“Levi Coffin Describes Margaret Garner’s Attempt to Escape Slavery” is a story about a slave named Margaret Garner, who attempted to escape slavery in the winter of 1856. The story took place in Boone County, Kentucky – a slave state and Cincinnati, Ohio - where slavery is illegal. The author, Levi Coffin, a prosperous Quaker and abolitionist, who was an active leader in the Underground Railroad network that helped thousands of fugitive slaves escape to freedom. He was a religious man and an opponent of African American slavery and felt it was his duty to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, no matter the color of the person. Several years after slavery was abolished in America, Coffin was encouraged by many of his friends to write his memoir of how Margaret Garner was driven to kill her child and attempt to kill her other three children and herself. It is the heartbreaking honesty in this act of brutality which displays what the lives of slaves were like; This shows how far an enslaved mother will go to protect her children from the pain they would endure if taken back to slavery.
Levi Coffin felt it was important to be the voice for Margaret Garner to tell the untold story of the pain and suffering she endured as an enslaved woman. He wanted white people to see what it was like for African American women to be sold away from their children and husbands and forced to do the unthinkable to survive. This story gives an inside look at how slavery was a true crime and how it destroyed the souls of good people and their families. Coffin only knew Margaret for a short time, but he understood the pain she was in from her actions on that cold wintery night in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Margaret, her family and several other slave families belonging to different masters in Boone County, Kentucky fled the plantations of Northern Kentucky to travel to Ohio where slavery was illegal. The Garner family planned to end their enslavement by reaching Cincinnati, Ohio and connecting with the Underground Railroad. Due to the close-proximity to Cincinnati, one would assume their travels to be an easy undertaking, but the Ohio River – usually a barrier - was frozen solid and provided a bridge into Ohio. Once they made it across
In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family In The Old South by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger outlines a very unique African American family living in Nashville, TN accounting tales of the trials and tribulations that Sally Thomas, the mother, and her sons had to go through; and how in the end she accomplished her goal. The authors excellently executed the life of this family in an informational and intriguing text by explaining and comparing the different lives and classes of slaves back in that century through Sally and her son’s stories.The detail and the historical pictures in the text help give life and a sense of “realness” and credibility to the situations given to help breathe life into the story, making the story easier to understand and believe.
In these two tales of brutal bondage, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the modern reader can decipher two vastly different experiences from circumstances that were not altogether that dissimilar. Both narratives tell the story of a slave gaining his or her freedom from cruel masters, yes, but that is where the most prominent similarities end. Not only are they factually different, these stories are entirely distinct in their themes.
Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass both wrote narratives that detailed their lives as slaves in the antebellum era. Both of these former slaves managed to escape to the North and wanted to expose slavery for the evil thing it was. The accounts tell equally of depravity and ugliness though they are different views of the same rotten institution. Like most who managed to escape the shackles of slavery, these two authors share a common bond of tenacity and authenticity. Their voices are different—one is timid, quiet, and almost apologetic while the other one is loud, strong, and confident—but they are both authentic. They both also through out the course of their narratives explain their desires to be free from the horrible practice of slavery.
Celia, a Slave was a truthful elucidation of one disengaged episode that delineated basic slave dread amid the prior to the war time of the United States. Melton A. McLaurin, utilized this record of a youthful slave lady 's battle through the undeserved hardships of assault and unfairness to disclose to today 's guileless society a superior delineation of what servitude could have been similar to. The tale of Celia delineates the base of racial issues Americans still face in their general public. In spite of the fact that not about as great, they keep on living in a white-male overwhelmed society that looks downward on African-Americans, particularly females. McLaurin takes a gander at the perspectives of the time, and conjectures the probabilities of this pre - Civil War time, the estimations of which still puncture every day life in the United States.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are both nineteenth-century narratives about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s experiences born into slavery and as escaped slaves. The concept of gender makes each narrative have distinct perspectives’ of their version of what they endure during slavery and how it shapes their freedom. Even though both narratives have many similarities of educating the complexity of being a vulnerable slave, Harriet Jacobs’ narrative provides more reason that slavery is far worse for women than it is for men.
