Slave Narratives

By: Daniel Donaghy, Stephanie J. Wilhelm

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Slave Narratives

[This entry contains three subentries dealing with slave narratives from the colonial period to the Civil War. The first article provides a discussion of the themes of American slave narratives and important early examples, while the second article provides a discussion of specific slave narratives from the perspective of literature, antislavery propaganda, and biography or autobiography. The third article provides a discussion of the slave narratives written by African former slaves in lateeighteenth-century Britain, and how they used memory to document their histories.]

The Slave Narrative in America from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

On 24 June 1700 Judge Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts published the first American antislavery document, The Selling of Joseph. In his essay Sewall offers readers the first written chronological account of a black slave's life in North America and argues that slavery is not only a philosophical problem but also a practical one. The essay also questions the religious validity of slavery and the threats that slavery poses to New England society.

In addition to whites such as Sewall who wanted to bring an end to slavery, many slaves tried to sue for their freedom. Around the time Sewall's essay was published, a slave named Adam asked Sewall to help him obtain freedom from his master, John Saffin. Details are sketchy, but it seems that Saffin promised in 1694 to free Adam after seven years of service. In 1701, however, Saffin refused to free Adam because of what he described as Adam's intolerable insolence and insubordination. Soon Sewall, Saffin, and Adam became tangled in a heated legal battle. Saffin responded to Sewall's document by publishing one of his own, A Brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet, Entituled, The Selling of Joseph, in which he describes Adam's “outrageous” behavior and offers the first biblical defense of slavery.

The jury ruled in favor of Saffin, and Adam remained his slave. It is no coincidence that Saffin was one of the judges who heard the case. In addition, Saffin recorded in his diary his attempts to manipulate witnesses and tamper with the jury. The tide turned, however, when Sewall was one of the superior court judges to hear the case's appeal in 1703. On 3 November of that year the court ruled that Adam and his descendants were to be “at peace and quiet and free” from Saffin forever.

Rebecca Warren Brown's Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear  title page. Brown began her (anonymous) preface by remarking: “When a book is put into the hands of young persons, in the form of a Memoir or Narrative, it is common to hear them ask, Is it true? In reply to this interrogation respecting the following little historical sketch, we say, It is true.”

University of North Carolina, Wilson Library.

view larger image

Adam's story is far from complete. There is no record of his full name, since it was not yet customary to grant surnames to slaves. Furthermore, there is only speculation about what happened to Adam after his emancipation. Nonetheless, his story offers a glimpse into nine years in the life of a slave and a testimony of one man's struggle to be recognized as a human being. The Selling of Joseph, along with Saffin's rebuttal and personal diaries, court records, pamphlets, and a few poems from the period, form Adam Negro's Tryall (1703), the most coherent published record of events from a slave's life in the first century of American literature. Although many contemporary critics see Adam Negro's Tryall as the first slave narrative, others will not go that far. Most agree, however, that Adam Negro's Tryall is the precursor of the slave narratives that followed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Adam Negro's Tryall changed the way African American experiences were recorded. After its publication slaves could no longer be referred to simply as chattel or as less than human. Instead, the voices of slaves, their struggle for recognition, and their movement from bondage to freedom became integral parts of the story of slavery. Although there was already a sympathetic audience for antislavery literature, Adam Negro's Tryall showed white abolitionist editors that there was also an audience for slaves' firsthand accounts. It elevated slave narratives, which had been seen as supplements to antislavery literature, into a distinct genre of its own. Furthermore, Sewall's essay became the model for antislavery writings.

Early Slave Narratives

Although the debate over slavery continued after the publication of Adam Negro's Tryall, no other story of a colonial slave was published as a factual account until thirty years later, when Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon appeared in London in 1734. It focused on selected episodes in the life of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known to the readers as Job Ben Solomon. Thomas Bluett, writing on behalf of England's Lord Montague, recorded the account; his use of the third person emphasizes the distance between himself and his subject. The book focuses on the physical and mental trials in Solomon's life as a stranger in a foreign land. While it serves as a eulogy for those who helped Solomon gain his freedom, it stops short of condemning the institution of slavery. Instead, Solomon's enslavement is presented as an unfortunate accident.

Twenty-six years passed before the publication of the next known slave narrative, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon (1760). The opening and closing pages of Briton Hammon's narrative have a decidedly pious tone, but Hammon's scribe may have added those pages, because most of the narrative is quite thrilling in its descriptions of Hammon's surviving shipwrecks, cannibalistic Indians, and Havana dungeons to meet up with his master in London while working as a ship's cook.

Eighteenth-century slave narratives are presented in a traditional and simple manner. The narrative is a chronological account of an individual's life meant to entertain readers while encouraging their humanitarian and religious efforts. Before the account itself, a respected white person offers introductory remarks that address the narrator's trustworthiness, Christianity, and overall good moral character. The typical narrative opens with accounts of the subject's life before captivity and then details the slave's kidnapping and life in bondage. The narrative climaxes with an emergence—either by rescue or escape—from slavery.

