"I verily believed myself to be a free woman": Harriet Jacobs's journey into capitalism

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Virginia Cope

In Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Linda Brent's initial act of freedom consists of walking into a Philadelphia shop and making a purchase--the first time in the narrative during which she trades money for goods. No longer an object of exchange, she proffers a gold coin, takes her purchase, and counts her change. In so doing, she triumphs in surreptitiously learning something about the market without revealing her ignorance of its workings or her status as a slave. (1) Her second act of freedom comes late that night when she returns to bed as firebells clang, realizing that she cannot be compelled to labor in extinguishing a neighborhood fire. In these "Incidents in Philadelphia," Linda Brent declares herself the proprietor of her own body and therefore a free and equal individual capable of choosing whether to sell her labor as a commodity, buy goods, or (by extension) marry and maintain a home. Drawing on nineteenth-century notions of contract that idealized voluntary market exchanges as the embodiment of human liberty, Linda rejects the paternalistic ethos of the precapitalist South in favor of a Northern, capitalist world view. With these narrative moments in mind, a rethinking of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl finds that, for Linda Brent, the journey from South to North is a journey into capitalism. (2)

My analysis draws on the work of historians who contend that the antebellum South was a precapitalist economy animated by a paternalistic ethos antithetical to the emerging ideology of the free-labor North. (3) The North underwent an ideological transformation amid the rise of industrial capitalism, these historians claim, justifying changing labor relations by idealizing contract rights as a form of freedom--indeed, as the essence of freedom. (4) Contract principles drew on Enlightenment ideals and classical political economy to construe all individuals as "sovereigns of themselves, possessive individuals entitled to their own persons, labor, and faculties" (Stanley 3). This right to self-ownership was imagined to imply the right to sell one's labor, marry freely, and engage in market exchanges on terms of equality, not as a subjugated dependent. Indeed, a contract's validity depended on the unsentimental, rationalistic nature of the agreements made between free and equal agents: "To contract was to incur a duty purely by choice and establish its terms without the constraint of status or legal prescription" (Stanley 2). While providing new legitimation for capitalist relations, however, the North's valorization of contract widened the ideological divide with the South. (5) Denial of contract was fundamental to slave law, of course, for the institution stripped bondspersons of all proprietary rights and denied them volition outside their master's will.

Using the soaring rhetoric of contract theory; abolitionists decried slave law as "a daring infringement of the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact." (6) In defense, embattled slaveholders clung ever more fiercely to a paternalistic rhetoric that posited slaves as inherently inferior and permanently dependent. (7) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl captures this dramatic moment in ideological and economic history, for it structures Linda Brent's story as a journey from a precapitalist South into a free-labor North. Linda Brent describes her escape from slavery as a release from a society in which a debased form of paternalism provided rhetorical justification for corrupt and corrupting economic relations; her goal throughout is to reach a land where she imagines she will live the bourgeois life glorified by free-labor ideology, a life in which she will "by dint of labor and economy" be able to provide a safe and comfortable home for her children (169).

Reading Incidents as a journey into capitalism provides an important intervention in Jacobs scholarship, which has predominantly analyzed the text according to its relation to male slave narratives or the domestic novel. (8) By placing Incidents in the context of capitalism, this analysis uncovers a pentimento text, a compelling narration of the emancipatory dream of nineteenth-century contract theory, the story of how Linda Brent lands on free soil and learns to trade like a true American. Yet, as I will demonstrate, Jacobs's text also anticipates the late-nineteenth-century disillusionment with contract principles which, in celebrating the Northern capitalist order, elided its inequalities. (9) When Linda Brent finally reaches the Free States, she discovers that racism, sexism, and her fugitive status--the goals which motivated her long and arduous passage out of slavery--severely limit her ability to earn a living and provide a home for her children. In the North, she is a woman freed but not free. Her journey into capitalism, consequently, is also a journey into disillusionment. This article traces both journeys.