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

Abstract

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