Slave Narratives

Written testimonies of escaped or freed slaves. Historians have documented the existence of more than 6,000 slave narratives, most of them written about slavery in the United States. These works range from book-length autobiographies, to pamphlets, to shorter accounts originally printed in newspapers and other periodicals. Representatives of the genre were published in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Prior to the Civil War, most slave narratives were written by fugitive slaves who had managed to escape from bondage. Members of the abolitionist movement shrewdly recognized that the publication of shocking, first-person accounts of life under slavery might win sympathy for their cause. Radical abolitionist periodicals printed numerous testimonials from escaped slaves in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Several book-length autobiographies of former slaves were published during this period as well.

Because most people born into slavery did not have the opportunity to learn to read, most escaped slaves could not write their own narratives. As a result, the former slaves often dictated their stories to abolitionists or editors, who would write them down. Many of those individuals took the basic outline of the slave's story and embellished it with literary techniques and personal observations. Although these writers may have gotten the general details right, they probably did not tell the tales in the style that freed slaves would have used if they had written the work themselves. Nonetheless, although the whites who documented the stories did so out of abolitionist motives, these accounts offer valuable insights into slave life in the antebellum South.

The best-known slave narratives of the nineteenth century were written by the slaves themselves. The most famous is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), by the freed slave abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Masterfully written, Douglass's narrative recounts many of the hardships he suffered under [Page 756]slavery. He also documents how he learned to read and describes a dramatic confrontation with Edward Covey, a cruel slave breaker who whipped and beat Douglass but against whom Douglass fought back and prevailed. In his narrative, Douglass also describes his eventual escape from bondage in 1838.

Douglass's narrative not only documents some of the horrors of slave life but also serves as a testament of his humanity. During the nineteenth century, many whites, even those who did not own slaves, believed that blacks were inferior to whites if not subhuman. Douglass's story reveals that he was exceptionally intelligent and articulate. By the act of writing his narrative, he implicitly refuted many of the racist assumptions about blacks that were common during the period.

The slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano, which was published in 1789, also became very well known. There account by Equiano is unusual because he recalls childhood memories of Africa, his capture, and subsequent enslavement. Unlike Equiano, the authors of most slave narratives were born in North America rather than in Africa.

The first African American woman to write an account of her experiences under slavery was Harriet Jacobs. The authenticity of her account, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), was initially doubted, but it quickly became an important contribution to the genre of the slave narrative. Jacobs gives insights into the particular hardships suffered by many female slaves. In particular, she describes now she avoided sexual advances by her master, whose sexual advances added another dimension of suffering to Jacobs's life in captivity.

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