"I verily believed myself to be a free woman": Harriet Jacobs's journey into capitalism.

In Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Linda Brent's initial act of freedom consists of walking into a Philadelphia shop and making a purchase--the first time in the narrative during which she trades money for goods. No longer an object of exchange, she proffers a gold coin, takes her purchase, and counts her change. In so doing, she triumphs in surreptitiously learning something about the market without revealing her ignorance of its workings or her status as a slave. (1) Her second act of freedom comes late that night when she returns to bed as firebells clang, realizing that she cannot be compelled to labor in extinguishing a neighborhood fire. In these "Incidents in Philadelphia," Linda Brent declares herself the proprietor of her own body and therefore a free and equal individual capable of choosing whether to sell her labor as a commodity, buy goods, or (by extension) marry and maintain a home. Drawing on nineteenth-century notions of contract that idealized voluntary market exchanges as the embodiment of human liberty, Linda rejects the paternalistic ethos of the precapitalist South in favor of a Northern, capitalist world view. With these narrative moments in mind, a rethinking of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl finds that, for Linda Brent, the journey from South to North is a journey into capitalism. (2)

My analysis draws on the work of historians who contend that the antebellum South was a precapitalist economy animated by a paternalistic ethos antithetical to the emerging ideology of the free-labor North. (3) The North underwent an ideological transformation amid the rise of industrial capitalism, these historians claim, justifying changing labor relations by idealizing contract rights as a form of freedom--indeed, as the essence of freedom. (4) Contract principles drew on Enlightenment ideals and classical political economy to construe all individuals as "sovereigns of themselves, possessive individuals entitled to their own persons, labor, and faculties" (Stanley 3). This right to self-ownership was imagined to imply the right to sell one's labor, marry freely, and engage in market exchanges on terms of equality, not as a subjugated dependent. Indeed, a contract's validity depended on the unsentimental, rationalistic nature of the agreements made between free and equal agents: "To contract was to incur a duty purely by choice and establish its terms without the constraint of status or legal prescription" (Stanley 2). While providing new legitimation for capitalist relations, however, the North's valorization of contract widened the ideological divide with the South. (5) Denial of contract was fundamental to slave law, of course, for the institution stripped bondspersons of all proprietary rights and denied them volition outside their master's will.

Using the soaring rhetoric of contract theory; abolitionists decried slave law as "a daring infringement of the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact." (6) In defense, embattled slaveholders clung ever more fiercely to a paternalistic rhetoric that posited slaves as inherently inferior and permanently dependent. (7) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl captures this dramatic moment in ideological and economic history, for it structures Linda Brent's story as a journey from a precapitalist South into a free-labor North. Linda Brent describes her escape from slavery as a release from a society in which a debased form of paternalism provided rhetorical justification for corrupt and corrupting economic relations; her goal throughout is to reach a land where she imagines she will live the bourgeois life glorified by free-labor ideology, a life in which she will "by dint of labor and economy" be able to provide a safe and comfortable home for her children (169).

Reading Incidents as a journey into capitalism provides an important intervention in Jacobs scholarship, which has predominantly analyzed the text according to its relation to male slave narratives or the domestic novel. (8) By placing Incidents in the context of capitalism, this analysis uncovers a pentimento text, a compelling narration of the emancipatory dream of nineteenth-century contract theory, the story of how Linda Brent lands on free soil and learns to trade like a true American. Yet, as I will demonstrate, Jacobs's text also anticipates the late-nineteenth-century disillusionment with contract principles which, in celebrating the Northern capitalist order, elided its inequalities. (9) When Linda Brent finally reaches the Free States, she discovers that racism, sexism, and her fugitive status--the goals which motivated her long and arduous passage out of slavery--severely limit her ability to earn a living and provide a home for her children. In the North, she is a woman freed but not free. Her journey into capitalism, consequently, is also a journey into disillusionment. This article traces both journeys.

