Stories of Freedom

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs were both born into slavery and both shared their stories with the world. Like all slave stories, Douglass’s and Jacobs’s works express the tension between conflicting motives that produced autobiographies of slave life. The need to achieve the most important goal, an end to slavery, took the author’s back to the world that had enslaved them. Their stories had to provide truthful reproductions of both places and experiences of the past they had escaped. White abolitionist advised slave writers to adhere to precise rules and methods to produce what they saw as one of the most powerful propaganda arguments against slavery. Still for the authors themselves, the chance to tell their stories created something more personal: a means to write an identity within a country that wrongfully deprived them their rights to exist as human beings.

The stories of Douglass and Jacobs reveal the full assortment of demands and situations that slaves would go through. Whether the authors were freed or a fugitive their stories were required to give precise details of their experience in servitude, while calling attention to their miseries under heartless masters and the strengths of their will to free themselves. One of the most significant elements that happened in the stories was a passage in which the author explained how he or she came to be able to do something that was often proclaimed to be impossible: to write and read. The person who read these stories was most often looking for excitement; this could be provided through vivid details of how the author managed to escape from his or her owners. Authors of these autobiographies also needed to present testimonials that they were good Christians while s...

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...uthors made an impact on America with their autobiographies. Harriet Ann Jacobs’s story was appropriately entitled “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” and she used pseudonyms instead a person’s real name. Frederick Douglass’s story let the reader know that they were reading an autobiography and is entitled, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” It was an unhappy time for African-Americans in history but it should not be forgotten.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” The

Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. Concise ed. Boston:

Houghton, 2004. 875-931. Print.

Jacobs, Harriet Ann. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The Heath Anthology of American

Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. Concise ed. Boston: Houghton, 2004.843-860. Print.