The next slave narrative to appear was The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man: Who Was Executed at Worchester, October 20th 1768. For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe. Unlike its predecessors, Arthur's narrative tells the story of a slave who was born in Connecticut and raised by a benevolent master who taught him to read and write and treated him with uncommon kindness. Arthur's mistress, however, treated him so badly that he ran away at the age of fourteen and soon took up a life of crime. He then entered a tumultuous period during which he was sold several times for refusing to work. Finally, he ran away, continuing to break the law until he was arrested for the crime to which he later confessed, which is articulated in the title of his narrative.

Importance of Religion in Late-Eighteenth-Century Narratives

There is a significant personality shift between Arthur and the next slave narrator, Jupiter Hammon (who was not related to Briton Hammon). Hammon is credited with being the first African American poet; his poem “An Evening Thought—Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” was published on Christmas Day 1760, ten years before the poet and former slave Phillis Wheatley published her first verse. Hammon's master gave him the rudiments of reading and writing, an intensive religious education, and training in skilled manual labor. The slave was so thankful to God for his favorable position that he made religion his life's work. He considered literacy as powerful chiefly because it allowed individuals to learn God's law. He urged illiterate slaves to learn to read so they would be able to read the Bible and “escape misery, and be happy for ever.” Worrying about being a slave would do slaves no good, Hammon believed, because God would release them from slavery “in his own time and way.” According to Hammon, all the hardships slaves had to endure on earth would pale in comparison to the everlasting joys of Heaven.

Religion is a key component of early slave narratives. Conversion to Christianity gave African Americans a higher status, and in some cases baptism could lead to freedom. Most of the early slave narrators were ministers whose stories offer detailed accounts of their conversion and testify that their faith sustained them during their darkest days in bondage. In addition, most readers of slave narratives were also Christians and became strongly invested in the slaves' stories because of their emphasis on religion.

The third slave narrator of the era, who put greater emphasis on religious experiences than on earthly ones, was James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. His autobiography, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, seems to have been published as early as 1770 in Bath, England. It was published in the United States in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1774 and went through twelve editions by 1814. The book had the distinction among the slave narratives of being the first of only four autobiographies of African American slaves containing accounts of the author's experiences in Africa.

Gronniosaw's narrative was popular among English abolitionists in the late eighteenth century. Even more popular, however, was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in 1789. Equiano's narrative begins with a description of his native country, Benin (now Nigeria). He details his family history, childhood, kidnapping, enslavement, and subsequent experiences in England, the West Indies, and the American colonies of Virginia and Georgia. His narrative is similar in many ways to others published between 1760 and 1807: the narrator is someone with extraordinary courage, daring, and independence, and the plot focuses on the protagonist's adventures. Yet it is also distinct from other narratives: interspersed with his descriptions of numerous terrible experiences—most notably, the Middle Passage and its subhuman conditions—are Equiano's recollections of occasional strokes of good fortune.

In his early years of enslavement, for example, Equiano is sold to a plantation owner, where he is to serve his owner's son. He gets along so well with the boy, however, that for a while he almost does not mind being a slave. Later in the narrative he tells of his close friendship with an American named Richard Baker, who was four or five years older than Equiano. The boys spend two years together aboard a ship and become faithful companions. “Dick” teaches Equiano how to read, write, and speak English, and although hardships await him at the end of the voyage, Equiano benefits greatly from his uncommon bond with Baker. Among the achievements Equiano lists are playing the French horn, reading the Bible, learning the art of hairdressing, and becoming knowledgeable about navigation and naval warfare. After converting to Christianity, he debates with British Protestant ministers and Portuguese Catholic clergy. Eventually, he travels the world, visiting every major region, including the North Pole. Finally, as a result of divine intervention and his own quick thinking, Equiano earns his freedom, settles in England, and dedicates his life to the antislavery cause.

The eighteenth-century readers of narratives by slaves like Olaudah Equiano were given portraits of brave, intelligent people who overcame great dangers with the help of what they interpreted as God's power and grace. The narrators reinforced the Christian idea that God guarantees the victory of good over evil as long as the good keep the faith. The slave hero of the narratives not only made advancements on his own behalf but also enriched the lives of his white masters and fellow slaves. His piety and integrity earned him the respect and admiration of all good men and served as a manifestation of God's salvation.

Slave Narratives after 1808

The narratives of the eighteenth century reproached slavery on moral, religious, economic, and social grounds, but they did not directly attack slave owners or the institution of slavery itself, nor did they emphasize slavery's dehumanizing effects. The common viewpoint at the time was that if the slave trade were abolished, slavery would not survive without at least adopting more humane practices. When President Thomas Jefferson signed the African Slave Trade Act in 1807, which prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States beginning on 1 January 1808, many Americans felt slavery would soon weaken. Consequently, the public's interest in slave narratives declined.

When William Lloyd Garrison released the first issue of theLiberator in January 1831, a new period of abolitionist activity began. Slaves and freedpeople had not stopped writing between 1807 and 1831, but only a few narratives were published during that time. It was not until whites revived their interest in the abolition of slavery that the full-scale publication of these narratives began again. The nineteenth-century narrators reshaped the existing slave narrator model until the form fit their needs. Gone was the African-born freedman as narrator; in his place was the African American fugitive slave narrator. Another notable change was the tone narrators took toward slavery itself. Unlike their predecessors, nineteenth-century narrators launched direct, vitriolic attacks at the institution of slavery.

