modifications of policy in the political parties of the day. The business of anti-slavery was, and is, to purify the fountain, whence all these streams flow; if it turns aside to take charge of any one of the streams, however important, it is obvious enough that the whole work must retrograde..." (qtd. in Kraditor 160-61). Douglass also drew on Child's metaphor for the public conscience when he said, "The public mind is widely and deeply agitated; and bubbling up from its perturbed w aters, are many and great impurities, whose poisonous miasma demands a constant antidote" ('Slavery and Slave Power" 251).

(3.) On November 7, 1841, as the slave ship Creole entered the port of Abaco Island, Bahamas, en route from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans, 19 of the 135 slaves on board launched a successful revolt. Armed with pistols, bowie knives, and handspikes, the slaves quickly took control of the ship while most of the crew were sleeping. Two people died in the initial struggle: one, an owner of 39 of the slaves; the other, an elderly slave man. Two days after the takeover, the ship entered Nassau harbor, at which point the slaves threw away their weapons and asked the British authorities for their freedom. The British Consul took custody of the rebels, but encouraged the remaining slaves to desert their owners. Despite ensuing complaints from the American owners, the Creole's captain, and Secretary of State Daniel Webster, the British refused to reprimand the rebels, and eventually set them free. Outraged by this turn of events, Webster immediately issued a dispatch to Edward Everett, American Minister at L ondon, threatening to wage a war against Great Britain if the "mutineers and murderers" were not tried and convicted and the owners compensated for their losses. Arguing that these "criminals" (whom he also refers to as "persons") were recognized as "property" or "merchandise" by the Constitution of the United States, Webster insisted that failure to punish them would render the British guilty of condoning "one of the highest offences [sic] known to human law" (qtd. in Jay 8). We can infer from the dispatch that the "offence," as Webster saw it, was not so much the fact that the British refused either to adjudicate the case of the rebels or extradite them to the United States, but the fact that they refused to acknowledge the slaves as "property" and therefore would not assist the master of the vessel in retrieving and securing his mutinous "goods." Webster was incensed at what he called this "unfriendly act of interference" (9) that threatened the peace between Great Britain and the United States.

(4.) In his discussion of this story, Robert Stepto extends Douglass's own project to that of the African American writer in general. Celebrating The Heroic Slave as an artistic rather than abolitionist achievement, Stepto argues that the function of the work is to exemplify on a larger scale the liberation of African American writing "from the realm--the text--of brutal fact" (180). History enslaves the would-be African American writer to a textual system that refuses to acknowledge the artistic merits of black literature.

(5.) For an excellent analysis of gender in this story, see Richard Yarborough's essay "Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave.'"

(6.) It is impossible to determine whether or not Douglass adhered to whatever facts he had discovered about the historical Madison Washington and his actual spouse, since there are numerous conflicting accounts of the rebellion, none of which is very specific about Washington's personal life. However, in William Wells Brown's rendition of the story, Susan is not killed during their escape attempt, but captured and sold, only to reappear on the Creole to be reunited with her husband in freedom. Unfortunately, we will never know which, if either, plotline more closely resembles the truth (although Brown's is certainly truer to the plot of the sentimental romance, culminating as it does In the reunion of true lovers). See oh. 4 of Brown's The Negro in the American Rebellion.

(7.) Oddly, Marx found the positive example he was looking for in the plebeian "who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois." In 1862, while the popular European presses mocked and parodied Abraham Lincoln, Marx defended his political honesty and praised his unexceptional character: "Lincoln is a sui generous character in the annuls of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no cothumus, no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form.... He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologizing for being compelled by circumstances 'to act the lion.' The most redoubtable decrees--which will always remain remarkable historical documents--flung by him at the enemy all look alike, and are intended to look alike, routine summonses sent by a lawyer to the lawyer of the opposing party, legal chicaneries, involved, hidebound actiones juris. His latest proclamation, which is drafted in the sam e style, the manifesto of abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution" (249-50).

For Marx, Lincoln was an important historical "player" in America's bourgeois-democratic revolution, not only because he was an ordinary person accomplishing feats that only heroes could accomplish in the old world, but also because he was not the "product" of a popular revolution. Rather, Lincoln found himself at the top "by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake." Unlike Louis Bonaparte, who "struts about melodramatically on this side of the Atlantic" in bourgeois-democratic drag designed to misrepresent the reactionary forces he serves, Lincoln clothed himself in the everyday dress of the genuine bourgeois and wore the sincere countenance of democracy. Or so it seemed to Marx ("Comments" 248-51).

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---. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 2nd ed. 1869. New York: International, 1969.

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