Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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The opening of Chapter 1
I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. My father was a carpenter, and considered so intelligent and skilful in his trade, that, when buildings out of the common line were to be erected, he was sent for from long distances, to be head workman. On condition of paying his mistress two hundred dollars a year, and supporting himself, he was allowed to work at his trade, and manage his own affairs. His strongest wish was to purchase his children; but, though he several times offered his hard earnings for that purpose, he never succeeded. In complexion my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow, and were termed mulattoes. They lived together in a comfortable home; and, though we were all slaves, I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise, trusted to them for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment. I had one brother, William, who was two years younger than myself—a bright, affectionate child. I had also a great treasure in my maternal grandmother, who was a remarkable woman in many respects. She was the daughter of a planter in South Carolina, who, at his death, left her mother and his three children free, with money to go to St. Augustine, where they had relatives. It was during the Revolutionary War; and they were captured on their passage, carried back, and sold to different purchasers. Such was the story my grandmother used to tell me; but I do not remember all the particulars. She was a little girl when she was captured and sold to the keeper of a large hotel. I have often heard her tell how hard she fared during childhood. But as she grew older she evinced so much intelligence, and was so faithful, that her master and mistress could not help seeing it was for their interest to take care of such a valuable piece of property. She became an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress. She was much praised for her cooking; and her nice crackers became so famous in the neighborhood that many people were desirous of obtaining them. In consequence of numerous requests of this kind, she asked permission of her mistress to bake crackers at night, after all the household work was done; and she obtained leave to do it, provided she would clothe herself and her children from the profits. Upon these terms, after working hard all day for her mistress, she began her midnight bakings, assisted by her two oldest children. The business proved profitable; and each year she laid by a little, which was saved for a fund to purchase her children. Her master died, and the property was divided among his heirs. The widow had her dower in the hotel which she continued to keep open. My grandmother remained in her service as a slave; but her children were divided among her master’s children. As she had five, Benjamin, the youngest one, was sold, in order that each heir might have an equal portion of dollars and cents. There was so little difference in our ages that he seemed more like my brother than my uncle. He was a bright, handsome lad, nearly white; for he inherited the complexion my grandmother had derived from Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Though only ten years old, seven hundred and twenty dollars were paid for him. His sale was a terrible blow to my grandmother, but she was naturally hopeful, and she went to work with renewed energy, trusting in time to be able to purchase some of her children. She had laid up three hundred dollars, which her mistress one day begged as a loan, promising to pay her soon. The reader probably knows that no promise or writing given to a slave is legally binding; for, according to Southern laws, a slave, being property, can hold no property. When my grandmother lent her hard earnings to her mistress, she trusted solely to her honor. The honor of a slaveholder to a slave!
To this good grandmother I was indebted for many comforts. My brother Willie and I often received portions of the crackers, cakes, and preserves, she made to sell; and after we ceased to be children we were indebted to her for many more important services.
Such were the unusually fortunate circumstances of my early childhood. When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave. My mother’s mistress was the daughter of my grandmother’s mistress. She was the foster sister of my mother; they were both nourished at my grandmother’s breast. In fact, my mother had been weaned at three months old, that the babe of the mistress might obtain sufficient food. They played together as children; and, when they became women, my mother was a most faithful servant to her whiter foster sister. On her deathbed her mistress promised that her children should never suffer for anything; and during her lifetime she kept her word. They all spoke kindly of my dead mother, who had been a slave merely in name, but in nature was noble and womanly. I grieved for her, and my young mind was troubled with the thought who would now take care of me and my little brother. I was told that my home was now to be with her mistress; and I found it a happy one. No toilsome or disagreeable duties were imposed on me. My mistress was so kind to me that I was always glad to do her bidding, and proud to labor for her as much as my young years would permit. I would sit by her side for hours, sewing diligently, with a heart as free from care as that of any freeborn white child. When she thought I was tired, she would send me out to run and jump; and away I bounded, to gather berries or flowers to decorate her room. Those were happy days—too happy to last. The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.
The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which Linda Brent describes a childhood that did not feel like slavery until she was six, and a father whose skill as a carpenter was hired out by the year.
Download Full EPUB1861
~81,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 4.5 hours
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Edenton, North Carolina, and New York, 1813–1861.
