LITR 4232: American Renaissance

Sample Student Research Project, fall 2004

Rhonda D. Bender

18 November 2004

Research Journal

Introduction

            Perhaps the most devastating and violent account of mankind’s capacity for inhumanity, degradation, and injustice in the treatment others is evident through the account of American slavery. Much of what was originally known about the condition of slavery came from antebellum travel accounts or from the writings of Southern apologists, both of which characterized slavery as necessary and respectable and failed to capture the true essence of life for the slave (Miller). In contrast to these records of slavery, which deem the institution of slavery necessary and almost pleasant, the autobiographies or narratives written by the actual slaves themselves depict a horrifying experience of slavery as endured by the slaves. These slave narratives were produced for mainly two reasons: to educate primarily white audiences about the horrors of slavery and to challenge the idea that African Americans were inhuman and worthy of enslavement. Of all the historical records on American slavery, the slave narratives remain the most important in providing a first hand account of the daily lives and constant struggles of American slaves. The two best known and perhaps most important slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, provide first hand accounts of the difficulties and atrocities related to American slavery. In this journal I will provide a chronology of the history of slavery, biographical accounts of the lives of both Douglass and Jacobs, the importance of literacy and education as seen by Douglass and Jacobs, as well as other similarities and differences among the narratives of each writer.

Chronology of Slavery

When we talk about the “history of American slavery” it seems we never look as far back as the 1500’s and earlier as the actual point of origin of the institution of slavery. For this reason I have chosen to allude to a chronology of slavery, which includes important dates such as the beginning of slave importation into North America, the publication of the first American anti-slavery piece, and the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. This chronology also serves to remind the reader that the institution of slavery was practiced in

America for nearly 250 years before it was finally abolished.

1510: The Spanish begin importing African slaves into the Caribbean.

1619: Dutch traders sell twenty Africans into slavery at Jamestown, Virginia. This marks the beginning of slave importation into North America.

1662: Virginia establishes a law mandating that children born of slaves shall be slaves from birth.

1672: The success of the Royal African Company in the slave trade leads to an increase in the number of slaves in North American colonies, while the number of white indentured servants declines.

1700: First American anti-slavery piece is published in Massachusetts.

1712: Eight whites and twenty-five blacks are killed during a slave uprising in New York City.

1739: Thirty whites and forty-four blacks are killed during a slave rebellion in South Carolina, known as the Stono Rebellion.

1750: The estimated population of the colonies reflects that 236,000 black slaves are property of the 934,000 whites.

1772: The publication of the Narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, marks the first slave narrative of English language.

1775: The Revolutionary War begins.

1776: The Declaration of Independence is adopted after the Continental Congress omits references included in the draft condemning the slave trade.

1848: Slavery is abolished in the French Caribbean.

1850: Congress adopts many measures regarding slavery, including a stronger Fugitive Slave Law denying alleged fugitives legal protection, which creates opposition and resistance in the Free states. The U. S. census records 434, 495 free colored people, 3,204,313 slaves, and 19,553,068 whites.

1852: The antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, sells 300,000 copies in its initial year of publication.

1854-56: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repeals the Missouri Compromise and leads to division between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas, as well as the formation of a Republican Party opposed to the expansion of slavery.

1857: The Supreme Court rules in the Dred Scott decision, maintaining that Congress cannot exclude slavery from federal territories and that African Americans are not eligible for American citizenship.

1859: John Brown seizes the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempted slave uprising. Fifteen people are killed during the raid and Brown and four other men are later hanged.

1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected president on November 6th on a platform opposing the extension of slavery. South Carolina secedes from the Union on December 20th, and ten other states soon follow.

1861: The Confederates shell Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12th, marking the beginning of the Civil War.

1862: Congress abolishes slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal territories and passes a law freeing slaves who escape from the Confederacy between April and July. Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, declaring that all slaves will be freed on January 1, 1863.

1863: The Emancipation Proclamation is issued on January 1st, authorizing the enlistment of freed slaves in the Union army. 180, 000 black men eventually serve in the Civil War.

