Harriet Jacobs:  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Chapter XL in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is titled “The Fugitive Slave Law” and is the book’s penultimate chapter. Earlier chapters detail Jacobs’s life from her girlhood in North Carolina through her flight to her grandmother’s home, her escape to Philadelphia, her time with the Willis family, her freedom, and other events. Throughout the narration the names of the characters are changed, such that she herself is “Linda Brent,” her brother is “William Brent,” her children are “Benjamin” (or “Benny”) and “Ellen,” Dr. Norcom is named “Dr. Flint,” Samuel Sawyer is “Mr. Sands,” Nathaniel Parker Willis is “Mr. Bruce,” and Willis’s second wife, who bought Jacobs’s freedom, is “Cornelia Bruce.”

By the first paragraph of Chapter XL, the narration has reached the time when William Brent decides to head to California to take part in the gold rush and agrees that Benjamin, Linda Brent’s son, will go with him. Left alone, the narrator decides to return to New York and to the Bruce family, where she was previously employed. Mr. Bruce has taken a new wife, Cornelia, whom the narrator describes as “aristocratic” but also as heartily opposed to slavery and resistant to any of the “sophistry” used by southerners to defend it. In the third paragraph, the narrator makes reference to an event of “disastrous import to the colored people”—the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She refers to a slave by the name of Hamlin who was hunted down by the “bloodhounds” of the North and South in New York. In describing the impact of the law on New Yorkers, she refers to the “short and simple annals of the poor.” This is a line originally from Thomas Gray’s famous poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) and later used by Abraham Lincoln in 1859 to describe his childhood. The paragraph also makes reference to Jenny Lind, a Swedish opera singer known in America as the “Swedish Nightingale.” The narrator makes the point that while “fashionables” were listening to opera, “the thrilling voices of poor hunted colored people went up … from Zion’s church,” a reference to the city’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

Because of the new law, many blacks who had found homes in the city had little choice but to flee, perhaps to Canada; many wives and husbands discovered that their spouses were fugitive slaves and liable to capture. Making matters worse was the fact that children born to a slave mother were themselves legally slaves, so fathers faced the prospect of losing not only their wives but also their children to slave catchers.

In paragraph 4 the narrator refers to the discussions she and her brother had before he left for California, pointing out his anger at the new law. The narrator then goes on to describe how she and others had to go about the city through back streets and byways, living in constant fear of being taken by slave catchers. Vigilance committees were formed to keep tabs on the activities of slave catchers, and New York’s blacks kept their eyes on newspapers that reported the arrival of southerners at the city’s hotels. The phrases “running to and fro” and “knowledge should be increased” are from the book of Daniel in the King James Bible.

In paragraphs 5–9, the narrator tells the story of a slave named Luke whom she had known as a child. Luke had been owned by a particularly cruel master who depended on Luke for his care but beat him constantly—or called on the town constable to do so for him. After the master died, Luke hid some of the man’s money in the pocket of the pants in which he would be buried. At the time of the burial, Luke asked for the pants, in this way getting funds that enabled him to flee to New York with the goal of reaching Canada—where he would have joined an estimated twenty thousand New York African Americans who fled to Canada after the law was passed. The narrator encounters Luke in New York and learns of his plans. Luke refers to “speculators,” men who purchased the rights to runaway slaves so as to catch them and then sell them to the highest bidder. The narrator concludes this portion of the account by noting that Luke’s tale offered an example of how the slave system corrupted morals: “When a man has his wages stolen from him, year after year, and the laws sanction and enforce the theft, how can he be expected to have more regard to honesty than has the man who robs him?”

With paragraph 10, the narrator returns to her own experiences, again stressing how anxious she was that she could be caught, especially with the approach of summer. She reflects on the irony that she was in a “free” state but still felt like a slave. Her anxiety was well advised, for she learned that Dr. Flint was on the hunt for her and had learned from informants about her mode of dress. In point of fact, the real-life Norcom placed newspaper ads in which he offered a reward of $100 for information about her. The ads stressed that “being a good seamstress, she has been accustomed to dress well, has a variety of very fine clothes, made in the prevailing fashion, and will probably appear, if abroad, tricked out in gay and fashionable finery.” When she informed Mrs. Bruce of the danger she was in, Mrs. Bruce offered to allow the narrator to carry her daughter about so that if the narrator were caught, the authorities would have to return the Bruce child to her mother. In this way Mrs. Bruce could learn of the capture and take action to help. In paragraph 13 the narrator notes that Mrs. Bruce had a proslavery relative who questioned her decision to harbor a fugitive slave. When he asked her whether she knew the penalty for doing so, she acknowledged that she did but expressed her willingness to go to jail “rather than have any poor victim torn from my house, to be carried back to slavery.” The narrator concludes the account by noting that she went to the safety of Massachusetts to avoid capture. The Massachusetts senator referred to by the narrator was probably Robert Rantoul, Jr., an outspoken opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act who provided a legal defense for Thomas Sims, the first purported slave captured under the new act in Massachusetts.