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Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

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In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the reader follows Harriet Jacobs’s first-hand account of her life when she was first enslaved in the South and then living in the North. With the use of this book, the class textbook The American Yawp, and the lecture “The Second Great Awakening”, the means oppressors used to control those enslaved will be explored and explained. Christianity was used in the American South to justify and uphold slavery through the manipulation and withholding of information, alongside the use of hypocrisy in order to gain and keep control over those enslaved. One way of controlling this was through the manipulation of information from the Bible. In Chapter 13 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Reverend Mr. Pike …show more content…

One is more inclined to believe something if surrounded by it and told by many people. By making those enslaved come to the general church services, the information they receive is controlled by those in power. Another way of controlling was by withholding information from enslaved people. According to The American Yawp, anti-literacy laws made it so enslaved people could not read the Bible and learn of inspirational stories such as Moses freeing the Israelites (The American Yawp, Ch 11, Sec 6, Par 4). Anti-literacy laws have a much greater impact than being unable to read the Bible. Many could not read or write, period. This provided oppressors with immense control. Letters could not be written or read, making long-distance or unspoken communication infeasible. Self-education is nigh impossible. Everything, alongside the inability to draw inspiration from Bible stories, stopped what could have been many uprisings. This was the goal of anti-literacy: complete …show more content…

This is one incident out of hundreds–if not thousands–that occurred throughout the South. Fear ran throughout the enslavers’ minds after Nat Turner’s insurrection and they were willing to do anything necessary to stop future uprisings. The manipulation and withholding of information is unbelievably powerful. The constant hypocrisy among the oppressors allowed for even more control. In the first chapter of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs writes about how she was taught some words of God from her mistress such as “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” and “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them” (Jacobs, Ch 1, Par 6). Jacobs and many other enslaved people were told to “treat others the way you want to be treated”. It was expected that they would treat everybody with kindness. Yet this is not how things worked the other way around, seeing the cruelty and horrors of slavery. Another point of contradiction is in Chapter 13 of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. When Jacobs’s enslaver, Dr. Flint, suggests that she should join the church and become virtuous, she replies the Bible doesn’t say anything about

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Although she did not receive any physical punishment by her master, she lived in a tight-knit community and was aware of the conditions of other slaves who received brutal punishments. For example, Jacobs notes that “every where men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet.” (page 56). Female slaves lived in fear that they would be raped by their masters. Jacobs’ master, Dr. Flint, often made relentless sexual advances at her, and justified his behavior by saying that she was “made for his use.”

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Chapter IX of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, titled “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders”, provides true imagery of the brutality of slavery. The author, Harriet Jacobs, who goes by the name of Linda, goes through a process of dehumanizing experiences by a multitude of slave owners in her city, Dr. Flint and Mrs. Flint. In the book several neighboring slave owners are mentioned including: Mr. Litch, Mrs. Wade, and Mr. Conat. To start, though, Mr. Litch, who creates unique ways in torturing his slaves by means of even starvation and murder.1 In addition to this torture, Harriet mentions a neighbor of Mr. Litch, Mr. Conat, who was not as discussed in the book, punished a slave by forcing him to spend a winter night outside and naked. Following this, a neighboring

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Harriet Jacobs reveals specifics about the brutality that went on during these times: “...it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the fugitive slave law” (Harriet Jacobs 2). Her first hand experiences affect her negative view on slavery. She addresses the inhumanity happening in her past life. Unlike Harriet, Charity Anderson did not have the exact same type of experience, because she did not go through the the same type of barbarity. In her interview, Charity addresses that she knew about the beatings that others experienced, but she did not go through those type of incidents herself: “But honey chile, all white folks warn’t good to dere slaves, cause I’se seen poor niggers almos’ tore up by dogs, and whipped unmercifully, when dey didn’t do lack de white folks say.

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