Heroic Slave Rebel in Delaney's Blake or the Huts of America and Douglass' Heroic Slave
The fundamental element of a successful slave rebellion is a heroic slave rebel. Madison Washington of Frederick Douglass' The Heroic Slave and Henry Blake of Martin Delany's Blake or the Huts of America serve as models of that rebel. First, he must possess a will to stay and fight-he must not be content to just run away and gain individual freedom, abandoning his family and friends. Second, he needs intelligence, and preferably education as well, to be able to organize large, complex plans of rebellion. Finally, he must be a natural leader, drawing fellow slaves and free abolitionists to follow him and fight for his cause. Throughout the novels, examples of all of these characteristics can be found in both heroic slave rebels.
For most American slaves, there were only two paths to freedom: running away or successfully plotting and carrying out a rebellion. The path of flight was much easier and was the path chosen by almost all dissatisfied slaves who decided to take action. The slave who decided to stay and fight instead of fleeing had to have a force holding him back. This force could be described as a sense of duty to family and friends or a remarkable desire to make a change in the nation as a whole rather than just improving his own life. Both Madison Washington and Henry Blake, like all heroic slave rebels, were affected by this force, held back by it. They had acquired their individual freedom through flight, but then were called back to aid their families and friends. Without this force pulling them back, they would have been content to remain as runaways in Canada and would not have become heroic slave rebels.
Throughout th...
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...hite man, I would have followed willingly and gladly in any honorable enterprise" (Douglass 68). Madison Washington's leadership skills during the insurrection aboard the ship were so great that they even impressed an old, prejudiced white sailor. Without this quality of leadership, his rebellion would have never been executed successfully.
These three characteristics-a will to stay and fight instead of running, intelligence, and great leadership-are all necessary to the successful rebel. Both Madison Washington of Frederick Douglass' The Heroic Slave and Henry Blake of Martin Delaney's Blake or the Huts of America embodied these characteristics and serve as good examples of the heroic slave rebel.
Works Cited
Delaney, Martin R. Blake or the Hunts of America. Boston: Beacon, 1970.
Douglass, Frederick. The Heroic Slave. New York, Penguin Books, 2003.
...fred D. “Frederick Douglass.” Encyclopedia of African-American Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2007. 144-146. Print.
This victory, combined with the achievement of literacy and other factors, such as the will to escape and attempt to teach others, point to a sense of inner, "factual" freedom which develops while Douglass is still a slave according to the law and in the public eye. Just as the Narrative is a personal story set within a framework of social relevance, the striving for freedom is personal before it is physical and external. In spirit and sense of self Douglass becomes free while still a slave, even if that freedom makes his more tangible bonds all the more painful. Because he fought for this freedom long before being ranked among free Northerners, Douglass maintains, in his narrative for the white abolitionist movement, an inner independence of social and legal definitions of slavery and freedom.
In the passage of the Narrative of Fredrick Douglass, the author masterfully conveys two complimentary tones of liberation and fear. The tones transition by the use of diction and detail. The passage is written entirely in first person, since we are witnessing the struggles of Fredrick Douglass through his eyes. Through his diction, we are able to feel the triumph that comes with freedom along with the hardships. Similarly, detail brings a picturesque view of his adversities. Since the point of view is first person, the reader is able to be a part of the Douglass’ struggles with his new freedom. With diction, detail, and point of view, the reader is able to get a rare glimpse into the past of Fredrick Douglass.Fredrick Douglass’ diction is powerful as he describes his life as a slave and with his new freedom. Fredrick Douglass calls being enslaved an act of “wretchedness,” yet he was able to remain “firm” and eventually left the “chains” of slavery. Fredrick Douglass expresses that being enslaved is a wretched act and that no man should ever deserve such treatment. Despite being a slave, he kept strong and eventually broke the chain of society. However, Fredrick Douglass experienced great “insecurity” and “loneliness” with his new freedom, and was upon a new “hunting-ground.” His new freedom brought other devastating factors, being a new state without any friends, which caused his loneliness. In this new state, he grew insecure for he was in a new danger zone where at any time his freedom could be rejected. With new freedom come new obstacles, which are described in the diction of Fredrick Douglass.