Linda Brent's journey begins in childhood, with her intellectual emancipation from paternalism, the ideology most commonly used to justify slaveholding and, to some historians, the inevitable ethos of a precapitalistic economy. (10) Described by historian James Oakes as "the ideological legacy of a feudal political system with no fully developed market economy" (xvii), paternalism imagines an organic society of reciprocal relations in which some are born to rule, others to obey. It proved to be an ideal model for defending slavery, for it allowed masters to construe themselves as benevolent caretakers for unavoidably inferior slaves, who as part of an extended household would labor in exchange for protection and guidance. Within the text, slaveowners repeatedly make paternalistic claims: Paternalism is the principle behind Dr. Flint's "old threadbare discourse about his forbearance and [Linda's] ingratitude," his unconvincing but unrelenting attempts to persuade his slave of his kindness and of her obligation to obey (76). Linda Brent recognizes the persuasive power of the paternalistic ethos and its incompatibility with Northern free-labor ideals.

Intriguingly, the text provides a shadowy outline of paternalism operating successfully in Linda's descriptions of her "happy days" as a child serving her first mistress. The woman was "almost like a mother," offering guidance and showing benevolence to her charge, who served her eagerly out of a sense of duty and love. "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, Linda says, invoking the paternalistic ideal of labor as a sentimental and familial relation. "I would sit by her side for hours, sewing diligently, with a heart as free from care as that of any free-born 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." Imposing "no toilsome or disagreeable duties," her mistress gives Linda the freedom due a child and the respect due a valued worker, and so the young girl's heart is as light as that of any "white child" (7). The ideal labor relation, it would seem, is one which burdens the hands but not the heart--and which does not vary by race.

The woman's love also gives Linda hope that she will be freed in her will, an exchange of benevolence for fidelity in keeping with the paternalistic ethos, if not with its assumption of immutable status. "She had promised my dying mother that her children should never suffer for any thing; and when I remembered that, and recalled her many proofs of attachment to me, I could not help having some hopes that she had left me free," Linda says after learning of her mistress's death. In fact, Linda's friends consider freedom assured because of the "love and faithful service" of Linda's grandmother and her mother, who as a baby was weaned so that her future mistress could suckle instead (7). Three generations of service do not earn liberty, however. Although the mistress had taught the child to "love thy neighbor as thyself," in her will she bequeaths her chattel to her niece. "I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor"(8). As a child she had fulfilled the duties expected of a dependent in a paternalistic relation, but it was a paternalism built on a lie (that her needs were respected) and at best scheduled to wither away (ideally, Linda imagined, loyalty would earn freedom). "Those were happy days--too happy to last," she says in hindsight (7).

A loving pseudo-daughter to her first mistress, Linda comes to recognize that paternalism is not only an ideal rarely achieved but an ideal thwarted by the workings of the slave economy. Her descriptions suggest that the system's economic instability all but guarantees its inhumanity, with owners selling away their slaves or denying them long-promised freedom because of sudden financial reversals. Linda's brother William flees Mr. Sands' relatively benign ownership because he quite realistically recognizes that "pecuniary embarrassments" or bankruptcy could force the master to sell his slave, for "he had too often known such accidents to happen to slaves who had kind masters" (136). In such cases, paternalistic ideals provided little protection; Linda's anecdotes demonstrate the point made by a recent historian, that the system's reliance on punishment and profit "destroyed for most slaveholders whatever remained of the elemental principles of the paternalist ethos: that masters were obliged to look to the needs of the slaves in return for the diligence and fidelity of the bondsmen" (Oakes 22). Linda describes slaveowners leading admiring guests on a tour of the cotton fields, ignoring the fact that the bountiful crops are the result of work "performed by men and women who were unpaid, miserably clothed, and half famished" (94). Men and women "toiling without wages, under constant dread of the lash," as she describes them, also would clearly be unlikely to perceive their labor as part of a system of reciprocal duties (71).

Although financially embarrassed owners prove inhumane, the text describes another type of master who is even more dangerous. These are the owners so obsessed with control that they ignore their own economic best interests: men such as Mr. Litch, who murders a valuable slave for stealing "a ham and some liquor," and Dr. Flint, who refuses to sell Linda and her children for amounts far above market value (46). These owners defy a capitalist world view that conceived of human beings primarily as profit-maximizers. These men "love money ... but ... love power more," and so their actions are unpredictable and uncontrollable (80). Only after Linda has been long outside Flint's control does he agree to sell her children for sizable sums, and he never agrees to sell her, even though his financial situation is so precarious that he must borrow the travel money to search for her. He dies insolvent, leaving behind a "distressed family" to pursue her with greater urgency.

