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32 Q By the time the enslaved Harriet Jacobs reached the age of sixteen, she had been trying to ignore her master’s sexual overtures for years. She later became involved with another white man, whom she hoped would purchase her from her master, Dr. Flint. But Flint threatened Jacobs and vowed never to sell her. Jacobs did not have the right to her own person, and, when she eventually became a mother, her slim claims to her children haunted her throughout her life. When her first child was born “sickly,” Flint “did not fail to remind me that my child was an addition to his stock of slaves,”she recalled.As her child’s health improved, Jacobs’s love for her son was mixed with sorrow: The little vine was taking deep root in my existence, though its clinging fondness excited a mixture of love and pain. When I was most sorely oppressed I found a solace in his smiles. I loved to watch his infant slumbers; but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment. I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy. God tried me. My darling became very ill. . . . Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.1 Jacobs bore another child and hatched a complicated plan to avoid seeing the children made into field laborers. She believed she could not escape with her two children, but she refused to leave them and tried everything in her power to exercise some control over their future. Still negotiating with the children’s white father, Mr. Sands, Jacobs hid in her grandmother’s attic for seven years. She saw her children sold to an agent representing Mr. Sands and fervently hoped for their freedom at Sands’s hands. Sands did not treat Jacobs’s children as slaves, but neither did he free them.After sending them north to live with one of his relatives, he promised them an education. Jacobs managed to follow her daughter north and spent a brief time reunited with her son. But she lived in constant fear of being sold or having c h a p t e r 2 Contradictions of Moral Motherhood slavery, race, and reform Contradictions of Moral Motherhood 33 her children sold back into slavery. This was always a possibility after Congress passed the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which empowered southerners to capture escaped slaves in the North. Jacobs wrote her story with religious zeal for a growing abolitionist audience. Like many other abolitionist writers, she spoke passionately of the evils the slave system visited on the mother-child tie. In fact, many of the sources we have to examine the situation of enslaved mothers come from abolitionist writers, who, whether African American or white, usually emphasized the moral sin of slavery and the abject victimization of everyone in its grip—most especially the enslaved, but also the immortal souls of those who profited from the system. Enslaved persons were not allowed to learn to read or write, and, although some were secretly literate, firsthand documentation like the kind Jacobs provided is very limited. Another important set of sources comes from interviews with formerly enslaved persons, often many years after the end of slavery. Less directed at an immediate social cause than the abolitionist literature, these sources often differ in tone and frequently include some version of dialect rendered by the interviewer. It is easy to find here, too, the traumatic reality of lost family ties. For example, a woman who endured a life of slavery and was sold three times recalled the situation vividly:“Babies was snatched from dere mother’s breas’ an’ sold to speculators. Chilluns was separated from sisters an’ brothers an’ never saw each other ag’in. Course dey cry; you think dey not cry when dey was sold lak cattle. . . . It’s bad to belong to folks dat own you soul an’ body.” As the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out, “The domestic hearth, with its holy lessons and precious endearments is abolished in the case of a slave mother and her children.”2 The dominant culture painted a portrait of the economically dependent mother, defined in relationship to a child who was innocent and malleable, and a father whose primary responsibility was economic support. Meanwhile, millions of enslaved women labored night and day to...

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