In passages like the one reproduced below, Jacobs showcases his talents as a writer and speaker to condemn American despotism—absolute rule over an unfree people—and to perform what it means to be free. Writing from Australia, beyond the reach of American law and outside the heavy hand of the white abolitionist editor, he demonstrates the potential of unfiltered, uncensored, unapologetic Black writing to speak truth to power.
Refusing to yield to pressures to represent Black pain in order to incite white anti-slavery sentiment, Jacobs draws up a revolutionary contract between text and reader, calling slaveowners out by name, exposing northern complicity, and arguing that the nation’s founding documents represent the bedrock of American slavery. “If [slaveowners] can be considered an evil,” he writes, “they are a necessary evil, and you can only remove the evil by removing the cause.”
–Jonathan D.S. Schroeder
I know that the picture I have drawn of slavery is a black one, and looks most unnatural; but here you have the State, the town, and the names of all the parties. Prove it to be false if you can. Take one who has never felt the sting of slavery, he would naturally suppose that it was to the slaveholder’s advantage to treat his slaves with kindness; but the more indulgent the master, the more intelligent the slave; the more intelligent the slave, the nearer he approximates to a man; the nearer he approximates to a man, the more determinate he is to be a free man; and to argue that the slaves are happy, or can be happy while in slavery, is to argue that they have been brutalised to that degree that they cannot be considered men. What better proof do you want in favour of universal freedom that can be given?
You can find thousands of ignorant men who will lay down their lives for their liberty; can you find one intelligent man that would prefer slavery? These thousands are not men—they are only children to what they should be. I am yet a child; I can see the things that I want, but have not attained to the stature of a man; they are beyond my reach, though I would be ashamed of myself to offer these acts of wanton cruelty as a reason why slavery should be abolished. If they can be considered an evil, they are a necessary evil, and you can only remove the evil by removing the cause.