The same year that Washington led the rebellion, Douglass joined Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, but there is no record of his response to Washington until 1845, when, in a speech delivered at Cork, Ireland, he celebrated Washington for his “love of freedom.” Douglass continued to extol Washington in his speeches both in the United States and abroad, going so far as to proclaim, in a speech delivered in New York City in 1849, that he “would greet with joy the glad news. Washington disappeared into history, but his legend as a successful leader of a slave rebellion continued to grow in black culture. Much to the outrage of American authorities, the British immediately freed the more than 100 slaves not involved in the actual rebellion and eventually freed Washington and his fellow conspirators. Eighteen slaves, under the direction of Madison Washington, rose up against the white crew, killing an officer and then piloting the ship to Nassau in the British Bahamas. The rebellion on the Southern slave ship th e Creole occurred in November 1841. It also has much to teach us about Douglass’s changing views of the antislavery struggle. The novella, one of the few works of fiction published by an African American prior to the Civil War, is increasingly being recognized as a major work in Douglass’s canon and as an impressive work of art. Douglass first published the novella in the 1853 Autographs for Freedom, a fund-raising volume of antislavery writings, and then reprinted it as a four-part serial in the March 1853 issues of his newspaper, Frederick Douglass’ Paper. According to Douglass, Madison Washington, the leader of the rebellion, was a patriotic freedom fighter in the heroic tradition of the American revolutionaries. Several months after delivering this lecture, Douglass began writing his only work of fiction, The Heroic Slave, which was inspired by the true story of the slave rebellion aboard the Creole. your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.” As he proclaims at the end of the lecture: “Your celebration is a sham your boasted liberty, an unholy license your national greatness, swelling vanity. In that lecture, Douglass attacked the hypocrisy of a nation that celebrated freedom while slavery remained the law of the land. Seven years later, and just two years after Douglass had publicly broken with Garrison, Douglass delivered, in 1852, what would become his most famous oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? ”.
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