Incidents also links what Linda considers the most damning aspect of slavery--the sexual exploitation of women--to the economics of the slave society. She notes that slaveowners who rape their slaves gain profitable commodities, children as "marketable as the pigs on the plantation," and can then sell their paramours down river, thereby reaping an additional profit even as they appease their angry wives (36). Consequently, sexual abuse is not only likely but inevitable, Linda's universalizing language suggests, her description of her own pursuit by Dr. Flint quickly branching into a description of the slave girl's fate in general. Before becoming victims themselves, young children are corrupted with a premature knowledge of the goings-on in the household: "Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves." Adolescence, when it comes, is invariably "a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl" the time when she learns "to tremble when she hears her master's footfall" and dread her mistress's "outbreaks of jealous passion" (28). Linda's description of the Flint family suggests that slavery's corruptions pass inevitably from generation to generation. Dr. Flint's grown son is known to be as lascivious as his father--"a chip of the old block"--the primary reason the elder man resists sending Linda to his plantation (86). "He was jealous of his son; and jealousy of the overseer had kept him from punishing me by sending me into the fields to work," Linda notes, her next line establishing the incongruity of a paternalistic construction of these debased relations: "Is it strange that I was not proud of these protectors?" (41). The same note is struck when Dr. Flint calls on the paternalistic glorification of the master-slave relation as familial, telling Linda: "'You know I exact obedience from my own children, and I consider you as yet a child'" (83). Coming moments after his demand that Linda become his concubine, his remark exposes paternalism's incestuous undercurrent and reveals the absurdity of applying such rhetoric to the master-slave relation (39).

Paternalism presumes sentimental relations will create justice between unequals. In describing Aunt Nancy's funeral, Linda shows not only that slaveowners feel no protective instinct for their slaves but that they exploit the sentimental associations of paternalism. Mrs. Flint, the mistress who had forced Nancy to sleep in her doorway through multiple failed pregnancies, plans to bury the woman in the white cemetery, and Linda recognizes her motivation: Mrs. Flint most likely "thought it would be a beautiful illustration of the attachment existing between slaveholder and slave, if the body of her old worn-out servant was buried at her feet." Linda's family attempts to regain control of the funeral by asking to pay for it, an offer the Flints accept readily, for, as Linda notes, "slaveholders are always ready to grant such favors to slaves and their relatives." Yet Linda still imagines that passers-by might misinterpret the "perfectly respectable" funeral by assuming the Flints arranged it: "Northern travelers, passing through the place, might have described this tribute of respect to the humble dead as a beautiful feature in the 'patriarchal institution'; a touching proof of the attachment between slaveholders and their servants; and tenderhearted Mrs. Flint would have confirmed this impression, with handkerchief at her eyes" (146). Accordingly, Linda longs to replace the misguided musings of the imagined passers-by with her own story: "We could have told them a different story. We could have given them a chapter of wrongs and sufferings, that would have touched their hearts, if they had any hearts to feel for the colored people" (147). It is telling that Linda Brent describes the obscured "wrongs" in terms of the stolen labor and misappropriated earnings that misty-eyed Northerners fail to perceive: "We could have told them how ... [Nancy's] poor old slave-mother had toiled, year after year, to earn eight hundred dollars to buy her son Phillip's right to his own earnings; and how that same Phillip paid the expenses of the funeral, which they regarded as doing so much credit to the master" (146-47). Financial and emotional credit are consistently misapplied by Northern observers blinded by paternalistic notions, just as wages and profits are consistently misdirected in a slaveholding society. Linda Brent recognizes that slaveowners reap illegitimate profits in sentimental as well as in economic terms, and Incidents is her attempt to correct the balance sheet.

