This chapter covers the story of three enslaved people who used various poisons to slowly murder their owner in colonial Massachusetts.

This chapter centers on a plot by three generations of slaves, led by the elderly matriarch, to murder their owner. This Virginia enslaved family used an ax, shovels, and fence posts to end their owner’s abuse.

This chapter examines the case of a teenaged term slave named Cloe who used her hands to strangle her owners’ young daughters a week apart in rural early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.

The final chapter covers the life of Lucy who killed her mistress with a blunt instrument and threw her body down a cistern in Galveston, Texas, in 1858.

This chapter examines the curious case of a group of enslaved people who used a featherbed to smother their owner to death in colonial North Carolina.

This chapter is about Jane Williams, an enslaved woman who hacked her owners and their infant daughter to death with an ax as they slept in Richmond, Virginia, in 1853.

This chapter centers on the actions of Rose Butler, a teenaged term slave in New York. Rose and her accomplices set her owners’ home on fire in 1818 to avenge her mistress’s poor treatment.

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.

From his early days in slavery until the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had been active in the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was Douglass’s longest and most sustained form of activism, foundational to all other aspects of his abolitionist thought. Douglass’s encounter with the Underground Railroad began with his earliest experiences of slave resistance – of secret communication, mobility, and running away. It continued with his own attempts to run away to the North. As a northern abolitionist, Douglass became a leader in the Underground Railroad. He helped hundreds of runaways, unifying slaves’ secret, underground resistance with the public work of antislavery agitation. Underground work proved crucial to the formation of Douglass as a thinker. He learned to read and write underground. Moreover, he developed his literary style and political philosophy – his ideas about women’s rights, internationalism, and direct action – through praxis in the Underground Railroad.

Throughout the antebellum period, the beliefs in force and direct action splintered the abolitionist movement. Black leadership believed moral suasion failed to protect black people and produce liberation. For some time, Douglass’s endorsement of Garrison’s ideology was out of step with black leaders that wanted the ability to defend their humanity. This essay illustrates how Douglass’s thinking evolved regarding the utility of moral suasion and the direction of the movement overall. Through the force of events, Douglass’s stance in the abolitionist movement shifted from nonresistance to political violence. In time, he conceded and then advocated for emancipation by violent means. Douglass’s stance and celebrity shaped the movement. He helped usher the movement from a group of religious outsiders to a political force who welcomed a war of abolition.