The Heroic Slave
Glossary
A
- Autographs for Freedom
- The 1853 antislavery literary anthology, edited by Julia Griffiths, in which The Heroic Slave was first published — alongside contributions from Harriet Beecher Stowe, William H. Seward, and dozens of other abolitionist writers. Proceeds supported Douglass's newspaper.
- Related: Douglass's Only Fiction
C
- Canada
- The destination of Madison Washington's first, solitary escape from slavery — a common endpoint on the Underground Railroad since British law did not recognize American claims to enslaved people who reached it, though Madison later returns south, is recaptured, and ends up aboard the Creole.
- Related: Madison Washington, Mr. Listwell
D
- Douglass's Only Fiction
- The Heroic Slave is the only work of fiction Frederick Douglass ever published; the rest of his body of work is autobiography, oratory, or journalism. Writing fiction let him imagine an interior voice for Madison Washington that the historical record never preserved.
- Related: Madison Washington, Autographs for Freedom
F
- Fictionalized slave narrative
- Douglass's literary strategy in The Heroic Slave: taking a documented historical event with almost no surviving first-person testimony from its central figure and reconstructing plausible interior speech, motive, and dialogue for him — a technique distinct from Douglass's own autobiographical writing.
- Related: Madison Washington, Douglass's Only Fiction
J
- Jack Williams
- A white sailor introduced in Part IV who dismisses the Creole uprising as a disgrace attributable to the crew's underestimation of 'the real character of darkies in general' — Douglass's device for putting period racist rationalization directly in a character's mouth, immediately before the true, heroic account is told.
- Related: Creole Rebellion
M
- Madison Washington
- The novella's protagonist and hero, based on the real leader of the 1841 Creole rebellion. Douglass first presents him as an enslaved man delivering a solitary speech against his own bondage in the Virginia woods, then follows him through escape to Canada, recapture, and his eventual leadership of the shipboard revolt that frees over a hundred enslaved people.
- Related: Creole Rebellion, Mr. Listwell, Virginia
- Mr. Listwell
- A white Ohio traveler who overhears Madison Washington's woodland soliloquy against slavery in Part I and is transformed into a committed abolitionist. He and his wife later shelter Madison after his escape, and Listwell reappears at the novella's end as a witness aboard the Creole.
- Related: Madison Washington, Virginia, Ohio
N
- Nassau
- The capital of the British Bahamas, where slavery had been abolished under British law; the destination the rebels aboard the Creole demand and reach, making the ship's arrival there the novella's culminating act of liberation.
- Related: Creole Rebellion
- New Orleans
- The major American slave-trading port that is the Creole's intended destination before the rebellion diverts the ship to Nassau — New Orleans's domestic slave market was among the largest in the antebellum South.
- Related: Creole Rebellion
R
- Richmond
- The Virginia city that figures in Madison Washington's movements as an enslaved and then fugitive man, part of the novella's careful geography tracing the route between bondage in the South and freedom in the North or the Bahamas.
- Related: Virginia, Madison Washington
S
- Slave brig
- The type of two-masted sailing vessel used to transport enslaved people along the American coastal trade, the class of ship the Creole belonged to — distinct from the transatlantic slave ships of the earlier trade, since by 1841 this was domestic coastwise trafficking between U.S. ports.
- Related: Creole Rebellion, New Orleans
T
- The Creole Rebellion
- The real November 1841 revolt aboard the American slave ship Creole, in which Madison Washington and other enslaved captives seized control of the vessel and sailed it to Nassau in the British Bahamas, where slavery had already been abolished — the largest successful slave revolt in United States history by number of people freed.
- Related: Madison Washington, Nassau, Jack Williams
U
- Underground Railroad (historical context)
- The informal network of routes and safe houses, of which Listwell's household is a fictionalized example, that helped enslaved people escape to free states or Canada in the decades before the Civil War.
- Related: Mr. Listwell, Canada, Madison Washington
V
- Virginia
- The slaveholding state where the novella opens, its woods the setting for Madison Washington's overheard soliloquy against bondage — the scene that launches both his own escape narrative and Listwell's conversion to abolitionism.
- Related: Madison Washington, Mr. Listwell
W
- Wilkes
- A tavern loafer Listwell encounters and pays for information in Part II, part of the network of small, casually complicit figures Douglass uses to sketch the everyday texture of a slaveholding society.
- Related: Mr. Listwell