The twisted relations between paternalistic sentiment and the slave economy find their ultimate expression in the letter from the Flints that Linda receives while a fugitive in New York. Outside the family's clutches for eight years, Linda remains one of its few remaining assets, and the letter attempts to seduce her into returning by approaching her as a daughter figure. The letter, Linda surmises, was written by Dr. Flint, although signed with the name of his young son. It assures her that the family is "gratified" by her letter (asking to buy her freedom) and insists that if they "have had any feeling of resentment towards ... [her], they feel it no longer" (171-72). The letter goes on to claim that they wish to resume their paternalistic protection, imagining her life in the North as one of suffering: "We all sympathize with you in your unfortunate condition, and are ready to do all in our power to make you contented and happy.... You have it in your power to be reinstated in our affections. We would receive you with open arms and tears of joy" (172). The forged letter figures Linda as a prodigal child whose family will receive her joyously, but the next lines give the game away: "You need not apprehend any unkind treatment, as we have not put ourselves to any trouble or expense to get you. Had we done so, perhaps we should feel otherwise" (171-72). Of course, as Linda knows, the family has expended trouble and expense to find her (Dr. Flint borrowed $500 to travel to New York) and does indeed "feel otherwise." Kindness and sympathy are a slave's only protection against "unkind treatment," and Linda knows quite well that economic loss readily ignites brutality. She, of course, has no intention of returning South.

One final anecdote shows Linda defending against slaveholders' falsehoods about the material conditions of slavery. Slavery advocates relied heavily on the claim that the system provided better for its workers than did the free-labor North, an argument underpinned by the protective assumptions of paternalism. (11) Linda marks this deception out for particular condemnation, refuting it in an anecdote heading the chapter entitled "What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North" and using the most bitter language in the text to make her case:

   Slaveholders pride themselves upon
   being honorable men; but if you were
   to hear the enormous lies they tell their
   slaves, you would have small respect
   for their veracity. I have spoken plain
   English. Pardon me. I cannot use a
   milder term. When they visit the north,
   and return home, they tell their slaves
   of the runaways they have seen, and
   describe them in the most deplorable
   condition. A slaveholder once told me
   that he had seen a runaway friend of
   mine in New York, and that she
   besought him to take her back to her
   master, for she was literally dying of
   starvation; that many days she had
   only one cold potato to eat, and at
   other times could get nothing at all....
   This whole story was false. I afterwards
   staid with that friend in New
   York, and found her in comfortable circumstances.
   She had never thought of
   such a thing as wishing to go back to
   slavery. (43)

Linda's report establishes indeed that the "whole story was false," not only the tale of that particular slave but of the protective arm of slavery providing a better life for slaves incapable of surviving in the North. The prominence she gives the anecdote suggests the importance to her of dichotimizing North and South according to material conditions; the next lines signal her recognition of the persuasive power of the economic deceit:

   Many of the slaves believe such stories,
   and think it is not worth while to
   exchange slavery for such a hard kind
   of freedom. It is difficult to persuade
   them that freedom could make them
   useful men, and enable them to protect
   their wives and children. If those heathens
   [slaves] in our Christian land
   had as much teaching as some
   Hindoos, they would think otherwise.
   They would know that liberty is more
   valuable than life. They would begin to
   understand their own capabilities, and
   exert themselves to become men and
   women. (43)

Linda distances herself from the majority of slaves precisely because of her acceptance of a capitalist ethic that construes industriousness as crucial to humanity: In exerting themselves to be free and "useful," slaves would become "men and women." Linda considers slaves' lack of interest in this ideal as ignorance of the basic tenets of American society. In choosing life over liberty, the frightened slaves prove themselves to be as un-American as "Hindoos."

With her vision of useful men and protected wives, Linda's ideal of life in the North also draws upon the capitalist ideology that links wage labor to domestic happiness and family security. Under contract principles, wage and marriage agreements were imagined as "mutually reinforcing contracts that would create economic and moral order and instill ideals of self support," and by the post-bellum period "the promise of a home unscathed by the market distinguished the rewards of free contract and chattel slavery" (Stanley 36). Linda draws on this evolving ideology in repeatedly imagining the ideal home as a haven in which women are protected from sexual abuse and families from labor abuse. She argues that even the most impoverished families in England have lives "vastly superior to the condition of the most favored slave in America" precisely because of the little thatched cottages in which they live. Safe inside their homes, the poor laborers could not be "ordered out to toil while the stars were in the sky," a freedom linked to family sanctity. "The father, when he closed his cottage door, felt safe with his family around him. No master or overseer could come and take from him his wife, or his daughter." The poor family's door serves as a metaphor for the legal protection afforded families in a free-labor society: "They must separate to earn their living; but the parents knew where their children were going, and could communicate with them by letters. The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were too sacred for the richest noble in the land to violate with impunity" (184). This contrasts dramatically with slavery, under which men are "so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters" and women "too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position" as sexual victims (28).