The issue of Slavery in the South was an unresolved issue in the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. During these years, the south kept having slavery, even though most states had slavery abolished. Due to the fact that slaves were treated as inferior, they did not have the same rights and their chances of becoming an educated person were almost impossible. However, some information about slavery, from the slaves’ point of view, has been saved. In this essay, we are comparing two different books that show us what being a slave actually was. This will be seen with the help of two different characters: Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass in The Narrative of the life of Frederick
Imagine being ripped apart from your mother as a child. Imagine watching family and friends receiving the stinging blow of a whip. Imagine religious men telling you that this is the will of god as they work you as close to death as they can. While difficult to imagine, this occurred to some of those who were enslaved in the early United States of America. One of the most heart wrenching of these accounts comes from a man born as a slave, Frederick Douglass. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an example of how some early Americans dehumanized slaves and how Fredrick Douglass’ viewed this atrocity. Despite this, Douglass found mental and physical means to fight this treatment.
In learning about the history of America from the colonization to the reconstruction I decided to read The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass. Frederick was one of the very few literate slaves. He was an incredibly important character in American and African-American history. Though he was blessed with intelligence most slaves were not, he still lived the same kind of life of the typical slave.
Hofmann, A. (1970, January 1). The Discovery of LSD. The Discovery of LSD. Retrieved May 12, 2014, from http://www.psychedelic-library.org/hofmann.htm
While hallucinogenic drugs have been used for centuries, it was not until the discovery by Western society of their mind-altering properties (Hofmann 1959; Stoll 1947; Delgado, Pedro L; Moreno, Francisco A) that these compounds began to be more widely used for treatment of mental disorders (see Abraham, Aldridge & Gogia 1996; Strassman 1995; Neill 1987; McGlothlin & Arnold 1971; Freedman 1968; Delgado, Pedro L; Moreno, Francisco A). Hallucinates are derived from plants or the fungus that grows on plants, the first recorded hallucination was a tossup between mental issues that were then used for a political push or the ergotamine during the Salem witch trails in 1962, far after that Albert Hofmann became the creator of LSD from ergotamine a chemical from the fungus ergot, in Switzerland 1938. From that time LSD has played a part in history, studies have shown that much has changed in the half-century since LSD was first used by psychiatrists and then found widespread recreational use in the 1960's and 70's. Modern psychiatry has embraced drugs that affect the same brain molecules that are tweaked by hallucinogens (Blakeslee,
Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (ed. John Blassingame) Yale University Press, 2001.
Deviating from his typically autobiographical and abolitionist literatures, Frederick Douglass pens his first work of fiction, “The Heroic Slave,” the imagined backstory of famed ex-slave Madison Washington, best known for his leadership in a slave rebellion aboard about the slave ship Creole. An interesting plot and Douglass’ word choice provide a powerful portrait of slavery and the people affected by it.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
The tone established in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is unusual in that from the beginning to the end the focus has been shifted. In the beginning of the narrative Douglass seems to fulfill every stereotypical slavery theme. He is a young black slave who at first cannot read and is very naïve in understanding his situation. As a child put into slavery Douglass does not have the knowledge to know about his surroundings and the world outside of slavery. In Douglass’ narrative the tone is first set as that of an observer, however finishing with his own personal accounts.
Society is so deceivable into believing that what is accepted by society is also correct and reasonable. One would not usually question the humanity of customs if one benefits in return. Frederick Douglass wrote The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as a way to depict the development of a dehumanized slave progressing into a free man. Frederick Douglass did not start to reconstruct his own self identity until he broke the bindings of being ignorant which his masters placed upon him.
Nichols, D. E., & Chemel, B. R. (2011). LSD and the serotonin system's effects on human
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