Forty-one chapters and an appendix, grouped into twelve movements
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Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #11030 · Standard Ebooks
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs’s account of growing up enslaved in a North Carolina town, of the master who began pursuing her when she was fifteen, and of the seven years she spent hidden in a crawlspace above her grandmother’s storeroom while her children grew up a few feet below her. Published in Boston in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, it is one of the few slave narratives written by a woman, and it describes what most of the others leave out: the sexual danger of bondage, the sale of children, and the price a mother paid for her own escape.
Jacobs wrote the book in the 1850s, encouraged by the abolitionist Amy Post, and L. Maria Child, already known as an editor, prepared the manuscript for the press while Jacobs was working as a nurse in New York. It appeared in 1861, in the first year of the Civil War, and the Wikipedia entry on the book sets out its publication and its later standing. What the book gave readers was not a catalogue of cruelty but a woman’s account, in her own words, of the garret, the auction block and the price of her children. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #11030 and Standard Ebooks.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs: Summary, Characters & Themes
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in Boston in 1861, printed for the author and introduced by L. Maria Child, the abolitionist editor who had run the National Anti-Slavery Standard. The title page names Linda Brent, the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs used for herself and for almost everyone else in the book: her master becomes Dr. Flint, her grandmother Aunt Marthy, the father of her children Mr. Sands. This page gives a summary and analysis of the book: the story chapter by chapter, the people who carry it, the arguments it makes and the history that pressed on it. Background on Jacobs’s life and work is useful here, because the narrative stops where the documents begin.
The narrative runs from Linda’s childhood in her grandmother’s house to the purchase of her freedom in New York. She is willed to a five-year-old heiress, watched from the age of fifteen by the girl’s father, Dr. Flint, and refused permission to marry a free carpenter. To keep the doctor from making her his concubine she takes a white gentleman, Mr. Sands, as her lover and bears two children, Benny and Ellen, in the hope that he will free them. When Flint builds a cottage for her and threatens to carry the children to the plantation, she runs: first to a neighbour’s house, then to a swamp, then to a garret over her grandmother’s storeroom, where she stays for seven years within sight of the family that never stops hunting her. She reaches Philadelphia by boat, works as a nurse in New York, and is freed at last when her employer pays three hundred dollars for her.
Forty-one short chapters carry the story, most of them built as scenes: the New Year auction, the jail visit, the master’s bedroom, the hole in the garret wall. Jacobs writes in the first person and quotes letters, dialogue and documents, including the advertisement for her capture and the letters Dr. Flint forges in reply to her own. The appendix prints statements from Amy Post and George W. Lowther, and a note from the editor, because a book of this kind was expected to prove itself. The Project Gutenberg text preserves all of it, including Child’s introduction, which answers readers who thought a woman’s story of sexual danger should not be printed.
Read beside Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which appeared nine years earlier, the book looks less like fiction’s companion than its correction: Stowe’s novel told northern readers what slavery might do, and Jacobs told them what it had done to her. Up from Slavery is the memoir of a man born into slavery who chose industrial education and public optimism, a very different road. The Souls of Black Folk takes up the question of what freedom meant once the law had changed. This edition follows the Standard Ebooks text, prepared from the Gutenberg transcription, so the chapter numbering here matches the file you download.
The book is now read for three things. It is a woman’s slave narrative, the fullest account of what bondage meant for a girl’s body and a mother’s children. It is a study of concealment, since seven years in a three-foot garret made Linda an observer of her own household, able to hear the search parties and the gossip and unable to answer them. And it is a northern book as much as a southern one: the separate railway car, the hotel that will not seat her, the law that turns a free city into a hunting ground. It also records a network of help: a grandmother, an uncle, a sailor, a neighbour and a northern woman who risked a thousand-dollar fine. The pseudonyms are part of the evidence rather than a decoration, because Jacobs could not print the names of people who still held her family’s papers.
Historical Context
Slavery in the Upper South worked through hiring and sale rather than the cotton field alone. Jacobs’s town had a work house, patrols and an auction block, and owners hired out skilled men by the year for a fixed sum, as Linda’s father was hired out for two hundred dollars. A will could free a person, but an executor could ignore it, and a grandmother who had bought her freedom could still be sold at auction. Children followed the condition of the mother, so a free father could not protect his own, and the law gave an enslaved woman no standing to refuse a master or to claim her child.
The 1830s brought a new fear of insurrection after Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, and the searches, patrols and demolished church in the narrative follow that pattern. At the same time abolitionism became a mass movement, and the slave narrative became its most effective form: Frederick Douglass’s narrative appeared in 1845 and Stowe’s novel in 1852. Jacobs wrote in that decade, encouraged by Amy Post, a Quaker abolitionist in Rochester, and her manuscript reached L. Maria Child, who had edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard and who lent the book her name and her editorial care.
