paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass, The

College Literature, Fall 2003 by Lock, Helen

I confess, gentlemen, I felt myself in the presence of a superior man; one who, had he been a white man, I would have followed willingly and gladly in any honorable enterprise.... It was not that his principles were wrong in the abstract; for they are the principles of 1776. But I could not bring myself to recognize their application to one whom I deemed my inferior. (Douglass 2000, 51)

The implicit argument is not that these principles did not apply to Washington, but simply that Grant could not acknowledge the fact, realizes this, and still cannot bring himself to voice the implication.

In fact, thanks to Douglass's strategy of telling this part of Washington's story from the perspective of a white man conditioned to be hostile both to the revolt and to the slaves themselves, the tone of the narrative's concluding paragraph then dissolves into irreconcilable ambiguity. The ship having docked at Nassau, governed by British law, a company of black soldiers, "impudent rascals," is sent on board to protect the ship's property, and refuses to interfere in the matter of the slave rebellion, saying "they did not recognize persons as property" (Douglass 2000, 51). Grant notes that they "sheltered themselves adroitly under their instructions only to protect property," but also he characterizes them as "stupid blockheads" (51; my emphasis). He condescendingly mocks their attitude toward the slaves: "[they] showed their ivory, rolled up their white eyes in horror, as if the idea of putting men on a footing with other merchandise were revolting to their humanity." Grant himself had previously equated the slaves legalistically with the "barrels of flour in the hold" (51).Yet two sentences later he describes, without a trace of mockery but with a suggestion of awe, how that erstwhile merchandise "formed themselves into a procession ... [and] marched, amidst the deafening cheers of a multitude of sympathizing spectators, under the triumphant leadership of their heroic chief and deliverer, MADISONWASHINGTON" (51).

In this dramatic concluding sentence, Grant cannot help implicitly acknowledging the organized, reasoned, and transcendent humanity of the rebellious slaves.Yet his contempt does not disappear but is merely inverted, redirected from the black slaves who resisted the law of the New World (which divided humans dualistically into persons and property) onto the black soldiers who insisted on obeying the letter of Old World law (which united all persons as distinct from property). American law itself in this case, in fact, depended on fundamental principles of inversion: those who supported the Creole slaves' right to revolt argued that "[bjecause only the slave states and not the federal government recognized the legality of slavery . . . once outside a state's legal limits those enslaved were transformed from property to persons, from objects to subjects" (Sale 1997,184).This is a paradoxical position in itself, since "those enslaved" were of course subjects even while legally objects, and it is this paradox that Grant perhaps intuits (or that Douglass realized that men like Grant would intuit) in The Heroic Slave's closing paragraph. Grant's attitude seems to be both that the slaves had a right to revolt (Washington is "heroic," a "deliverer," acting according to "the principles of 1776"), and that they should be denied the opportunity to do so. In this sense Grant's narrative combines the perspectives of Rutherford Calhoun and Captain Delano (unlike whom, however, Grant unwillingly surrenders to, or at least acknowledges, his intuition).