3.3: Enslavement in America - Assignment

Enslavement in America - Discussion Assignment - Discuss the Slave Narratives

After reading "Slave Narratives" students will make two discussion posts: 1) a response to the reading (minimum 250 words) and 2) you will respond to a classmate's post (minimum 75 words). *Discussion board grading rubric attached.

Slave Narratives

Slave narratives—the written testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans—an effective discourse against the system of slavery. The eyewitness testimony of men and women who had experienced slavery—which British travelers, European guests, and other white visitors might corroborate—presented a formidable challenge to those slaveholders who downplayed and even dismissed accusations of brutality against African Americans. Slaves narratives additionally proved to be useful tools for educating readers concerning the horrific realities of an economic system that mythologized kind mistresses, benevolent masters, and contented chattel slaves.

Slave narratives of resistance stood as compelling evidence of the humanity of African men and women, and of their desire for liberty and autonomous lives that was innate, unstudied, and self-generated. By extension, the authors of these books demonstrated how freedom is often predicated upon the acquisition of literacy and an education. Yet, resistance to slavery required physical as well as psychological battles, and included in the slaves' narratives are descriptions of such tactics as fistfights with slave owners, collective rebellions, poisoning, work slowdown and stoppages, and both temporary and permanent escapes.

Beginning in the 18th century, slave narratives of resistance were published primarily for consumption by transatlantic British and U.S. audiences, and much of their appeal lay in the combination of sentiment, Christian moralizing, violence, melodrama, and suspense that came to characterize them. The genre derived characteristics from the authentic and fictional Native American captivity narratives of the colonial era, and from the conversion narratives and tales of crime, punishment, and imprisonment that were printed cheaply and sold briskly during the early Republic. Slave narratives peaked in popularity within the United States during the antebellum era, yet they continued to enjoy wide circulation, with new books emerging, after the Civil War and through Reconstruction. In advance of printing book-length narratives, authors tested the appeal of themes and scenes in the pages of the antislavery press, particularly in correspondence or anecdotes directed to The Liberator, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and other newspapers with loyal subscribers and organized reform societies underwriting them.

White abolitionists often transcribed and published the stories of illiterate ex-slaves, or, on occasion, such authors withheld their true identities and produced autobiographies that the public assumed had been written by former slaves. For example, Mattie Griffiths, who wrote The Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857), was a former Kentucky plantation heiress who had denounced slavery, left the South, and joined the abolitionists, but most readers assumed that she was an African American woman until her editor revealed the deception.

It was ex-slave men, however, who published the majority of slave narratives, and they typically worked out their books' subject matter as they lectured to northern antislavery audiences about surviving slavery. Those who could sway skeptical crowds assured themselves of a wide readership once their books were published, for the public demanded to see the fugitives in person in order to accept their stories as credible ones. The orators' dramatic presentations also supported the claim that African Americans were indeed capable of producing original and imaginative thought, speech, and literature.

Former slaves, both men and women, who lectured before the public debunked lies about their owners' benevolence by displaying the scars and wounds inflicted upon them during beatings, and the limbs muscled and blistered from their grueling, uncompensated labors. Their public recitations brought the antislavery message home to audiences who lacked the leisure time or the literacy skills to benefit from printed accounts of the subject. Such speeches often risked abrupt endings followed by literal acts of resistance, as they and other antislavery supporters—including African American activists such as Lewis Hayden and Charles Lenox Remond—fought their way out of lecture halls like Boston's African Meeting House while angry, brick-throwing mobs chased behind them.

Written accounts of resistance by ex-slaves worked in tandem with such oral presentations to defeat slavery. The autobiographies and memoirs of ex-slaves cite gaining literacy, fighting back, and escaping enslavement altogether as favored methods of resistance. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which became an international bestseller, Frederick Douglass presents his secret attempts to educate himself as an essential declaration of his humanity and as a counter to widely held assumptions, justifying slavery, that African Americans were little more than beasts. An insatiable thirst to attain learning also spurs him to succeed among a transatlantic community of much more privileged speakers and writers, after he obtains his freedom by dressing as a sailor and jumping ship in Baltimore. Similarly, Harriet Jacobs writes in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) of slaves risking beatings and torture to hide pages of the Bible in their clothing, and of holding an evening Sunday school as a pretext for defying anti-literacy laws and using Scripture verses to teach the slaves to read. Her recollections demonstrate that the slaves' resistance was also impelled by their version of Christianity, which offered believers hope for liberation in this world alongside assurances of salvation and tranquility in the next one.