The book appeared in Boston in 1861, printed for the author as the war began, and it carries the marks of that moment. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 is the crisis of the last chapters, and the northern states it describes are not a refuge but a place where kidnappers work and where a coloured nurse is asked to eat in the kitchen. Jacobs published under a pseudonym and disguised the town and the witnesses, and Child’s introduction defends the book against readers who thought its subject unfit for print. The appendix, with its sworn statements, belongs to a genre that had to prove itself true.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Linda Brent: The narrator, called Linda, born into slavery in a North Carolina town and left motherless at six. Quick, proud and literate, she is pursued by Dr. Flint from the age of fifteen, takes a white lover to defeat him, and hides for seven years to keep her children off the plantation. The name is Jacobs’s pseudonym, and the voice is hers.
- Dr. Flint: A physician, slaveholder and executor who owns Linda and her brother through his young daughter. He builds a cottage to keep her as a concubine, refuses every offer to buy her, jails her relatives to force her out, and follows her to New York after her escape. Jacobs draws him as patient, pious and vindictive rather than merely brutal.
- Mrs. Flint: The doctor’s second wife, jealous of her husband’s pursuit of Linda and unable to touch him. She spits in the cooking, weighs out provisions, makes Linda swear on a Bible and watches her at night. Her cruelty falls on the women her husband abuses, and the narrative treats her as a second persecutor rather than a victim.
- Aunt Marthy: Linda’s grandmother, free by purchase and known in the town for her honesty and her cooking. She raised Linda, lent her mistress money that was never repaid, was sold at auction in her old age and freed again by a neighbour. She hides Linda’s children, keeps the garret secret, and dies just after her granddaughter’s freedom is bought.
- William: Linda’s brother, sold away from the family, jailed after asking to be sold, and finally carried north by Mr. Sands. He leaves his trunk and a sealed note in New York when freedom is not granted, reaches Boston, and later takes Benny to California. His escapes show what the same system did to a man who could not hide.
- Benny and Ellen: Linda’s two children by Mr. Sands, born within three years of each other and bought back from a trader by their father. Benny is impulsive and watchful, and works out where his mother is hiding before anyone tells him. Ellen is sent to Brooklyn as a maid and taught almost nothing; both are free at the end.
Core Literary Themes
- Property, law and the bill of sale: The book is organised around documents: a will, a loan, an auction list, a forged letter, a bill of sale. Linda’s grandmother lends three hundred dollars and is sold anyway; Linda is willed to a child and inherited like furniture; at the end a bill of sale records her own price in New York. Jacobs keeps returning to the same point, that slavery was not a set of bad manners but a system of property enforced by courts, and that the most respectable master held the clearest title.
- Sexual danger and the trials of girlhood: Chapter 5 names the subject that most slave narratives avoided, the sexual vulnerability of an enslaved girl, and refuses to describe it in detail. Flint’s whispered offers, the wife’s jealousy and the cottage in the woods form a single pressure, and Linda’s decision to take Mr. Sands is presented as a choice made under duress rather than a fall. The book asks readers to judge a woman by what she did to survive, not by the standard of a protected lady.
- Motherhood and the sale of children: Linda’s motherhood is the engine of the plot: she hides to stay near Benny and Ellen, refuses to run north without them, and watches them from a gimlet hole. The sale in Chapter 19, the jail at two years old and Ellen’s service in Brooklyn show how the market treated children as stock, and Ellen’s calm statement that she is nothing to her father is the book’s hardest sentence. Freedom matters because it lets a mother keep her children.
- Concealment and the loophole of retreat: Seven years in a garret nine feet long, seven wide and three high turn the narrator into an eavesdropper on her own life. She hears the search, the bribe offered to her son, the funeral of her aunt, and can answer none of it; she writes letters dated from New York to keep the hunt pointed the wrong way. The garret is a prison and a strategy at once, and Jacobs makes the reader feel both its danger and its cost in health and nerve.
- The North and the colour line: Freedom in the narrative is legal rather than social. Philadelphia puts coloured passengers in a filthy separate car, an Albany steamboat refuses Linda a seat at table, and a fashionable hotel directs her to the kitchen. The Fugitive Slave Law turns New York into a city of kidnappers, and even the kind Mrs. Bruce must break the law to shelter her. The book refuses the comfort of a simple north-south contrast, which is why it still reads as a national argument.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl?
