Jacobs begins her story from the beginning, describing her family and how they became enslaved and sent to America. Life started out good for Jacobs. In fact, it was not until the death of her families’ mistress that her life would become more troublesome. Jacobs also lost her father and mother within the same time frame. Worse yet, Dr. Flint took over caring for the estate, and his wife and himself made life much more horrible for Jacobs than she ever realized that it could. It was during this time that Jacobs says that she first realized that she was a slave. The Flints treated Jacobs and her fellow slaves as mere property, which was not uncommon at the time, which was a stark contrast to the easier going life that they had lived just months ago. One of t

Jacobs recounts on the propaganda that slaveholders told slaves of the North. The North was seen as a haven for freedom, and a place where all slaves should hope to go, their “Promised Land”. However, it was in the slaveholders’ intentions to make sure that the North was seen as anything but a Promised Land. Great attempts were made to show that runaways who made it to the North faced near starvation and even more harsh conditions than they had faced in captivity. These accusations were obvious lies to those who had family or friends in the North who would inform slaves on what conditions in the North actually were. This attempt to subdue runaway slaves was not very effective, due to the grapevine of information that many slaves receive.

The fact that this work is a primary document gives more concreteness to her argument of the conditions of slavery. This is not the work of someone who has researched the subject and is reporting their findings; this is someone who had to personally go through the subject for most of her life. To even further her claim, these words are her own, not of some interviewer who is jotting down her words in an interview. There is no biasness of a reporter, nor is there any fear on Jacobs’s behalf to say what the public wants to hear. Jacobs proves that these are her true words, and that the conditions that she had to endure were as real as they could be.

With the news of Nat Turner’s Insurrection, the community that Jacobs lived in was turned upside down. Soldiers would constantly barge into slave and freemen quarters, searching for anything that would show that a slave insurrection was planned in the area. As time progressed, and the searchers began to become drunk, the searches and accusations turned more violent. Many slaves were whipped and taken to jails for no concrete reason. This would continue until the news of Turner’s capture calmed the community down, and the life of a slave would continue.

The time came for Jacobs to make the trip to the North. The voyage would be made by boat up to northern soil. However, these plans had to be accelerated when one of Flint’s servants caught sight of her. Before she left, Jacobs had to see her daughter for maybe one last time. Jacobs sped to the vessel, and was finally brought north, to Philadelphia. There, she had to become accustomed to life as a freeperson. She had help from anti-slavery people over there, and soon she sought to see her daughter, who she learned was sent t

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