Published narratives of slavery written by African Americans are replete with descriptions of physical resistance to dehumanization as well. As in the classic scene where Frederick Douglass beats his master, Edward Covey, often ex-slaves, brushing aside fears of losing their lives or being sold away from family members, struggle against abusive owners with brooms, tools, the whip that was to scourge them, or their own bare hands. Sabotage of crops and arson and theft of property, feigned sickness, outright revolt, murder of their owners and families, suicide, starvation, and, rarely, infanticide, are just a few examples of how the slaves' narratives map out their hatred of slavery on their own bodies and on the persons and property of others.

Further testifying to the incendiary power of such descriptions of violence are what ex-slave authors omitted from their books. For instance, fearing disapproval from even her most sympathetic readers, Jacobs deleted a concluding chapter she had written on the controversial John Brown, who had led a group of men during the Harpers' Ferry Raid (1859) to steal arms from the federal arsenal in order to initiate a war against slaveholders.

Running away altogether is perhaps the most iconic method of resisting victimization that is recounted in both written and oral narratives. While fugitives such as Sojourner Truth tell of slipping away from servitude in somnolent dawn hours or camouflaged by murky evening darkness, conspiracies to escape also encompass more imaginative and daring schemes. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic found Henry "Box" Brown's Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851) appealing because it chronicled how friends nailed the Virginia slave into a box, then shipped him by train to waiting abolitionists in the free city of Philadelphia. Similarly, the Irish Quaker William Tweedie must have published Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom (1860), the memoir of Georgia slaves William and Ellen Craft, with their unusual method of escape in mind. Ellen, who could pass for white, disguised herself as a southern gentleman planter; her husband William traveled as her slave escort; the two of them journeyed with denizens of the slave-owning aristocracy by boat, carriage, and train until they too reached the first free northern city of Philadelphia. Fugitives such as Brown and the Crafts reached non-literate audiences and raised money for abolition by selling engravings depicting scenes from their escapes. Like the portraits of ex-slave authors that usually stood opposite the title page, these images verified the stories the fugitives told as true tales of servitude.

Decades after the Civil War had ended and with it, Southern slavery, William Still's The Underground Rail Road (1872) underscored the appeal to readers presented by the fugitives' narratives of escape. Still, an African American Underground Railroad conductor who had met both Brown and the Crafts when they arrived on separate occasions from the South, interviewed scores of fugitive slaves he assisted and transcribed their stories in a series of journals, which he gathered for posterity in this commemorative book. The narratives collectively offer several explanations for why escaping was an especially effective, though extremely risky, action against slavery. Slaves who fled caused public embarrassment for their owners, as well as injuring them financially and incurring additional expenses if the owners sought recapture or restitution. When news of a successful escape filtered back to plantation slaves through letters or word-of-mouth, those who remained behind could share the good fortune and hopes for their own emancipation. Finally, runaways offered unassailable proof of the humanity of a people willing to risk their lives and families for freedom.

Even after the fugitives have settled in the nominally free states, their narratives attest to the continued need to resist human traffickers. Most narratives published after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 contain scenes of runaways eluding bounty hunters sent north by furious owners to retrieve them. Fugitives fought against this second assault on their liberty by going into hiding with the assistance of the antislavery community, raising funds to compensate their owners for what their bodies would sell at auction, or uprooting with their families to settle all-black communities in Canada.

Fugitive narrators also write of women who attempt to undermine slavery by fighting against sexual exploitation: for example, by refusing to mate and breed more slaves with a man their owner has selected. Women also describe escaping slavery under different circumstances than men do, choosing more frequently to run away in groups of family and friends rather than alone, and profiting along the way from the assistance of antislavery networks. After she reaches the free states, Harriet Tubman's decision in her autobiography to return multiple times into Maryland in order to rescue hundreds of relatives and strangers illustrates this commitment.

After the war and through the end of the century, the production of slave narratives of resistance diminished to a trickle, yet many still attracted an attentive readership. Writers including Susie King Taylor, who cooks, cleans, nurses, and does laundry for Union troops garrisoned on the Sea Islands in her Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902), and Elizabeth Keckley, who designs clothes and dispenses advice for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln in her Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), demonstrate that former slaves are ready to occupy positions as hardworking, law-abiding citizens and community members. Even as their books include conventional accounts of their courage in the face of sadistic punishments and heartless treatment, the post–Civil War writers balance these reflections of trauma with a reconciliatory tone. For instance, Keckley recalls the generosity and charity of Virginia ladies she served, and Annie Louise Burton nostalgically reminisces about her idyllic childhood as an Alabama slave before the Civil War erupted.

Early slave narratives of resistance have influenced the most influential contemporary African American writers. From Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) to August Wilson's plays, their works commemorate the former slaves' determination to humanize and complicate their experiences, and to depict themselves as more than mere victims.

Barbara McCaskill

McCaskill, Barbara. "Slave Narratives." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2025, https://go.openathens.net/redirector...%26sTypeId%3d2. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.