After 1830 abolitionists recognized the power of the earlier slave narratives and republished several of them to further the antislavery cause. New printings of eighteenth-century narratives enjoyed brisk sales, and some works written between 1807 and 1830 were able to find publishers. The narratives of this era, many of which were written by African American ministers, deal largely with matters of conversion. Methodist preachers and itinerants, with the help of aides and recent converts, blanketed the country to spread the word of God and harvest as many souls as they could. During this time, many African American preachers broke away from paternalistic white churches and tried to capitalize on the country's revolutionary environment to spread political as well as religious messages.

Mid-eighteenth-century readers eagerly discovered the narratives of people such as David George, who first published An Account of Life of Mr. David George from S. L. A. Given by Himself in 1785. Born a slave in Essex County, Virginia, George grew up with his family on the plantation of a cruel slave owner. His narrative recounts the terrible treatment his family endured during his adolescence, including his mother's bloody beatings and his brother's being almost beaten to death after trying to escape. It tells of his escape and capture by a man named Blue Salt, who gave George back to his master in exchange for rum, linen, and a gun. Most significantly, it describes George's conversion to Christianity. At the urging of another black man referred to only as Cyrus, George began attending church regularly, learned to read and write, and became a preacher. After his master fled from approaching British troops, George was free. He began working for the British army and offering religious services.

Following the war some of George's British friends secured him safe passage to the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, where he brought the word of God to black communities, preaching from the Bible and performing baptisms. When George baptized a white member of his congregation, many furious people attacked him, hit him with sticks, and drove him away. George met similar resistance when he later immigrated to Sierra Leone, where whites seemed to be just as ignorant and prejudiced against black preachers. Throughout the narrative, George remains above the fray. He closes his story with the image of his offering a final sermon to the people of Sierra Leone, as if trying one last time to make them see the word of God that was guiding him.

John Jea and George White wrote two of the most important narratives of this period. Their narratives—titled, respectively, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, an African Preacher (1815) and A Brief Account of the Life, Experience, Travels, and Gospel Labours of George White, an African (1810)—reveal the influence of Methodist evangelism and show how the democratic atmosphere of the country spread into the religious realms. Jea and White were two of the earliest African American autobiographers, part of a generation born into slavery but later set free. Both men were fiery Methodist ministers, preaching their religion's strong antislavery messages from their church pulpits and at various meeting places throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their works address a range of subjects that became staples in subsequent narratives of former African American slaves: the Christianity of blacks, the injustices of slavery (in both the North and the South), and the effects of the American Revolutionary War on the mind-sets of African American slaves.

Solomon Bayley's was another important narrative of this period. Based on correspondence between Bayley and Robert Hurnard (who learned of Bayley's story during a trip to America in 1820), A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley (1825) tells a compelling, if at times disjointed, story of the life of a slave, born in an unknown year, who lived in Delaware before his master took him to Virginia and away from his wife. It describes Bayley's escape from his master and his return to Delaware, where he risked almost certain capture to be with his wife. He was eventually recaptured, Bayley tells his readers, but he was able to buy his freedom for eighty dollars. Later, he bought freedom for his wife and son. Bayley's religious beliefs are expressed throughout the work. While he worked as a farmer after slavery, he dreamed of dedicating himself to religious pursuits.

Zilpha Elaw, who published Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, An American Female of Colour in 1846, was a pioneering female black preacher around the time slavery was ending. Her narrative chronicles a difficult childhood and her adult life as a Methodist evangelist dedicated to spreading the word of the Bible and saving souls. The most distinguishing aspect of her work, however, is her memorable descriptions of conversions at religious camp meetings. Her prose describing these meetings pours on for pages, rich with vivid sensory detail, in an attempt to capture the awe-inspiring moment during which a person gives the self over fully to Christ.

One of the more remarkable conversion narratives of the period was written by John Marrant, who was born free in 1755 in New York, grew up well educated, and gained popularity partly because of his ability to play the violin and French horn. His story, told in A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova Scotia) Born in New-York, in North-America (1785), details how he accepted Christ so suddenly and feverishly that those close to him thought he was ill and how he was one of the first black men to convert members from Cherokee communities to Christianity. Readers were attracted to his near-death experiences during a war at sea, when he preached the word of God even under the most dangerous circumstances.

Boston King was another former slave who gained fame during this era. Born outside Charleston, South Carolina, King endured terrible beatings at his master's hands during his early years. Nevertheless, he was able to learn the skills of a carpenter. On the verge of manhood he seized a rare opportunity and fled to a nearby encampment of English troops. Accepted by the troops, King served in the British army and later the navy until he was captured and taken to a prison camp in New Jersey. After escaping once again, he eventually fled to Canada. There, like the protagonists of many narratives from this period, King had a religious awakening. After his wife converted to Christianity, King reluctantly followed her example but before long was preaching in the Canadian towns of Birchtown and Shelburne. King's reputation as a preacher rose in the years after 1789, when a great famine struck Nova Scotia. King's famous sermons brought strength and relief to many. During this time, he traveled extensively, preaching and attempting to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Later he studied in England so that he could be officially ordained a minister. In 1798 he published Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher, Written by Himself, during His Residence at Kingswood-School.

