In Frederick Douglass's only fictional work, the 1853 novella The Heroic Slave, he retells the story of an actual slave revolt aboard the American ship Creole in 1841. Douglass imagines a tavern conversation in which the first mate recounts the ship's collapse under the rhetorical weight of the revolutionary argument made by Madison Washington, the novella's hero. In response to a friend's boasts that he could have quelled the rebellion single-handedly, the first mate comments:

While slavery may perpetuate itself on land and under the jurisdiction of the American government, the first mate observes, its hierarchies dissolve immediately once they are exposed to the ‘salt water’ of the Atlantic: the test that any faulty policy is bound to fail. In this crucial moment, Douglass tests out his own theory of transatlantic politics, developed during his years in Britain and Ireland from 1845 to 1847, and he suggests that both thought and action outside national boundaries ultimately counteract the deficits of the culture that has developed within their limits.