Writing Against Slavery: What the Literature Did

The idea

The thirty years before the Civil War produced the first American literature written to change a law, and it did. The slave narrative is its central form: a life told as an argument, moving from birth in bondage through a dawning understanding of what slavery is, through an act of resistance, to escape and a chosen name, and framed by white supporters testifying that the author really wrote it, a preface that tells you what the book was up against. Douglass gives the form its greatest example, and its two most durable passages. In the first, a mistress who began by treating him as one human being ought to treat another is transformed by the power she holds, so that the tender heart becomes stone and the lamblike disposition gives way to one of tiger-like fierceness, which is the claim that unchecked power corrupts the people who wield it. In the second, a boy learns that his owner forbids literacy because literacy would unfit him for slavery, and takes the prohibition as a map. Jacobs writes the narrative the men could not, a woman's account in which the owner's pursuit is the danger and seven years in a crawlspace is the escape, and she writes it in a reticence that is evidence of what her readers would tolerate. Northup reverses the shape, beginning free and being stolen. Beside the narratives run the pamphlet and the newspaper: Walker naming Jefferson a hypocrite, Garrison refusing to retreat a single inch. Stowe turns the argument into a novel and outsells everyone by making readers weep over a sold child. And the women who did antislavery work found themselves making a second argument, which Stanton wrote at Seneca Falls by taking the Declaration's own sentence and adding two words to it. Lincoln ends the period by redating the country from that sentence in two minutes.