Nancy Prince, in A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (first published in 1850), crafts an important and interesting account of life as an African American woman in antebellum America. Though never a slave, Prince comments on slavery in the United States and serfdom in Russia, where she lived for nearly ten years. In the opening pages of her brief narrative, Prince describes the difficulties she faced growing up as the daughter of a widowed mother and the sister of seven brothers and sisters. Prince goes on to detail nearly twenty years of traveling, including journeys around the United States; her time in Russia with her husband, who served the czar; and her work in Jamaica as a missionary after her husband's death. Prince's narrative offers readers valuable insights into race and gender relations and the global political climate in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. In addition, it gives readers a rare glimpse into what it was like to travel great distances during that time. It is worth noting that the tone of Prince's narrative is much more upbeat than many other African American narratives of the era. Despite its many dark moments, Prince's is not a bitter story. Rather, it is the narrative of an extraordinary, experienced, and confident free black woman living in the mid-nineteenth century.

An important narrative to surface after the Civil War was James Mars's Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut, Written by Himself (1866). As he explains in the book's introduction, Mars did not write his narrative for the same reasons that many before him wrote theirs. His goal was not to raise awareness of the horrors of slavery and to testify to the power of God to transcend great earthly trials. Rather Mars composed his narrative for his sister, who was born years after Mars and the rest of his family were no longer slaves and, he believed, needed to know about the hardships that slavery brought the members of his family while they lived in Connecticut. His narrative suggests a bridge to the twentieth-century African American autobiography, a genre that writers would use for a much greater array of purposes and agendas.

The interest in firsthand slave narratives became so great that the stories of fugitives were solicited almost as soon as the runaways reached the North. The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of great optimism and social idealism. Cities were growing, the West was expanding, literacy was increasing, and newspapers, magazines, and books were cheaper and more available than ever before. A new era in American literature had begun.

See also Abolitionism; American Revolution; Autobiography; Baptism; Bayley, Solomon; Black Church; Black Family; Black Loyalists; Black Migration; Black Nationalism; Black Seafarers; Catholic Church and African Americans; Education; Elaw, Zilpha; Emancipation; Equiano, Olaudah; Free African Americans to 1828; Fugitive Slaves; Gender; George, David; Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw; Hammon, Briton; Hammon, Jupiter; Identity; Jea, John; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Kidnapping; King, Boston; Language; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Literature; Marrant, John; Mars, James; Methodist Church and African Americans; Missionary Movements; Native Americans and African Americans; Newspapers; Prince, Nancy Gardner; Religion; Slave Narratives, African British; Slave Trade; Solomon, Job Ben; Spirituality; Violence against African Americans; Wheatley, Phillis; and White, George.

Daniel Donaghy

Interpreting Slave Narratives

The slave narrative has been a subject of great controversy since its inception in the late eighteenth century. As a genre of literature, slave narratives have been praised for their honesty and courage, criticized as propaganda for the abolitionist movement, and questioned regarding their historical truth and accuracy. Whatever conclusions their readers may have drawn, these stories were recorded as responses to the experience of Africans in America. They had a significant impact on the movement against slavery in the antebellum period as well as a strong effect on late twentieth-century understandings of slavery.

“Twelve Years a Slave,” title page of Solomon Northrup's narrative, 1853. Northup was born free in New York state in 1808. In 1841 he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana; after his freedom was restored through the efforts of Samuel Bass (a Canadian), and blacks and whites in New York and Louisiana, he returned to Saratoga Springs, New York—where, in 1999, July 24 was declared Solomon Northup Day. He closes his book with these words: “My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the ‘peculiar institution.’ . . . This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.”

New York Public Library, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

view larger image

Prior to the publication of the first known African American slave narratives in the 1660s, the methods of preserving memory in the slave community were primarily oral and visual—dance, song, and storytelling. These forms of communal recall were used to preserve the slaves' cultural links to their African past and to help them explain their own circumstances to themselves and their children. In addition, the stories were passed down orally in part because most masters forbade their slaves to learn how to read or write for fear that such knowledge would make it easier for slaves to escape.

These fears proved to be well grounded. By learning how to read and write, slaves could and did forge passes to the North and eventual freedom. For some slaves, however, like Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, legal freedom was not enough. Knowing that so many others suffered under the cruel hand of slavery without hope of ever being free, they and others told their stories of pain and triumph as participants in a struggle for personal liberation and the end of institutionalized slavery itself.

Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1760) and Fortune's (full name unknown)Dying Confession and Declaration of Fortune (1762) were the first known slave narratives to be published in the English-speaking world. It was not, however, until the publication of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, the African, Written by Himself (1789) that Europeans and Americans were fully exposed to a graphic firsthand account of the cruelties of slavery written by a former slave. Although Equiano's book was not the first slave narrative to be published, the author's command of the English language in expressing his despair not only gained fame for him and his story but also elicited an intensity of sympathy in his readers that would not be matched until the publication of Frederick Douglass'sNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself in 1845.

