Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl Essay

“But can that hour singing and shouting sustain them through the dreary week, toiling without wages, under constant dread of the lash ?” In the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs explains that after Nat Turner’s insurrection, slaveholders decided to expose slaves to religion, so they would not follow Turner’s decision to violently rebel. Slave masters also gave them Christianity to control them by teaching that if slaves disobey their masters, God would see them as sinners and evil. But the slaves uncovered the truth about the church, and they were amused by their masters’ lies. Slaves used the church as a speedy way to gain some type of freedom. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs further explained how slaves related to church and how masters related to church. The connection between slavery and church was that slave masters used church to have slaves obey their without masters getting murder and slaves used the church as a way to have some type of freedom in slavery.

Slaveholders used the church as a tool to keep their slaves obedient. Harriet reveals this idea in paragraphs 3 A&B, it states “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ...If you disobey your
In paragraphs 5 & 10, Harriet circulated the text, stating “They never seem so happy as they were shouting and singing at religious meetings….The congregation stuck up a hymn, and sung as though they were as free as the birds that warbled round us.” This convey the idea of how the church makes the slaves feel exuberance and jollity during their one hour of church services, once every week. The church also allow slaves to sing and chant as if they weren’t in confinement, which resulted to slaves finding a speck of merriment of being in their