1865: The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which eventually abolishes slavery, is proposed by Congress on January 31st. The Confederate armies surrender from April 9th to May 26th. President Lincoln is assassinated on April 14th, and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment is completed on December 6th. (Andrews 1001-5)

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland sometime during the month of February in the year 1818. The son of Harriet Bailey and an unknown white man, Douglass was sent in 1826 to Baltimore by Thomas Auld, the son-in-law of his master, to reside in the home of Auld’s brother, Hugh, and his wife Sophia. Douglass was fortunate enough to receive reading lessons at the side of Sophia Auld before her husband forbade the instruction. Douglass ventured on, after the ceasing of his lessons, to secretly teach himself the conventions of reading and writing. In 1833, Douglass was returned to Talbot County, where Thomas Auld hired him out as a field laborer. After a failed attempt to escape the chains of bondage in 1836, Douglass was sent back to live with Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Auld. During his second residence in Baltimore, Douglass learned the trade of ship caulking and met a free black woman by the name of Anna Murray. With the assistance of Ms. Murray, Douglass eventually escaped to Philadelphia on September 3, 1838 via route of trains and steamboats, equipped with protection papers borrowed from a free black merchant sailor. Douglass was joined by Ms. Anna Murray in New York City, where they were married. The couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he finally took the name he is remembered by, Douglass. The Douglass’ had five children, the first of who was born in 1839. In 1841, Douglass began lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society, headed by William Lloyd Garrison, and published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which is estimated to have sold over 30, 000 copies by the year 1850. During his lecture tour, which spanned Great Britain and Ireland between 1845and 1847, a group of English supporters purchased his freedom from the Auld family, allowing him to return home to the United States without fear of being apprehended by slave catchers. Douglass created his own antislavery newspaper, North Star, on December 3, 1847. Also of historical significance is the fact that Douglass was a known attendee of the woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Douglass eventually separated himself from William Lloyd Garrison, and by the early 1850’s associated himself with Gerrit Smith, advocate of an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution and participation in electoral politics. After publishing his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, Douglass proceeded to argue for emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers in the Civil War and became a supporter of Abraham Lincoln after his own adoption of these policies. Once the war ended, Douglass perpetuated his advocacy of racial and gender equality while simultaneously devoting his support to the Republican Party. He served as U.S. Marshall from 1877 to 1881, was recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia from 1881 to 1886, and served as minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891, all under Republican administrations. Douglass’ third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published initially in 1881 and later in 1892 in an expanded edition. Following the death of his wife Anna in 1882, Douglass was married for a second time in 1884 to a white woman’s rights activist by the name of Helen Pitts. The “American slave” died of a heart attack at his Cedar Hill estate in the Anacostia region of Washington, D.C. on February 20th, 1895. (Andrews 1008)

Harriet Ann Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs, daughter of Elijah Jacobs and Deliah Horniblow, was born in Edenton, North Carolina on a date not specifically known during the year of 1813. Both of Jacobs parents were slaves, her father Elijah employed as a house carpenter and her mother Deliah as a domestic servant. Following the death of her mother in 1819, Jacobs was raised by her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, and her white mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who graciously taught her how to read, write and sew. Upon the death of Margaret in 1825, Jacobs was sent to the residence of Edenton physician Dr. James Norcom. After evading repeated sexual advances from Dr. Norcom, Harriet perceived her only escape as engaging in an affair with an Edenton attorney, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, and had two children by this man: Joseph, born in 1829, and Louisa Matilda, born in 1833. Jacobs went into hiding in June 1835, in hopes that with her disappearance Norcom would sell her children to their father. The children’s father successfully purchased them from Norcom in the summer of 1835, and they were sent to live with Jacobs’ grandmother, who had been emancipated in 1828. Shortly after Sawyer’s obtaining the children and placing them with Molly Horniblow, Jacobs hid herself in a small crawl space above a storeroom in Horniblow’s house, where she remained for seven long years until her escape to Philadelphia. Upon escaping from Edenton, Jacobs soon found work in New York as a nursemaid to the infant daughter of Mary Stace Willis and Nathaniel Parker Willis, a journalist, editor, and poet, and was reunited with her children. She moved to Boston in 1843 in order to avoid recapture by Norcom, where she supported herself as a seamstress. Jacobs joined her brother, John S. Jacobs, in Rochester, New York in 1849 where he had opened an antislavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglass’ newspaper North Star. While in Rochester Jacobs met and came to confide in Amy Post, a white abolitionist and women’s rights activist who encouraged Jacobs to write her autobiography. Jacobs’ freedom was purchased, without her permission, by Cornelia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of Nathaniel Parker Willis. She entered into the composition of her autobiography in 1853 while employed as a nanny by the Willis family in Cornwall, New York. In 1860, Jacobs enlisted Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist writer, for the tasks of editing her completed manuscript and obtaining publication of the work. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published pseudonymously in Boston in 1861 and listed Child as the editor. An English version of the autobiography, The Deeper Wrong, appeared in 1862. Jacobs went on to engage in Quaker-sponsored relief work among former slaves in Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia. Following her life’s work, Jacobs lived with her daughter, Louisa Matilda, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., where she died on March 7th, 1897. (Andrews 1012-3)