Slave Narratives as Literature

It was Douglass's narrative rather than Equiano's, however, that sparked great interest in and controversy over the plight of slaves and the telling of their stories in America. While prominent white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and John Brown found Frederick Douglass's story truly remarkable and revealing, many others, especially southerners, found it nearly impossible to believe that an uneducated slave could express himself so clearly, skillfully, and passionately.

Moreover, Douglass's narrative challenged the emerging proslavery arguments that blacks were inherently unable to compete with whites in any area involving intelligence and that they were actually quite content as slaves. No one could read Douglass's narrative and fail to be impressed by the quality of his mind and literary skills. Southerners consequently asserted that Douglass could not possibly have written the narrative; they insisted that it had to have been produced by a white person. To counter these accusations, Douglass's narrative and many that followed it had in their titles “Written by Himself” or “Herself” to assure readers that the author and tale were authentic. Additionally, readers would often find a foreword written by a reputable white person, usually male, endorsing the slave narrative. For example, the preface to Douglass's narrative was written by Garrison and filled with details of Douglass's courage, eloquence, and intelligence. Garrison also noted that he was not the only person willing to testify on Douglass's behalf and that the narrative was indeed authentic.

These tactics, however, did not satisfy critics of slave narratives. Historians point out that many authors of slave narratives, whatever the accuracy of their accounts, wrote not only to expose the horrors of slavery and servitude but also because they were paid to do so. To have both a moral and pecuniary interest in the abolition of slavery seemed to contradict the underlying message of the abolitionists. Douglass weathered criticism for his acceptance of financial compensation for his public lectures and essays on slavery. Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was first published in 1859, making her the first African American female novelist. However, because it had been written for profit—to provide for herself and her children when her husband failed to return from service in the merchant marine—Wilson's book remained in relative obscurity until it was rediscovered and republished in 1983. Although Our Nig was a novel, it demonstrated that even free blacks were met with racist attitudes and few economic opportunities in the nineteenth-century North, and it shattered the myth that the North embodied untroubled freedom for runaway slaves. Being well acquainted with hunger and economic desperation, Wilson wrote about what she knew and experienced in New England.

Literary scholars are also quick to point out that slave narratives were regarded critically because they shared many conventions with novels of romanticism or sentiment, which were a common form of literary expression in the mid-nineteenth century. In a novel of sentiment, nature is considered a pure and holy entity, the sufferings of individuals are regarded as more important than the maintenance of social institutions, emotion is valued over reason, the characters are never ordinary, and the hero or heroine is depicted as moving from ignorance to wisdom. The key to understanding the novel of sentiment is that it is intended to elicit sympathy for the outcast and to persuade readers that emotional ties should count for more than social conventions.

Slave narratives, which were intended to be autobiographical accounts beginning with the protagonist's birth and ending in his or her liberation, mirrored the conventions of sentimental novels. In a typical slave narrative the writer, who is of exemplary character, first struggles to achieve literacy, then attempts to disprove what white readers have “heard” about slaves and the character of black people, and finally relates the details of his or her harrowing journey to freedom.

It is difficult then to take into account the conventions of a novel of sentiment and not apply them to Douglass's narrative or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Douglass begins his story with as much factual data as he can provide: where he was born, who his mother was, the identity of his putative father (his mother's master), and where he lived. He then goes on to describe in detail the cruelties of slavery and its effects on the African family, on the individual black person, and on the white southerners who participated both directly and indirectly in perpetuating the institution. Douglass did not, however, provide precise details of his escape from slavery for fear that their inclusion might adversely affect slaves still wishing to escape. He later criticized Henry Brown for revealing his method of escape in the Narrative of Henry “Box” Brown (1849). The details of Douglass's life are relegated to the background of the narrative once Douglass relates his decision to educate himself and others in order to overcome the effects of slavery. Through education Douglass is filled with purpose and a new sense of self. He suggests to his readers that turning a blind eye to the horrible conditions of slavery is to be ignorant, inhumane, and decidedly unchristian. It was Douglass's hope that his “little book” would provoke thoughtful men and women to indignation at the injustice and cruelty of slavery and move them to work for abolition.

Harriet Jacobs's narrative, while showing structural similarities to Douglass's, contains a key element that often elicited a much different reaction from her audience; namely, she was a woman who suffered under the hand of slavery. As a woman, Jacobs had been subject to sexual as well as physical and emotional abuse under slavery. Her narrative recounts the facts of her life, her progress from ignorance to self-awareness, and the incessant sexual torment that she suffered at the hands of her master, Dr. Flint. Jacobs makes it quite clear to her readers that female slaves lived in constant fear of being raped as well as beaten. If they refused a master's advances, they often faced physical punishment. Worse yet, masters could coerce reluctant female slaves by threatening to sell their children and other loved ones, completely isolating and alienating them from anything or anyone they knew. These profound violations of body and mind, Jacobs argues, are further proof that the institution of slavery is morally repellent as well as unjust. Her narrative reaches its highest emotional pitch when she asks her readers to sympathize by envisioning their mothers, daughters, and sisters trapped within a similar institution of perpetual anxiety and fear.

