Imagining Massachusetts: Political Geography and Sexual Control in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

In Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), an autobiographical slave narrative set in North Carolina, the commonwealth of Massachusetts serves as an imagined space that promises refuge to African-American slaves, not merely as a free state in the North, but also because of its reputation as a place populated with fervent abolitionists who harbor animus toward slave owners. In Jacobs’s text, conjuring Massachusetts also provides her with legal and social status outside the confines of civil marriage. On the one hand, throughout Jacobs’s famous account of her time as a slave, she deplores how her slave status impedes her access to marriage and therefore recourse to state-sanctioned rights and protections. On the other, Jacobs cultivates relationships that serve as proxy protection. While her lived experiences in the North disabuse her of its claims to equality and civil rights, I argue that despite Jacobs’s disenfranchised state, she draws on the public conception of geo-political sites as opportunities to test out modes of self-sovereignty. Her text enables readers to understand how political positions extend beyond sanctioned borders; the nineteenth-century patchwork of legal rights in the U.S. is fraught with danger for slaves but it also undermines marriage as an institution that regulates rights and thus leads one to experiment with new opportunities to establish one’s self-direction.

Jacobs’s life writing raises three interrelated points about the U.S. First, rights sanctioned in one geo-political space cannot be contained even if they do not transfer to others; rather they erode or strengthen (as a countermove) legal distinctions elsewhere. That is, in Jacobs’s mind, other communities extend the possibilities for liberation and at times supersede her immediate sphere. Second, conservative and patriarchal interests attempt to contain advocacy within specific geographic spaces by ascribing nonnormative erotic impulses to people who live there. Opposition groups derogate activists as compelled by an individual compulsion, rather than a social or national mandate, to redress wrongs. In particular, in the nineteenth-century U.S., abolitionists faced repeated accusations that their true motives were to advance amalgamation, as though the campaign to end slavery is rooted, not in the political ideals of the Revolution, but in an effort to fulfill an individual’s private, erotic desire.¹ This maneuver to characterize abolitionists as harboring secret aims to encourage amalgamation obscures how the oppressive mechanisms of slavery in the early U.S. fostered a widespread system of sexual exploitation of black women in the South. In some cases, it diverts energy from activists advocating for a cause to defending their sexual practices. Advocates find themselves constantly pledging their impartial desire for the end to slavery. When Stephen Douglas tried to impute erotic desire as the reason for Abraham Lincoln’s disavowal of slavery during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates held throughout 1858, Lincoln responded, “I protest, now and forever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes that because I did not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.” Lincoln accuses Douglas of faulty logic, but he adds the transitive phrase, “now and forever,” in order to foreclose charges of sexual freedom that he knows will recur despite his protestations. Third, Jacobs’s ultimate decision to disavow her predilection for marriage or a man’s protection leads to a new social and legal imaginary in which state-sanctioned individual rights will diminish the need to patrol marriage rights, specifically interracial marriage; marriage will no longer serve as the contractual relationship among men, women, and the state, and thus marriage need not serve as the institution through which the state extends liberal rights related to property, ownership, suffrage, or citizenship.²

For Jacobs, Massachusetts not only secures her from life as a slave but also from the sexual violation constantly threatened by her master, Dr. Flint.³ It remains an imagined sanctuary, because Jacobs’s initial venture as a runaway slave leaves her trapped hiding in the South...