1. Douglass, Narrative , 114; "The Heroic Slave," in Life and Writings , 5:503. All further references to "The Heroic Slave" in this chapter will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Daniel Webster, "Completion of The Bunker Hill Monument," Works , 1:59; Emerson, Nature , in Essays and Lectures , 7. Recent studies examining America's national patriarchy include Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided ; Rogin, Subversive Genealogy and Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Vintage, 1976), and Sundquist, "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance" and To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Also relevant are Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth , and Jay Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims .

3. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Stern, introduction to a special issue on memory and counter-memory, Representations 26 (spring 1989): 2; for a further description of topoi as related to memory, see 2-3.

4. Mary Henderson Eastman, Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is (1852; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 205; Burrows, "Address Before the Mount Vernon Association," 517; Edmund Jackson, "The Effects of Slavery," 41.

5. Brown, Narrative , xxv, 91.

6. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," 126,130. Also see Bhabha's account of the hybrid, "Signs Taken for Wonders," 153-57, and his account of "cultural difference"in "DissemiNation," 312-15.

7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxii-xxiii, 75,42-54.

8. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom , 191; Dred Scott v. Sandford , 703.

9. Douglass, Narrative , 21. Certainly, Douglass's 1845 autobiography is an integral document of American history and not simply a personal narrative. I am commenting, however, on the editor's efforts to limit the discursive scope of the Narrative . Sundquist provides a discussion on the important changes Doulgass made in his history and representation of America in moving from the Narrative to My Bondage and My Freedom. To Wake the Nations , 83-93.

10. Douglass, Narrative , 93; My Bondage and My Freedom , 361.

11. See James Olney, "The Founding Fathers—Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987 , ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Olney reads Douglass's Narrative as a "revolutionary document" that signifies upon the Declaration of Independence (6). Also see Sundquist's chapters on Douglass and Nat Turner in To Wake the Nations and Maggie Sale, "Critiques from Within: Antebellum Projects of Resistance," American Literature 64 (December 1992): 695-718.

12. I refer to "amalgamation" instead of "miscegenation" because the latter term was not invented until 1863, and was coined then to express a specific anxiety concerning how black emancipation would affect sexual relations between the races. See Forrest Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53-55.

13. Brown, Clotel , 226. Sundquist makes use of the duality of the Mayflower—vessel to freedom and slave trade ship—to discuss the "elementary doubleness of America's political origins." "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," 7. He also examines the patriotic implications of Nat Turner's rebellion, see "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," 14, and To Wake the Nations , 65.

14. William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Signifying Monkey ; Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Stepto, Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

15. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," in The Foucault Reader , 87, 88; Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 312.

16. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage; or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (1890; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 158-59.

17. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death , 337. James Olney and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have discussed the problematics of memory for the slave narrator. See Olney, " 'I Was Born': Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature," in The Slave's Narrative , ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 149-152; and Gates, Figures in Black , 100-104; Melville, Pierre , 27. Hortense Spillers' article, "Mamma's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" Diacritics 17 (summer 1987): 65-81, which examines the historical and rhetorical construction and effacement of black womanhood, is instrumental in understanding the disruptions in gender and family identity caused by slavery. It is important to point out, however that my remarks concern the slave narrative and do not necessarily concern the slave community. In addition, it should be noted that my study seeks to understand conceptions of freedom largely within men's slave narratives. Women's slave narratives proffer much different notions of freedom, ones that are less individual and more family-oriented. See Sale, ''Critiques from Within," especially 701-13.

18. See John Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive Slave, Containing His History of Twenty-Five Years in Bondage, and His Providential Escape: Written by Himself (1856; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968). Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave; Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853,from a Cotton Plantation, near the Red River, in Louisiana , in Puttin' On Ole Master: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup , ed. Gilbert Osofsky (1853; New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 406, 229.

19. Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro , 280; Albert Taylor Bledsoe, An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856), 131; James Roberts, The Narrative of James Roberts, Soldier in the Revolutionary War and at the Battle of New Orleans (1858; reprint, Hattiesburg, Miss.: The Book Farm, 1945), 31. In suggesting that black patriarchy was slighted in national consciousness, I do not mean to indicate that blacks did not exercise fatherhood or that they were merely incidental to American founding history. Indeed, Brown's own studies, such as The Black Man and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867; reprint, New York: Citadel Press, 1971), oppose the antebellum predisposition to ignore or declare invalid black fathers, within both actual social structures and constructed national history.

20. James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland , in Great Slave Narratives , ed. Arna Bontemps (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 201.

21. Gates, Figures in Black , 100; Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death , provides a range of cross-cultural examples of "social death."

22. C. W. Larison, Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Years Old), A Biografy of the Slav Who Wipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom (1883; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 76.

23. S. A. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology , in ' Cotton is King,' and Pro-slavery Arguments: Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright on this Important Subject , ed. E. N. Elliot (1860; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 722.

24. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855; reprint, Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1972), 98. Brown dictated his narrative to Louis Alex Chamerovzow. On the slave narrator's strategies to gain authority and authenticity, see Stepto, Behind the Veil , and Olney, "'I Was Born.'"

25. Byrd is quoted in Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll , 75.

26. Roberts, Narrative , 10.

27. On the indispensability of history for human subjectivity, see Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History," 60-61.

28. Douglass, Narrative , 21-22.

29. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William And Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860; reprint, Salem, Mass.: Ayer, 1991), 2, 57. Samuel Ringgold Ward also uses a textual metaphor to describe the mulatto: "Ah! the slaveholders are publishing, as in so many legibly written volumes, in the faces of their mulatto offspring, the sad, sickening evidences of their abominable immoralities." Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro , 205.

30. Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , v; the proslavery pamphlet is quoted in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Rebellion: A Selection from Travellers and Outlaws (1889; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 272; Dred Scott v. Sandford 702-3.

31. Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , 2, 60. These and other scenes from the Crafts' history are adapted by Brown in Clotel , 170-76, 204. On the sexual and psychological dangers of the miscegenated body, see Dearborn, Pocohontas's Daughters , 131-58.

32. Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (1838; reprint, Philadelphia: Rhistoric, 1969), 1-2; Brown, Narrative , 59; and Clotel , 158, 159. The mistress's actions in Clotel are a perfect example of what Barbara Jeanne Fields calls "society in the act of inventing race." "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America" New Left Review (May-June 1990): 95-118.

33. William Andrews examines fictive slave narratives, including Clotel and "The Heroic Slave," and points to the ways in which African American texts confuse fictional and factual discourse to acquire narrative authority. "The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative" PMLA 105 (January 1990): 23-34.

34. The newspaper reviews of Brown are quoted in William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown, Author and Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 259, 288. In Behind the Veil , Stepto treats the complex relationship of the slave narrative to the editor's preface.

35. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom , xxxi; Frederick Douglass, Letter to Charles Sumner, September 2, 1852, in Life and Writings , 2:210; Sundquist, To Wake the Nations , 104.

36. Eric J. Sundquist, introduction to Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays , ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12; Brown, Clotel , 245.

37. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death , 340.

38. Brown, Clotel , 217. Douglass recounts a similar episode of a slave woman's suicide/escape in his "An Appeal to the British People, May 12, 1846," in Life and Writings , 1:159.