Slave Narratives as Autobiography, Biography, and Fiction

The similarities between novels of sentiment and slave narratives are striking, to be sure. However, sentimentality largely defines literature in which the places, events, and people are fictional. Though such a strict definition cannot extend to slave narratives, most widely read and taught stories, like those of Douglass and Jacobs, adhere to a structure akin to that of the sentimental novel. This similarity suggests that the slave narrative, a purported true account of life in bondage, was more palatable to readers when the truth of the brutality of slavery was somewhat obscured by language and context. In other words, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs included graphic descriptions of physical violence in their accounts but did so in language that appears to be extremely contrived.

These literary contrivances suggest that the authors had to keep in mind their intended audience in their efforts to recount and expose the horrors of slavery. This audience consisted mostly of educated white women from the northern middle-class and to a lesser extent men of the same social background. Appealing to the northern woman's sense of female or maternal compassion through a grammar and dialect similar to her own was an easier way for the writers of slave narratives to persuade readers to identify with the plight of slaves—an identification which might then incite readers to action.

Because the structure of slave narratives was very similar to that of sentimental novels, these stories became such a ubiquitous form of reading material that they not only breathed new life into the abolitionist movement but also created a new literary genre. Indeed, Harriet Beecher Stowe took extensive notes from Douglass and his narrative when writing Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), a fictional representation of life under slavery. She also relied on other slave narratives, including that of Josiah Henson (1849), who escaped to Canada from a plantation in Maryland and eventually became a Methodist preacher. It is no coincidence that Uncle Tom's Cabin became the first American novel to sell more than 1 million copies.

The evolution of the slave narrative from an account of life as a slave to a form of popular literature gave rise to a number of problems. Above all, slave narratives were supposed to be historical documents—autobiographical accounts of a person's life as a slave and then later as a free man or woman. The popularization of these narratives seems to have fictionalized the protagonists in their struggles for freedom while simultaneously undermining the underlying message of the narratives. The literary conventions that governed novels of sentiment were also easily ascribed to slave narratives and offered readers a kind of homogeneity that seemed to suggest all experiences in slavery were alike. Masters were depicted as sadistic demons, protagonists as almost godly, the North as the embodiment of freedom, and the once-gallant South as weak and oppressive.

Recognizing the public's growing demand for slave narratives, nineteenth-century publishing houses began to create false accounts of living in slavery that magnified the conventions of the slave narrative. Abolitionists were also accused of embellishing genuine narratives to further their cause. For example, the Narrative of Henry “Box” Brown was first published with extensive help from Charles Stearns, an active abolitionist. Brown, a slave whose family was sold to a plantation in North Carolina, decided to escape from slavery by having himself shipped in a box to Philadelphia. According to Stearns's account, Brown weighed two hundred pounds and stood roughly five feet eight inches tall yet managed to survive in a box three feet long and two feet wide for nearly twenty-seven hours. While Stearns's presentation of Brown's life and his dramatic escape was reasonably accurate, he took great liberties in retelling Brown's narrative. Stearns's use of overly dramatic prose led many readers to question whether any part of Brown's account of his experience in slavery was accurate. Even Douglass expressed a certain amount of skepticism regarding Brown's and Stearns's respective motives. Given this background, it is easy to understand why narratives such as Brown's, combined with more traditional autobiographical accounts, served as antislavery and proslavery propaganda in both the North and the South. Brown sought to undo the damage when he wrote a new autobiography titled Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown Written by Himself, which he published in Manchester, England, in 1851. This version seemed more plausible to readers and found greater acceptance in the North and in England than the one written by Stearns.

While many abolitionists worked tirelessly to convince the public of the truth of all the horrors of slavery depicted in the narratives, many readers, especially in the North, believed that the melodramatic nature of these accounts weakened their credibility. The most adamant proslavery propagandists, who had much to gain financially by perpetuating slavery, argued that no man or woman could possibly be as cruel as the slave owners characterized in slave narratives. The mere existence of false narratives indicated to proslavery advocates that stories so easily replicated had to have been formed in a world that was already largely based on fiction.

It is thus very difficult to categorize slave narratives with respect to language, context, and genre. To view them as works of literature, in the sense in which the narratives of Douglass, Jacobs, and other well-known former slaves like Harriet Tubman are often read and taught, suggests that their writers employed elements of fiction like plot, theme, and character development to give the “stories” cohesion. This perspective tends to relegate questions of historical truth and accuracy to the background. These methods substitute the ordinariness of historical figures and events for emotional intensity and dramatic action.

Slave narratives are unique because they constitute the only genre of literature that combines a truthful account by one person to his or her audience (autobiography), a secondhand story of a person's life experiences (biography), and a pattern of relaying unverified events and circumstances to both further the antislavery cause and entertain readers (fiction). Between 1745 and 1999, more than two hundred autobiographies of former slaves, eighty-seven biographies, and sixteen fictionalized narratives are known to have been published. In the late 1930s, under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration and in conjunction with the Federal Writers' Project, researchers conducted hundreds of interviews with the last surviving generation of former slaves and recorded their oral histories. Despite the skepticism of some historians, the slave narrative remains a vital primary resource in understanding the many dimensions of the slave experience. The proliferation of the genre indicates that the slave narrative in its many forms has served as one of the most important sources of information for shedding light on the peculiar institution of slavery in the United States.

