Harriet Jacobs:  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Context

Jacobs’s narrative was published in 1861, the year that the sectional conflict dividing the United States erupted into war. For decades the nation had been grappling with the slavery issue. In 1820, when Jacobs was yet a young girl, Congress had tried to appease both sides in the slavery debate through the Missouri Compromise, which created a dividing line between the free northern states and the southern slaveholding states. The compromise, though, proved to be only a temporary solution. After the United States acquired new territories as a result of the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, the nation stretched from coast to coast, raising anew questions about the status of slavery in the new territories.

The events of the 1850s, when Jacobs gained her freedom and began writing her narrative, thrust the nation toward civil war. A key event was the passage of the Compromise of 1850, a package of legislation that included a new Fugitive Slave Act, designed to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The earlier act had laid the responsibility for capturing fugitive slaves on the state from which they escaped. The new law was highly controversial because it required federal authorities in the northern states, as well as citizens, to help southern slave catchers in returning runaway slaves to their owners. In many northern states the response to the Fugitive Slave Act was the enactment of personal liberty laws designed to increase the legal rights of accused fugitives and prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, overturned these laws, arguing that federal law took precedence over state laws.

Meanwhile, abolitionist societies had sprung up in the North. While some of them were created and run by African Americans, many were the work of whites, particularly Quakers, who had long had a strong religious aversion to slavery. The abolitionist movement shared many of the goals of the incipient women’s rights and suffrage movement, so some women, such as Jacobs’s friend Amy Post, played key roles in the opposition to slavery and deliberately flouted the law by hiding escaped slaves and giving them aid. The Underground Railroad, a secretive network of meeting points, safe houses, and escape routes, conducted runaway slaves north and, in many instances, to Canada; Philadelphia, Jacobs’s destination after leaving North Carolina, was one of the main “depots.” By some estimates, as many as a hundred thousand slaves had escaped via this network by 1850; thenceforth, the Fugitive Slave Act made the work of the Underground Railroad more crucial—and more productive.

In 1854, shortly after Jacobs is presumed to have begun composing her narrative, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed to repeal the Missouri Compromise. The new act, the work of the Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, was an attempt to deal with slavery in the new states being carved out of the Louisiana Purchase. In essence, the act held that the question of slavery in those states would be settled by popular vote, but the law proved disastrous, leading to extraordinary bloodshed as proslavery and antislavery settlers clashed. Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune editor and initial publisher of portions of Jacobs’s book, coined the term “Bleeding Kansas” as politically opposed gangs attacked each other in the mid-1850s. One of the most notorious acts of violence was the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, by proslavery forces in May 1856. In retaliation, John Brown—best known for his later raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859—led a band of abolitionists that murdered a group of proslavery settlers in Kansas in what came to be called the Pottawatomie Massacre. Adding insult to injury was the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held that presently or formerly enslaved African Americans, as well as their descendants, were not citizens of the United States and thus not entitled to the protection of federal law.

During this period, many people mounted their own campaigns against slavery. Prominent among them was Frederick Douglass, who became one of the nation’s most powerful abolitionists and orators as he railed against the evils of slavery. After spending some twenty years as a slave, Douglass escaped, and seven years later he published an autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). He also created an antislavery newspaper called the North Star, which would evolve into a succession of newspapers bearing Douglass’s name. Fanning the flames of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a graphic depiction of slavery that evoked sympathy and outrage throughout the North. Stowe’s depiction of Tom’s enslaved life under his cruel white overseer, Simon Legree, mobilized abolitionists and others who had perhaps until then given little thought to the issue.

Joining these writers was Solomon Northup, a free man who was captured and forced into slavery and who in 1853 published Twelve Years a Slave, an account of his time in bondage. During these years numerous other slave narratives were published, among them The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave (1856); The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and his Wife “Vina,” after Forty Years of Slavery (1856), authored by Kate E. R. Pickard; and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860). Thus, by the time Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861, a vibrant market for these kinds of books had already been established.