Intriguingly, domestic bliss for Linda is figured as a return to an Edenic childhood, the time when her parents were alive. "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," she says (5). Despite their legal status, her parents and grandmother modeled the ideal household, exemplifying the risk-taking and independent spirit valorized by the culture of capitalism. (12) Her father demonstrated the industriousness glorified by a free-labor ideology that valued work not always for its intrinsic value but for its instrumental value, "its escapability into something 'better'" (Glickstein 9). The "something better" for him was respect as a carpenter; Linda indicates that he was "considered so intelligent and skillful 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" (5). These rare abilities earn him the right to be allowed to "work at his trade, and manage his own affairs," a taste of freedom bought with a $200 annual fee to his mistress (5). We are told little about Linda's mother other than that she was "a slave merely in name, but in nature ... noble and womanly," suggesting that her presence completed the image of domesticy (7).

Linda's parents die early in her life, and she is raised by her grandmother, who is even more remarkable as a model of upward mobility. Called Aunt Marthy by the communty, she is a gifted cook whose "nice crackers became so famous in the community" that her mistress allowed her to "bake crackers at night, after all the household work was done." Her "perseverance and unwearied industry" allow her to build up a profitable business, eventually to be "mistress of a snug little home, surrounded with the necessaries of life," and to surround her children and grandchildren with those comforts, materially and spiritually, after she is finally freed (6). To Linda and her brother, Aunt Marthy's house comes to represent the psychological and physical release from enslavement, and their life there teaches them to have, like their father, "the feelings of a freeman," even in defiance of that loving grandmother (9). Fearing they will attempt to flee the South, Aunt Marthy seeks to convince Linda, her young uncle, and her brother that slave children should settle for obedience and not strive for happiness, but the children reject this "beautiful faith" in favor of another dream: "We reasoned that it was much more the will of God that we should be situated as she was. We longed for a home like hers" (17). Their dream is a quintessentially capitalistic one, for the home earned through labor and made domestic through marriage was emerging as the most powerful symbol of the promises of a flee and voluntary labor market in which toil would bring material and moral rewards. (13)

In keeping with this ideal, Linda hopes to become "a virtuous, free and happy wife," the moral keeper in the domestic idyll, living in "a home shielded by the laws" (54). (14) Imagining that she will, like her parents, be able to fulfill this vision even as a slave, she asks her master permission to marry a "young colored carpenter; a free born man" (42). Dr. Flint immediately recognizes the emancipatory potential represented by the marriage contract. He violently refuses her request and declares his right to rule her "body and soul," even to kill her "on the spot" (39). Unable to marry the man of her choice, she desperately enters a liaison with an "educated and eloquent gentleman" who has won her heart with sympathy and "kind words" unrelated to financial considerations. It is crucial to note the importance of choice in her description, not only for the individualism or feminism other critics have discerned (15) but because it is exactly the quality of volition that distinguished such relations from feudalistic ideas of obligation. Linda Brent enters into an illicit liaison with the belief that the affair gains legitimacy precisely because it is an act of free will, an avowal of her right to choose. She consequently takes the risk of alienating her readers with her insistence that her choice was an informed and free one, made with a man who had no control over her: "I will not try to screen myself behind the plea of compulsion from a master; for it was not so. Neither can I plead ignorance or thoughtlessness.... I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation." She describes herself as acting out the liberty legally denied her: "There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment" (54). Choosing to sleep with Sands is her Sophie's choice: She violates the most basic tenet of womanhood (virtue) to fulfill the basic requirement of contract freedom (volition). "It is less degrading to give one's sell than to submit to compulsion," she says (55).