“Celia, A Slave” written by Melton McLaurin paints a full story of an African slave named Celia in the period of 1850s. She was bought by Robert Newsom, her white master, to serve his sexual relationship. She was put into trial after killing her master in an attempt to stop him from sexual advance and then burned his body in the fireplace. This incident appalled residents in Callaway County and Missouri in a historical period when the neighboring Kansas Territory deeply involved into a furious dispute over if Kansas became a slave state or free-slave state. In a series of non-stop events, Celia’s story became emblematic of the centrifugal conditions that ripped the antebellum America apart because her life helps us understand women’s rights in the slavery society and a conflict between proslavery and antislavery activities.
Little did Douglass now, that the same would happen to him later a various amount throughout his life as a slave. In “Slavery in the Land of the Free”, Bales and Soodalter convey how people can deceive others in the redards of slavery, and change someone’s innocent life forever in the matter of a second. Both authors reveal the story of Maria, the slave for Sandra Beaden. They explain, “On arrival, Maria was dragged into hell. Sandra Bearden used violence and terror to squeeze work and obedience from the child” (1).
By hiding runaway slaves in his house and helping them proceed to the next safe house, Levi Coffin made an immense difference in the lives of over 2,000 fugitive slaves. One way that his impact is shown is by his unofficial title of “President of the Underground Railroad”. Conductors on the Underground Railroad gave Coffin this label because they recognized the amount that he sacrificed to help slaves. This proves that he helped an abundance to free slaves because even though the newspapers couldn’t publish any articles about Coffin, Coffin had helped enough people that his sacrifices could be seen by other conductors. By using his house as
After reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, it is clear to see the true horrors behind the entirety of slavery. It is one thing to learn about it from a textbook or to sit through a lecture, but it is a completely different experience to get an account of how grossly inhumane, frightening, and appalling slavery really was from someone who experienced the terrors first-hand. Reading this narrative provided extremely descriptive details of how slaves truly were treated. Douglass recounted the time where he had often:
An analysis of the book Harriet Jacobs autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl reveals, in my opinion, that it is an accurate representation of the antebellum South under a slave system based on other published works such as Soujourner Truth, Address to the Womens’ Right’s Convention Akron, Ohio 1851 and Benjamin Drew, Narratives of Escaped Slaves 1855. The accounts described by Harriet Jacobs are consistent with these and many other
Harriet Jacobs, a black woman who escapes slavery, illustrates in her biography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) that death is preferable to life as a slave due to the unbearable degradation of being regarded as property, the inevitable destruction of slave children’s innocence, and the emotional and physical pain inflicted by slave masters. Through numerous rhetorical strategies such as allusion, comparison, tone, irony, and paradoxical expression, she recounts her personal tragedies with brutal honesty. Jacobs’s purpose is to combat the deceptive positive portrayals of slavery spread by southern slave holders through revealing the true magnitude of its horrors. Her intended audience is uninvolved northerners, especially women, and she develops a personal and emotionally charged relationship with them.
No one in today’s society can even come close to the heartache, torment, anguish, and complete misery suffered by women in slavery. Many women endured this agony their entire lives, there only joy being there children and families, who were torn away from them and sold, never to be seen or heard from again.
Douglass gives detailed anecdotes of his and others experience with the institution of slavery to reveal the hidden horrors. He includes personal accounts he received while under the control of multiple different masters. He analyzes the story of his wife’s cousin’s death to provide a symbol of outrage due to the unfairness of the murderer’s freedom. He states, “The offence for which this girl was thus murdered was this: She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks’s baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried.” This anecdote, among many others, is helpful in persuading the reader to understand the severity of rule slaveholders hold above their slaves. This strategy displays the idea that slaves were seen as property and could be discarded easily.
Like Douglass, Jacobs also exposed the harsh treatment towards slaves while proving that American “blacks could succeed at the same activities as whites” (Hunter-Willis 26) through her own narrated experiences. Her resolve to write demonstrated a “resistance to the patriarchal system of slavery” (Peterson 158) by sharing the exploits of slavery through her own point of view.
Slavery has always been the most dreadful phenomena of our world. Slavery, by itself looks so unusual and provokes mixed feelings from the heart of each person. In other words, slavery change a human being into a “thing” or even some type of consumer item. However, a fugitive slave, Frederick Douglass writes the novel called “The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass” to reveal how the slavery system works. Douglass’ narrative resembles not so much an autobiography as a memoir. If we read this novel closely, women often appear not in a primary plot, but in a short passage and as a vivid images; specifically, an image of abused bodies. Douglass associates women with suffering. Also, he gives an understanding