See also Africa, Idea of; Antislavery Movement; Black Family; Brown, Henry “Box”; Brown, John; Dance; Discrimination; Douglass, Frederick; Garrison, William Lloyd; Gender; Jacobs, Harriet; Literature; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Phillips, Wendell; Proslavery Thought; Racism; Sexuality; Slavery; Stereotypes of African Americans; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Visual Representations of Slavery; and Women.

Stephanie J. Wilhelm

African British Slave Narratives

The eighteenth century in Britain has been described and represented in numerous ways. Among its appellations are the Age of Enlightenment, the birth of modernity, and the era of colonialism and imperialism. Perhaps one of the most important events on the time line of eighteenthcentury Britain is the peak of the Atlantic slave trade. Ironically, Britain's participation in and domination of the slave trade created an empire of wealth and prestige based on forced labor at a time when Britons themselves were asserting the “rights of man.” The British conceptions of self, conquest, and “otherness” helped form the writings of African British slaves.

Literacy: Imparting Voice, Inciting Change

Slave narratives were extreme in reenacting and re-creating slavery but sentimental in appealing to their audience. A captivated audience was essential to the transformation of displaced and oppressed African slaves from voiceless victims of an imperial machine to people with intelligence and agency. The act of writing by former African British slaves, such as Charles Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince, illustrates how Africans in late-eighteenth-century Britain could use memory to document their histories and help whites in Britain understand their humanity and the suffering of slaves. Reading these works enabled white British audiences, especially women, not only to recognize the personhood and humanity of the African British slave but also to empathize with slaves' struggle to be viewed as thinking, rational beings. This interdependent relationship between author and audience created a landscape suitable for political and cultural change that would later be repeated in early American history: the first sparks of the women's movement and its close link to the abolition of slavery.

Historians have noted time and again the profound connection between literacy and political action. This notion seems especially true considering the immense political and cultural turmoil of eighteenth-century Britain. The French and American revolutions, industrialization, and imperialism promoted intense discussion and debate in various forms of the printed word. The soaring literacy rates among British women and the working class allowed a great number of people to consider themselves and their places within society and the empire in a new light. For example, the proliferation of texts written by male British imperial explorers, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, created a national identity based on a discourse of opposition between the “civilized” and the “barbarous.” Thus, a specific rhetoric was formulated around Enlightenment principles that highlighted the immense difference between Africa and the West. According to this rhetoric, the familiar cultural and social practices of the West were rational, humane, and intellectual, whereas Africa and the West Indies were geographically unknown, ideologically backward, and heathenish in their ways and customs.

The rhetoric of difference created by male readers and writers of the eighteenth century dominated many of the prevailing thoughts of the era, including those concerning slavery and conceptions of womanhood. Women were increasingly defined as private and sentimental creatures whose roles were confined to matters of hearth and home. They were seen as readers of romantic fiction, works that played heavily on an emotive rather than an intellectual response. Women were obviously not degraded in the same bodily manner as the African British slaves, but through the exclusivity of the male-dominated public sphere of political and intellectual debate, they were reduced to the status of children and labeled as irrational beings who, like slaves, were incapable of thinking or acting in their own best interest.

The abolitionist movement in Britain and the growing accessibility of the printed word allowed both women and former slaves to bridge the gap between the domestic and public spheres. Print culture allowed former slaves to express themselves on a personal level as well as in the political arena. In their writings former slaves communicated with their audience—primarily white middle-class Britons—with the language of emotion, religious fervor, and domestic duty through which they could describe the harsh realities of slavery.

Charles Ignatius Sancho: The Art of Letters

The posthumous publication of the vast correspondence of Charles Ignatius Sancho in 1782 counteracted arguments made by philosophers, such as David Hume, that Africans were not capable of “arts and letters.” Indeed, the editor of Sancho's letters, believed to be Frances Crew, states in her preface to the body of letters that her motives for publishing Sancho's correspondence were to counteract presuppositions of the inherent ignorance of Africans. Although Sancho had never intended his correspondence to be published, Crew's mediation signals a political agenda that not only brought to light the creative imagination of an African British slave but also granted a woman the power of being an agent of the publishing process.

The sentimentalism of Sancho's writing allows him to adopt a tone of benevolence, religious fervor, and polite social custom, making it difficult to distinguish this “heathen” from the most upstanding English gentleman. Although some scholars see this sentimentality as subverting a rigorous stance on antislavery, others understand that because of their warmth and candor, Sancho's letters, especially those to the noted clergyman and sentimental novelist Laurence Sterne, garnered particular favor with audiences.

