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A character in The Heroic Slave

Tom Grant

The first mate of the Creole, who tells the story of the revolt in a Richmond coffee-house and swears off slave ships for good.

The book

The Heroic SlaveFrederick Douglass, 1853

Frederick Douglass's only work of fiction: a novella about Madison Washington, who led nineteen enslaved men in taking over the slave ship Creole in 1841.

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Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Grant is a tough, honest sailor who was knocked senseless in the revolt. He is the witness Douglass needs: a man with no sympathy for abolition who still tells the truth about what he saw.

How Tom Grant Is Portrayed

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • Unwilling to boastWhen Jack Williams mocks the crew, Grant at first says only that there was foul play as well as foul weather.
  • Tested by salt waterHe tells Williams that managing enslaved people on a Virginia plantation is one thing, and putting down a revolt on the open Atlantic is another.
  • Done with slave shipsHe says he will never again set foot on one, as officer or sailor, and calls the slave trade a disgrace to Virginia.
  • An honest confessionHe admits Madison's principles were those of 1776. He could not accept them only because Madison was Black.

Tom Grant quotes

Lines spoken by or about Tom Grant, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.

God is my witness that LIBERTY, not malice, is the motive for this night's work.
— Madison Washington (dialogue, in Tom Grant's account) · Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1853), Part IV
We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they.
— Madison Washington (dialogue, in Tom Grant's account) · Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1853), Part IV
Mr. mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.
— Madison Washington (dialogue, in Tom Grant's account) · Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1853), Part IV
All 4 Tom Grant quotes

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