SOURCE: Yarborough, Richard. “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's ‘The Heroic Slave.’” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, pp. 159-84. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

In the following essay, Yarborough contends that Frederick Douglass's reinterpretation and exaltation of a slave rebellion in his novella The Heroic Slave is subverted by the underlying prejudices of the white, masculine worldview.

Sir, I want to alarm the slaveholders, and not to alarm them by mere declamation or by mere bold assertions, but to show them that there is really danger in persisting in the crime of continuing Slavery in this land. I want them to know that there are some Madison Washingtons in this land.

—Frederick Douglass

In 1877 the African-American author Albery A. Whitman published an epic poem called “Not a Man, and Yet a Man.” At...