A book of this length, with forty-one chapters, an appendix of testimonials and a great deal of quoted dialect, needs a file that behaves. The Standard Ebooks text was chosen because it keeps the chapter divisions, the italics, the paragraphing and the documents of the 1861 volume, and because its proofing is consistent across the whole narrative. Nothing here has been abridged or modernised, and no notes have been pushed between Jacobs’s sentences. The result is a file that reads like the printed volume rather than a dump of text.
The table of contents is working and points to every chapter by name, so a reader can move from the garret to the appendix without scrolling the whole book. The cover survives being sent to a Kindle, the text reflows on a phone, and the type falls back cleanly on an old reader. EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB are built from one source, so chapter breaks and page positions match whichever format you take. Each is a single download, with no account and no restriction on copying.
Nothing in the narrative has been cut, including Child’s introduction and the statements that Amy Post and George W. Lowther contributed. If you want to compare readings, the Project Gutenberg text is there for that purpose, and it preserves the same chapters and the same appendix. That text is a transcription rather than a facsimile, which makes it easy to search. The commentary you are reading stays on this page, so the file opens at Jacobs’s first sentence and runs to her last.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks prepared this text from the Project Gutenberg transcription and corrected it against the printed book, so the chapter breaks and the appendix match the 1861 volume and the summaries below follow the same numbering.
- Free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files One download per format, all carrying the complete text, a working table of contents and a cover that survives being sent to a device. EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for Kindle, KEPUB for Kobo, none of them locked or watermarked and each small enough for an old reader.
- The appendix kept with the narrative The statements from Amy Post and George W. Lowther and the editor’s note are part of the book as published, and they stay at the end of the file where Jacobs and Child placed them, rather than being cut as apparatus or moved into a footnote.
- No editorial apparatus inside the text Child’s introduction is printed as she wrote it, with her spelling and her defences of the book’s decorum, and nothing has been added between the chapters. The commentary on this page stays on this page, so the narrative runs from the first sentence to the last without interruption.
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Up from Slavery — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Souls of Black Folk — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The forty-one chapters and the appendix fall into twelve movements: the town childhood, the pursuit, the neighbouring plantations, the insurrection scare, the flight, the months of peril, the garret, the years of letters and escapes, the passage north, the reunion, the northern persecution, and the purchase of freedom. Each summary is short enough to read before the chapters and full enough to check afterwards. Chapter numbers follow the Standard Ebooks text.
- Chapters 1–4 — Childhood, the Flints and the auction block: Linda is born in a North Carolina town, the daughter of a hired-out carpenter and a mother who dies when she is six. A kind mistress teaches her to read and then leaves her to a five-year-old heiress, whose father, Dr. Flint, takes charge of the family. The grandmother’s three-hundred-dollar loan is never repaid; she is sold at auction in her old age. Every January the town hired out its enslaved people, and a mother with seven children could lose all of them in an afternoon. The movement ends with Uncle Benjamin, who fights his master and escapes north.
- Chapters 5–8 — The trials of girlhood and the lover: At fifteen Linda becomes the object of Dr. Flint’s pursuit, and the narrative says plainly that no law protects an enslaved girl. Mrs. Flint’s jealousy turns the household into a second persecution, complete with an oath on a Bible and night watches. A free-born carpenter wants to marry Linda and offers to buy her; Flint refuses, strikes her and threatens to shoot the man, and the lover is sent away to Savannah. A short chapter explains the lies slaves are told about the North, so that the later flight reads as a choice made against a warning.
- Chapters 9–11 — Neighbouring slaveholders and a perilous passage: Linda sketches the planters around her: Mr. Litch with six hundred slaves and a private jail, his brother with bloodhounds and a deathbed curse, a cotton-gin accident that kills a young man named James. The tour ends her girlhood. Dr. Flint builds a secluded cottage, and Linda takes the white gentleman Mr. Sands as her lover to put herself beyond the doctor’s reach. Her grandmother turns her out and then takes her back, and her son Benny is born premature and small, with no lawful name to give him.
- Chapters 12–14 — Insurrection, the church and a second child: Nat Turner’s revolt brings soldiers, house-to-house searches and a ransacked grandmother’s house where only verses are found. The church chapter shows the same system at prayer: a minister preaches obedience, a class leader jeers at a bereaved mother, and only a new Episcopal clergyman teaches his slaves to read. Linda’s daughter Ellen is born. Flint cuts off Linda’s hair with shears and strikes her, and four days after the birth he makes her stand and hold the baby while he curses them; she faints, an episode she records without comment.
