difference

I know, objectively, that slavery was and is a cruel, heartless institution by it's very existence, and the violence in these narratives never ceases to shock me, although (this being the fifth or so of such narratives that I have read) it has unfortunately ceased to surprise me.

I do, however, continue to be surprised by the sympathy that saves have for slaveholders whenever it crops up in the books. The slaveholders have been ruined by slavery, according to Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglas. Douglas especially illustrates the transformative power of slavery on the character of good women with the mistress that teaches him his ABC's. Although I appreciate that these accounts of a character transformed are probably true, I'm not convinced that the sympathy was real and immediate. Part of me thinks that these accounts are included to try and sway those who would not enter the abolitionist cause for the sake of a black man, but might to save the character of a white woman. I have no doubt that the sympathy is real, I just think it's retrospective.

One notable difference between Douglas and Jacobs is their attitudes towards slave master fathers selling their own children away. Both authors naturally hate the practice of rape that produces the children, but they have different perceptions of the motives that cause masters to send these children away. Jacobs gives the impression that the slaveholder sells his mulatto children away because he has no feeling towards them and he desires to profit by selling his wife's least favorite slaves. Douglas, however, speaks of the suffering that the master is to endure if he would keep a good reputation for not treating his mulatto offspring with any favoritism. The master must whip the child himself, his wife is bound to mistreat the child, and the child's own brother will eventually come to whip him. And it is for these reasons that the master sells his children, out of a twisted desire not to see them harmed by those who would have been considered the child's family. Almost out of a twisted kind of tangled up love for the child.