Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Douglass had long addressed the story of Washington and the Creole mutiny in
speeches in the late 1840s in Britain and America. He had kept its memory alive as a
historical precedent for slave rebellion and as a rhetorical weapon. He did so
especially in New York in April 1849 to twelve hundred blacks at the Shiloh
Presbyterian Church, where he told Washington’s tale in imaginative terms to the
delight and laughter of his audience. In such speeches Douglass tried out some scenes
that ended up in the novella, although much of the 1849 effort was devoted to the
irony of monarchial Britain freeing self-liberated slaves from “free, democratic”
America; he especially relished the image of the former bondmen escorted off the ship
in Nassau by “a platoon of black soldiers.” He reserved a special sarcasm for how this
American “property” emerged as human beings from the clutches of outraged US
senators such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, and the secretary of state, Daniel
Webster, who issued formal protests to the British. Unmistakably, Douglass left those
public audiences with a dire warning: “There are more Madison Washingtons in the
South, and the time may not be distant when the whole South will present again a
scene something similar to the deck of the Creole.”4













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