- Chapters 15–17 — Persecutions, the plantation and the flight: Offers of nine hundred and twelve hundred dollars for Linda are refused because she belongs to Flint’s daughter. Flint throws Benny across a room and strikes Linda in her grandmother’s house, and the old woman orders him out. Sent to the plantation to break her, Linda spends six weeks fitting up a house for young Mr. Flint’s bride and hears a neighbour’s warning that the children are to be brought to the plantation to break her. She waits until midnight and climbs from a window.
- Chapters 18–20 — Months of peril, the sale and the swamp: Hidden in the town, Linda is bitten by a venomous reptile, refuses her relatives’ advice to return and beg pardon, and is taken in by a slaveholding lady who hides her above her own bedroom. When the family is jailed to make her surrender, she stays put. Mr. Sands buys William and the children for nineteen hundred dollars, and the children are brought back to the grandmother’s house. Her uncle Phillip is jailed for helping her and stays there rather than pay bail. Linda escapes the searchers in a sailor’s disguise and spends a day in Snaky Swamp before climbing into the garret.
- Chapters 21–23 — The loophole of retreat: The garret is nine feet long, seven wide and three feet high at the peak, reached by a trapdoor and furnished with a gimlet hole through which Linda watches her children in the street. She reads and sews by the hole, which gives her the only daylight she has, and she hears the town give her up for gone and Flint offer Benny silver to say where she is. Christmas brings the Johnkannaus and a constable who searches the house while she listens above him. Years pass, her health collapses in the second winter, and Mrs. Flint says she wishes the dog had killed Benny.
- Chapters 24–27 — The candidate, the letters and Ellen sent away: Mr. Sands is elected to Congress as a Whig, and Linda crawls down to beg him to free the children before he leaves for Washington. He promises and does nothing. She writes letters dated from New York and has a sailor post them, and Flint intercepts them and forges a reply inviting her home. William escapes from Sands in New York and reaches Boston. Ellen is sent to Brooklyn as a waiting maid, and Linda spends one night with her before she goes.
- Chapters 28–30 — Aunt Nancy, the vessel and the free shore: Aunt Nancy, Linda’s mother’s twin, dies after years of nursing Mrs. Flint’s children and burying her own, and the grandmother insists she be buried in the slave graveyard. Linda has been in the garret nearly seven years when her friend Fanny is sold and escapes, and a vessel is found. She gives up her place to Fanny, then is seen by the housemaid and must go. Benny admits he has known where she was for years, and the two are rowed out to the boat. The captain is a Southerner and treats them decently, which the book notes without softening the danger.
- Chapters 31–33 — Philadelphia, the reunion and a home found: The boat lands in Philadelphia, where the Rev. Jeremiah Durham and his wife take Linda in, and she sees a free city for the first time, including the separate and filthy car reserved for coloured passengers. In New York she lodges in Sullivan Street and crosses to Brooklyn, where she meets Ellen in the street and holds her for the first time in two years. Benny is still in the South, and her first wages go to clothes and schoolbooks. She finds work as a nurse with the English Mrs. Bruce, who keeps her on through illness and treats her as a person.
- Chapters 34–37 — The old enemy, prejudice and England: A letter signed by Emily Flint’s young brother invites Linda home, and she recognises her master’s hand in it. Dr. Flint visits New York to look for her, and Benny is sent north to join her in Boston. Travel with the Bruce family brings the insults of an Albany steamboat and a Rockaway hotel, and a southern guest in Brooklyn writes to Flint with her address. She flees to Boston with Ellen, and later spends ten months in England, where colour prejudice seems to vanish.
- Chapters 38–41 and the appendix — The Fugitive Slave Law and freedom bought: Emily Flint, now Mrs. Dodge, invites Linda to Virginia, and Linda refuses. She tells Ellen the truth about her father, and Ellen answers that she has known for years. The Fugitive Slave Law turns New York into a city of kidnappers, the Dodges arrive to claim her, and Mrs. Bruce buys her freedom for three hundred dollars. The book ends with the grandmother’s death, the notice for uncle Phillip, and the statements of Amy Post and George W. Lowther. The last pages admit that freedom has not yet given her the home she wanted.
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Part of: Classic Fiction · Victorian era