The relationship also gives Linda Brent a compelling new reason to seek freedom in the North, for only there will she be able to protect the children she bears. In line with an important strand of abolitionist rhetoric, Linda considers the children to be the most significant and undeniable of her possessions, "the fruits of toil that must belong" to the mother, and for Linda the inability of slave mothers to shield their offspring comes to represent the worst of slavery's abuses (Stanley 33). Consequently, her two children become the battleground over which she and Dr. Flint war. While in hiding in her grandmother's garret, Linda convinces Dr. Flint she has escaped north by having a letter she wrote posted from New York; within that letter, she encloses one to her grandmother, knowing he will read it. "To my grandmother, I expressed a wish to have my children sent to me at the north, where I could teach them to respect themselves, and set them a virtuous example; which a slave mother was not allowed to do at the south" (129). In this letter meant for his eyes, she subtly taunts him by describing the bourgeois ideal to which she would subscribe if her children were under her control. She recognizes the power of this concept of virtue to threaten the lecherous slaveholder, who indeed rewrites the letter before reading it to her grandmother, eliminating any reference to her plans for her children. The ability to control her children's fate comes to signify all the promises of freedom for Linda, for she imagines her son and daughter establishing themselves as virtuous and respected citizens, representing her own maternal labor and completing the triad of "self-ownership, free labor and family security" inextricably linked in contract theory (Stanley 39). (16)

As a mother, Linda also imagines a new identity for herself in the North, revealed in her prayers for freedom while in hiding: "Alone in my cell, where no eye but God's could see me, I wept bitter tears. How earnestly I prayed to him to restore me to my children, and enable me to be a useful woman and a good mother!" (133). In asking the Lord to allow her the freedom to re-create herself as a "useful woman and good mother," she conflates the male role of bread-winner (the "useful") and the female role of domestic icon (the "good mother"). Her lack of a husband has freed her to pursue the masculine dream of self-ownership unencumbered. If she were married, her husband would own her labor as well as her tangible property, for even abolitionists usually "recapitulated the gender rules of classical liberal theory, which defined men as masters of the household with proprietary rights to their dependent wives" (Stanley 29). Linda Brent acts out this newly imagined, dual-gendered role in a little-noticed incident after her escape from the Flint plantation. Her friend Betty brings her "a suit of sailor's clothes,--jacket, trowsers, and tarpaulin hat" in which to disguise herself as she moves from one hiding spot to another (111). Although Linda is still years from escaping, Betty envisions the men's clothes as essential to that eventual journey to "free parts" and instructs her carefully on how to gender herself male: "'Put your hands in your pockets, and walk ricketty, like de sailors'" (112). Linda "perform[s] to her satisfaction," escaping femininity so successfully that even her lover does not recognize her: "I passed several people whom I knew. The father of my children came so near that I brushed against his arm; but he had no idea who it was." Told to "make the most of this walk," Linda walks "boldly through the streets," triumphant as she heads to the coffin-sized garret that will imprison her for seven years (113).

When Linda Brent finally escapes the South, she does so on a vessel bound for Philadelphia, ironically presumed by the sailors to be a wife searching for her husband. As the nation's commercial and financial center, the great city suggests the manifold possibilities of a capitalist economy to Linda. "I had never seen so large a city, or been in contact with so many people in the streets," she observes (160), a contrast to what she later describes as the "stagnation in our Southern towns" (183). The city's urban nature alone puts it in antithetical relation to the rural South, for in noncapitalist economies like the antebellum South, cities remained subservient to the countryside until much later (Kulikoff 267). Indeed, slaveowners believed "slavery and cities simply did not go together," precisely because of the commercial ties possible in urban areas (Ashworth 101). (17) In cities, slaves could fraternize with free blacks, learn to read, or gain the work skills that were believed to "foment discontent" with their status (Ashworth 107, 97). Accordingly, Linda's first request after landing on the wooden wharf is to participate in this commercial society: She asks for a shop in which to buy gloves and veils. To Linda Brent, the market transaction enacts her escape from slavery, for, according to contract principles, the "mechanism of exchange established the symmetry of the relation, entailing a reciprocity of rights and duties while also testifying to the mutual consent of the contracting parties" (Stanley 2). She describes the important event in detail:

   The noise of the great city confused
   me, but I found the shops, and bought
   some double veils and gloves for
   Fanny and myself. The shopman told
   me they were so many levies. I had
   never heard the word before, but I did
   not tell him so. I thought if he knew I
   was a stranger he might ask me where
   I came from. I gave him a gold piece,
   and when he returned the change, I
   counted it, and learned how much a
   levy was. (159)

