Summary Of Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs was a slave from a southern plantation in North Carolina. She wrote about her experiences in the inhuman system of slavery. In 1861, Harriet Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself under a pseudonym of Linda Brent. Jacobs was one of the first and few women to write about her experiences as a woman slave. Harriet Jacobs account reveals how destructive the slave system was towards the slaves and the masters and mistresses who owned slaves. She depicted the violence and cruelty that went on in slave owning homes. As a slave woman, Jacobs had no legal protection and small variety of choices she could make in self-preservation. Harriet Jacobs’s narrative shows that freedom is a human right, and the

There were no laws that protected slaves from their owners and slave voices were not heard. Slaves were subjected to the absolute power of their masters. Jacobs did not have many options that would protect her from the abuse. She must go against her morals and principles to have some defense against her master. To protect herself, Harriet Jacobs gets pregnant. Jacobs felt ashamed because she degraded herself and went against everything she believed in. Jacobs says, “I wanted to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me” (84). Harriet Jacobs did not have the freedom to live her life the way she wanted too. Slavery did not allow for any ethics to exist. Harriet Jacobs was raised with certain morals and standards that she was expected to follow, but because she was not free and had very little choice in how to survive in this system, the room for ethics was very

Her narrative dismissed the idea that slaves were happy being forced to be slaves. She argued that that are no such thing as good slave owners because they did not view slaves as human beings but property. She showed what happened to a slave woman in the household and that they had no protection from the violence and abuse. The little white girls grew up trained in how to treat slaves not like they are human beings but like they were property. Harriet Jacobs showed that there was no room for ethics for a slave because of the limited choices they could make. Harriet Jacobs argued for freedom because it was a human right. Angelina Grimke argued that slavery was unethical for the slave owning people. She used the Bible and Constitution to discredit the idea of slavery. Women saw the contradiction in the American political system that promised freedom to all people but suppressed slaves and