Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

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

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

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