39. Brown, Clotel , 224, 226. Yet the conclusion of Clotel suggests reservations about how effective this militant political strategy is in the United States. It is not insignificant that the close of the novel finds George living happily in Europe, passing as a white man, and Clotel dead. The "tragic mulatto," as Werner Sollors has argued, had no place in American society, finding only suicide as the pathetic outcome of a resolve to remain in the United States. Those fictional characters who removed to Europe, in contrast, fared more successfully. See Werner Sollors, "'Never was Born': The Mulatto, An American Tragedy," Massachusetts Review 27 (summer 1986): 300. In later versions of Clotel , entitled Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon (1860) and Clotelle; or, the Colored Heroine (1864), the mulatto, George Green, becomes the black rebel Jerome. For the significance of these changes, see Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 174-77. Both the chronological setting of Clotel (1831) and George's genealogy—"He too could boast that his father was an American statesman. His name was George"—make it plausible that he is the son of a founding father. The ambiguity of whose name is George ("his'' logically refers to "father") creates suggestive speculations about which Virginia statesman named George gave birth to this rebel.

40. Hughes, Treatise on Sociology , 239-40, 240; Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind , 405; Brown, The Black Man , 92.

41. Bledsoe, Essay on Liberty and Slavery , 10; Thomas Roderick Dew, "The Abolition of Negro Slavery," in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 , ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 59.

42. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology , 725; Baynard Hall, Frank Freeman's Barber Shop; A Tale (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852), 210; the South Carolina reverend is quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 127. Sundquist also discusses Dew's use of the words patricides and patriots in the context of Nat Turner and Douglass. To Wake the Nations , 35, 115.

43. New Orleans Daily Picayune , December 3, 1841; Andrews, "The Novelization of Voice," 28.

44. Frederick Douglass, "The Heroic Slave," in Life and Writings , 5:479. All further references to this text are to volume 5 this edition. For the historical circumstances of the Creole affair, see Howard Jones, "The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt," Civil War History 21 (March 1975): 28-50. Andrews offers a similar view of the subversive quality of fictive discourse within Douglass's story. He argues that "The Heroic Slave" sabotages "natural" discourse by authorizing the representation of history within fictive discourse. "The Novelization of Voice," 29-31.

45. Robert B. Stepto has suggested the significance of naming in this first paragraph of "The Heroic Slave." Stepto writes: "Douglass advances his comparison of heroic statesman and heroic chattel, and does so quite ingeniously by both naming and not naming them in such a way that we are led to discover that statesmen and slaves may share the same name and be heroes and Virginians alike." "Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass' 'The Heroic Slave,"' Georgia Review 36 (1982): 362.

46. Abraham Lincoln, "First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois," in Collected Works , 3:19.

47. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 68. Stepto's essay "Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction" also marks Madison Washington's example of violent resistance as a significant opposition to the Christ-like passivity and sufferings of Uncle Tom. Andrews makes a similar point in To Tell a Free Story , 186. Still, it should not be forgotten that Uncle Tom's Washington is dressed up in blackface as well—a fact that, especially after the appearance of Eric Lott's Love and Theft , makes this portrait the site of complex negotiations between ethnic, national, and gender identities. While not radical for Uncle Tom, this blackface Washington offers subversive readings for Northern audiences, acting as a "racialized mediator of northern conflicts in southern guise" (199).

48. Richard Yarborough, "Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave,"' in New Essays on Frederick Douglass , 180.

49. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story , 187. Maggie Sale argues against the positions of Yarborough and Andrews as well: "this criticism of Douglass's strategies rests on the notion that one can exist, indeed one can think, in a place outside of culture, outside the language systems" that constitute the material and imaginative worlds of nineteenth-century America (711). And see Sundquist in To Wake the Nations : "the notion that the language of the Revolution was but a new form of totalizing imprisonment, a thorough mockery of freedom, is a view that would have been anathema to Douglass" (121). Indeed, Douglass seems to anticipate the arguments of Yarborough and Andrews and attempts to sort out the complex legacy of Washington and the other founders in his speech on the Dred Scott decision. See Life and Writings , 2:407-24, especially 422-23.

50. Brown, Clotel , 226-27.

51. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave , 370; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , in Life and Selected Writings , 278.

52. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 433.

53. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 170.

54. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," 82.