Literacy and Education

From the early days of slavery, many slaves discover the importance of gaining literacy and the impact that this literacy might have on their ability to gain their freedom. At a time when only ten percent of slaves could read or write, Douglass and Jacobs are among the small number of slaves who successfully record their own accounts of their years in bondage (Miller). Douglass and Jacobs each benefit from the experience of being taught to read, if only for a limited time. Douglass’ Narrative is well known for the association it makes between literacy and freedom. Upon first residing with Mr. and Mrs. Auld in Boston, Douglass begins learning to read from Mrs. Auld, until her husband discovers this instruction and forbids her from continuing his education, telling her “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world” (Douglass 1838). Douglass cites this moment as the point when he discovers that the pathway from slavery to freedom lay in literacy. He also recognizes that the “very decided manner with which [Mr. Auld] spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering” (Douglass 1839). Due to this revelation, Douglass from then on seeks to teach himself to read and write by any means possible. Douglass cleverly tricks other children into teaching him new letters and words by betting the children that they cannot write better than him. By this trick Douglass is exposed to new letters and words, which he would memorize for later use. Jacobs, like Douglass, also learns the art of reading and writing from her mistress. Jacobs says of her mistress, “While I was with her, she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of a slave, I bless her memory” (Jacobs 1964). While the mistresses of both Douglass and Jacobs went on to treat each slave in cruel and vicious manners, Douglass and Jacobs recognize the importance of having been introduced to the convention of reading and writing at an early age, thus inspiring them to acquire an education for themselves. Most slaves associated literacy with power, while some desired to read simply to be able to read the Bible. Jacobs acknowledges that because the slaves were unable to read the Bible for themselves, they were forced to listen to white minister’s selections, which often appeared to justify slavery.

Similarities and Differences in Narratives of Douglass and Jacobs

Both of these narratives are powerful, emotional, and accurately depict the horrors of slavery in a personal way that no other form of literature has the ability to do. Each narrative focuses primarily on the end goal of freedom, and each author ultimately achieves freedom by escaping to the North. These narratives demonstrate the atrocities of slavery, both physical and emotional, and acknowledge the hypocrisy of slavery as experienced in the “Christian South.” Despite their similarities, however, there are several differences between the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs. The most important difference has to do with the different genders of the writers, which affects the way they experienced and wrote about slavery. For Douglass, slavery is very much a physical bondage, as well as mental, as he is forced to work long and hard days in the field under the watchful eye of overseers like Mr. Covey. Jacobs, however, sees the main obstacles of slavery as being her lack of ability to safely provide for her children. She worries constantly about the safety and well being of her children, as well as herself. In fact, Jacobs’ main motive in writing Incidents was that she might reach white women of the North on behalf of the many slave mothers still enslaved in the South. Alternately, Douglass’ primary concern has to do with ensuring his personal freedom only.

Conclusion

One of the more significant discoveries to come from my research of American slavery has to do with the history of American slavery and the fact that it can be dated back to as early as the 1500’s. When we speak about American slavery, it seems we often only recognize the years directly leading up to the Civil War as being “slaveholding years.” The fact that slavery endured in America for approximately 250, only serves to depict it as more atrocious. In addition to facts relevant to the history of slavery, I have discovered much about the personal and professional lives of both Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass through biographical accounts of the two writers. Also, in studying each author, I have found that the underlying need and desire for literacy and education was of utmost importance and present with both Jacobs and Douglass. As noted, both similarities and differences exist in the writings of Douglass and Jacobs, however, one difference in their accounts which deserves further analysis would be Jacobs’ account of sexual exploitation and motherhood. Other general for further study regarding slavery might include the denial of individuality and creativeness amongst slaves. Through my current research, however, I have had the opportunity to analyze the life and works of two significant anti-slavery writers in American history who, through their narratives, present an accurate portrayal of the dehumanization and degradation of slavery while striving for freedom and dignity.

  

 

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. Slave Narratives. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000. (1-1035).

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002. 1817-80.

Jacobs, Harriet Ann. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002. 1960-84.

Miller, Jennie. “Harriet Jacobs and the ‘double burden’ of American Slavery.” International Social Science Review 13 July 2002. 15 Nov. 2004. <http://www.findarticles.com>.