The decade of 1845 to 1855 witnessed a rapid rise in abolitionist sentiments across the United States. Interestingly, at the forefront of the abolition movement were ex-slaves narrating their experiences in the hopes of eliciting a response from the anti-slavery forces. Now, and in perhaps the most effective tactic that the slaves employed, their narratives counteracted the dehumanizing nature of slavery. In other words, rather than accept the notion of white supremacy on which the slavery system survived, persons of African descent escaping their masters applied different tactics to argue for racial equality in the hopes of liberation for their masses. Case in point Solomon Northup (1853) repeatedly using the word “human” when speaking of slaves in Twelve Years a Slave and “inhuman” when dealing with the slave owners. Sojourner Truth (1851) takes a different approach as she insists that the standards with which the white society handled their women did not apply to enslaved females in the Southern States. In that sense, her strength as a black woman who “[plowed] and planted” while in bondage reflects that of the first woman that God created, the one who singlehandedly “[turned] the world upside down,” (1851, par.2; 4). Both writers debunk the idea of white supremacy.
With the given facts in mind, Truth and Northup’s attacks on the societal hierarchies that governed Antebellum America portray similar goals but different tactics. On the one hand, Sojourner Truth’s focus is on the women in bondage whose worth was apparently less than that of their Caucasian counterparts. In her words, “nobody ever [helped her] into carriages or over mud puddles” yet the white populace insisted that women need the “best place everywhere” (1851, par.2). That is where one’s interest is piqued by Truth’s Ain't I a Woman? With a combination of a determined and religious attitude, Sojourner Truth attacks the idea of blacks being less human using her personal experiences. For instance, she refuses to acknowledge a correlation between “women’s rights [and] negroes’ rights” with “intellect” because, before God, all are equal; after all, Jesus comforted her when she lost her children to slavery (1851, par.2-3). By that logic, the whites could not claim a higher class merely because they are learned: the creator of all humans considered them equal either way.
On the contrary, Solomon Northup’s demystification on the dehumanization of the men and women in bondage does not suggest the equality Sojourner Truth seeks to portray. Rather than see all Caucasians and people of African ancestry as equals, Northup adopts a moral attitude and reverses the situation by highlighting the whites as the inhuman lot. For example, he calls his captors “subtle and inhuman monsters in the shape of men” for luring him into slavery because of gold (Northup, 1853, p.34). However, Northup likens the relationship between a master and a slave to the idea of “a man holding his brother man in servitude” while the institution of slavery in his book bears the phrase of “traffic in human flesh” (1853, p.90). One cannot help but admire the use of logic in Northup’s writing.
Thus said, it is impossible to overlook the reality of slavery as a system that stemmed from the dehumanization of black people: it allowed white supremacists the luxury of brutality when degrading slaves to the status of beasts of burden. Therefore, the humanization of people of color was important to their liberation, and as mentioned above, the Abolition Movement was gaining momentum between 1845 and 1855. Accordingly, there is an apparent continuity to the 1830 to 1845 understanding of slave liberation being the responsibility of black people; surprisingly, the need to humanize slaves suggests the return of the eighteenth-century reliance on the federal government and the Northern whites. If the whites outside the South sympathized with the slaves, then abolition would become a reality.
References
Northup, S. (1853). Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853. Retrieved from Documenting the American South: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html
Truth, S. (1851, December ). Ain't I a Woman. Retrieved from Fordham University: Modern History Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/sojtruth-woman.asp