Many of his letters to Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, exemplify Sancho's astute recognition of the importance of the printed word in swaying an audience to the author's cause. By mimicking Sterne's own writing style—the prolific use of dashes in Sancho's prose, an appeal to benevolence, and an emphasis on connecting the heart to the mind—he both flatters the author and exhibits within the body of the letter the tremendous effect Sterne's writing has had on him. Sancho's logical conclusion was that if Sterne, who was widely read and admired, could be moved to speak out against slavery in literary form, such remarks had the potential to reach and affect many readers with respect to the cause of abolition.

Olaudah Equiano: The Mastery of Language

The narrative of Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was first printed in 1789 and became the archetype for slave narratives because of its masterly use of the English language and its commentary on the institution of slavery. Unlike Sancho's private letters, which engage in only a general discourse on slavery, Equiano's first-person narrative takes on the system of slavery itself, offering the credibility and authenticity of lived experience.

Equiano immediately engages his audience in a discourse on the effects of slavery. He speaks not just for himself, the narrator who has mastered the language of imperial England, but also for countless enslaved people who silently suffer without the political or cultural means to communicate their experiences. Equiano's assessment of the European identity is that of an oppressor who is seemingly incapable of being oppressed, or at least incapable of enduring the oppression of slavery. His alignment with the African identity of “his countrymen,” however, illustrates his pride in being among those with the strength to endure and overcome hardship. His commentary on being “a particular favorite of Heaven” and his invocation of “Providence” underscores perhaps two of the most important themes in antislavery texts: emotion and religion.

Equiano's attributes his freedom to God's intervention, thus affirming to his readers that he is not an unfeeling heathen but an African capable of being both Christian and emotive. Equiano appeals to the sentimental and religious nature of a middle-class audience by asserting that slave and master alike are included within the rubric of Christianity.

Equiano further affirms his humanity and manhood by employing the use of logic and reason to define the scope of his argument against slavery. Having gained a modicum of wealth and prestige as a free man practicing mercantilism, Equiano suggests Britain would realize numerous benefits by trading goods and services with Africans instead of enslaving them. Equiano's solution to the slave trade may appear to be just another means of imperial exploitation of Africans, but as Srinivas Aravamudan points out in Tropicopolitans, Equiano was writing in a manner that had become increasingly popular among people who had achieved wealth through mercantilism. From Defoe to Adam Smith, the sentiment surrounding capitalism was strong and pervasive among men who saw imperialism as a means to achieve global betterment through free commerce and the demand for European goods. By evoking the rhetoric of popular sentimental literature, Equiano hoped to succeed in assuring his audience that the abhorrent nature of slavery was unnatural to the progress of a nation and beneath the enterprising spirit of Britain.

Mary Prince: The Power of Truth

Mary Prince's narrative, unlike those of Sancho or Equiano, does not echo the style of well-known sentimental writers, nor does it offer suggestions of replacing the lucrative institution with something of equal benefit to the British economy. Instead, her account, as her amanuensis, Susanna Strickland, testifies, offers readers a picture of a slave woman's life, Mary's story, titled The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, is told in her own simple language, without flourish or romance. Because an African female slave's perspective on slavery had never been written before, female readers, who could only imagine the particular cruelties that slavery had to inflict on mothers, wives, and sisters, were deeply affected by Prince's narrative.

Before the publication of Prince's autobiography in 1831, British abolitionists were reluctant to use the female slave experience as a means of promoting their cause. One reason for their reluctance was the low percentage of African women living in Britain; another was the commonly held perception that the black woman was licentious. Indeed, the veracity of Prince's tale depended on her ability to present herself as a virtuous, pious, domesticated woman. Mary mirrors her intended audience, “good” Christian women, to elicit sympathy for her plight not only as a slave but also as a woman. Though sexual abuse most assuredly accompanied the physical abuse inflicted on female slaves, Prince is quite cautious in her allusions to her master's improprieties, so as not to provoke criticism of her character or offend the piety of her female readers.

The relationship between Prince and Strickland also serves as an authentic and unifying force against criticism. Strickland became Prince's literary agent, writing the slave woman's experiences just as she dictated them. By doing so, Strickland, a white middle-class woman, called into question the strict opposition of white and black, oppressor and oppressed. Likewise, in her narrative Prince confounds the assumption that Britons are by nature polite, gentle, and civilized. The horrors of imperial conquest brutalized not only the slaves but also the masters and mistresses who held them. By working together to put this truth before the English people, Prince and Strickland showed that the abolition of slavery was essential to preserve the nation and its citizens.

The writings of former slaves provided the first sparks of the women's movement for political access as much as the involvement of women as “sentimental readers” gave strength to the Abolition movement. Both parties interdependently relied on hegemonic discourses concerning race and gender to provide them with the tools of agency. In adapting and appropriating mainstream European thought, former slaves and women were able to subvert a paradigm that branded them as ignorant, inferior, and voiceless. This, in turn, enabled them to develop a cultural and political intervention that would forever change Britain.

See also Abolitionism; Autobiography; Education; Equiano, Olaudah; Foreign Policy; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Literature; Sancho, Charles Ignatius; Sexuality; Slave Trade; Violence against African Americans; and Women.

Stephanie J. Wilhelm

processed xml | source xml