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Writing Revolt in the Wake of Nat Turner: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of Black Domesticity in "The Heroic Slave"

One of the most striking aspects of the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner is the text's sensationalized depiction of the annihilation of family. After describing the Turner band's initial "work of death"--the "murder of [the Travis] family, five in number," including a "little infant sleeping in a cradle"--the text follows the slave rebels as they march from house to house, felling men, women, and children with axes, swords, guns, and clubs. (1) The text documents the pleasure Turner takes in the group's often prolonged acts of murder ("I ... viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction, and immediately started in quest of other victims") and the group's slaughter of even the most seemingly innocent whites: we "murdered Mrs. Reese in her bed, while sleeping," Turner explains; "her son awoke, but it was only to sleep the sleep of death, he had only time to say who is that, and he was no more." (2) The question of authorship with regard to The Confessions--an ostensible "as told to" prison confession that is peppered with often unmarked interjections by interviewer/editor Thomas Gray himself--is an admittedly complex one: to what extent does the narrative remain under Gray's control, and where does Turner emerge from his interlocutor's frame to tell his own story? But regardless of whether one reads The Confessions as belonging primarily to Gray or to Turner, it is hard to miss its emphasis on Turner's savagery, linked insistently to Turner's desire to penetrate, and destroy, the spiritual heart of antebellum white civilization: the family. As an exemplar of slave resistance, Turner posed difficulties for an antislavery movement that was in its earliest stages of organization and was, therefore, reluctant to endorse violence of any sort--least of all the seemingly indiscriminate, purposeless, and anti-family violence in which Turner and his men were alleged to have engaged. It is in an 1832 issue of the Liberator, for example, that we find Turner, a "sable fiend," gloating over the corpses of a "babe" whose "bruised lips" are "dashed with blood" and an "unripened virgin" who lies on "the cold hearth stone." (3) Ten years after Turner, however, abolitionists found a model of what one critic has called "righteous slave rebellion": Madison Washington, who in 1841 led a far less bloody, and arguably far more successful, revolt on board the slave ship Creole. (4) On the Creole, en route from Virginia to the slave market in New Orleans, Washington, with the help of three other men, led a group of nineteen slaves in a revolt that would leave all of the ship's 135 slaves free in Nassau and that resulted in only two deaths, one white, one black) Importantly, even white witnesses to and participants in the events on board the Creole described Madison Washington as a man of restraint, humanity, and self-control--as the diametrical opposite of Nat Turner and, thus, an appealing figure around which to focus the public understanding of black resistance. It is no wonder, then, that Washington is invoked over and over again--most centrally, but certainly not exclusively, as the titular "Heroic Slave" of Frederick Douglass's 1853 novella--in the writings of antislavery activists as a righteous rebel, both resistant and compassionate, a fighter and a friend. (6) But while abolitionists turned to Washington partly in an effort to undo Nat Turner's grip on historical consciousness, it was not so easy to shake that grip loose. Just as Turner can be seen to exert a shaping force on Gray's editorship of the Confessions, so too does he shape and influence the story that others would seek to tell of Madison Washington and the Creole affair. The horrors of Turner's ostensible anti-domestic agenda hover over retellings of the later revolt, directing the terms of those retellings and generating in them both intriguing "facts" and conspicuous gaps. Focusing on Douglass's "The Heroic Slave," this essay explores one such retelling and the ways in which Turner's story might be seen to shadow and shape it. …