In adapting his own speeches about the Creole rebellion, Frederick Douglass narrativized aspects of Madison Washington’s life to craft The Heroic Slave (1853). The novella, Douglass’s only foray into writing fiction, remains important for what it reveals about his shifting understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics as well as for what it illuminates about the arc of nineteenth-century African American literary history. With respect to his perspective on abolitionist politics in particular, Douglass used the occasion of writing The Heroic Slave to intimate a new position on physical violence and the right of revolution. With respect to African American literary history, The Heroic Slave marked a pivot towards the novel by a cadre of African American intellectuals in the years immediately before the Civil War.

Beacons of Liberty starts with Madison Washington, the enslaved man who led a famous shipboard slave rebellion in 1841, and Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman newspaper editor in North America. Their stories introduce the importance of international free-soil havens to the U.S. anti-slavery movement. Free-soil havens abroad were places where slavery had either been curtailed or abolished by law or by local practice. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century they emerged in places like Haiti, West Africa, Upper Canada, Mexico, and various new republics throughout Central and South America. Over five decades characterized by changing social conditions and evolving geopolitical relationships within and beyond the United States, international free-soil havens were often defined in very different ways by different people. The Introduction to this book explores what international free soil came to represent for slaves, free black people, and white reformers with impressive ideological diversity regarding the question of black freedom.