In finding the shop and buying her goods, she demonstrates her ability to compete in a vibrant, competitive market, skillfully deploying the anonymity presumed in the transaction to hide her ignorance as well as her legal status. She defies the property law of the South, which held that "a slave, being property, can hold no property," as she had bitterly noted (6). And, finally, in buying the nonessential goods, she establishes her capacity as a consumer, that capitalist creation, (18) even as she recognizes the compromises she will be required to make in the North: The gloves and veils help her fulfill ideals of feminine decorum while hiding her face, "so blistered and peeled, by sitting on deck, in wind and sunshine," from curiosity and slave hunters (160).

Linda's entry into the market as an actor is possible because of the "small bag of money" her grandmother pressed upon her before her escape. A long-time anomalous participant in the South's small market economy, the old woman recognized the first requirements for survival in free country. Linda describes their final moments together: "She insisted, while her tears were falling fast, that I should take the whole [bag]. 'You may be sick among strangers,' she said, 'and they would send you to the poorhouse to die' (155). Her savings allow Linda to reject the abolitionists' offer of charity, a moment she is careful to note. She has long recognized that "independence is much preferable to charity, no matter how generous" (89), and so refuses to let the Anti-Slavery Society pay her expenses to New York. In preferring the autonomy suggested by financial independence and rejecting the psychological dependence inevitable in gifts or charity, Linda recognizes capitalism's mentality; in giving her the bag of money to keep her from the poorhouse, her grandmother recognizes its ruthlessness. (19)

Her first night in Philadelphia, Linda Brent says, "I sought my pillow with feelings I had never carried to it before. I verily believed myself to be a free woman" (161). She awakes soon after to the sound of fire-bells, however, and quickly learns another lesson about freedom. She describes the moment:

   I jumped up and hurried on my
   clothes. Where I came from, every
   body hastened to dress themselves on
   such occasions. The white people
   thought a great fire might be used as a
   good opportunity for insurrection, and
   that it was best to be in readiness; and
   the colored people were ordered out to
   labor in extinguishing the flames.
   There was but one engine in our town,
   and colored women and children were
   often required to drag it to the river's
   edge and fill it. (162)

She awakens Mrs. Durham's daughter, who responds to her announcement that "'they're screaming fire'" with a drowsy, "'What of that? We are used to it. We never get up, without the fire is very near. What good would it do?'" Linda Brent considers this incident, in which she learns that she cannot be compelled to labor, as a seminal moment in her growth toward maturity as a free woman: "I was quite surprised that it was not necessary for us to go and help fill the engine. I was an ignorant child, just beginning to learn how things went on in great cities." In "great cities," the uneasy relations of slavery neither compel colored women and children to labor involuntarily nor require whites to guard perpetually against rebellion. In Philadelphia, such realities seem absurdities: "At the breakfast table, my idea of going out to drag the engine was laughed over, and I joined in the mirth." Her journey into a new world seems confirmed that morning by another novelty: "At daylight, I heard women crying fresh fish, berries, radishes, and various others things," she says. "All this was new to me. I dressed myself at an early hour, and sat at the window to watch that unknown tide of life. Philadelphia seemed to me a wonderfully great place" (162). Although she does not buy from the vendor, she sits in her window to watch this wonder of capitalist initiative. In the sound of the woman hawking fruit she hears the echo of both her right to work for pay and her right to buy. The vendor's call signals escape from a world in which property is exchanged along lines of dominion and dependence and into a region in which such transactions stand as metaphors for human freedom (Stanley 2).

In Philadelphia, Linda also begins the self-improvement central to the capitalist ethos, with the help of her "kind hostess" Mrs. Durham. In accord with the ethic that imagined education as a form of capital from which one might gain property and independence (Kulikoff 95), Linda envisions herself building up a nest egg of intellectual property to take farther north: "Every day, almost every hour, I was adding to my little stock of knowledge" (162). Accordingly, self-education later proves to be one of the most appealing aspects of her work for the first Mrs. Bruce, who gladly allows Linda opportunities for reading "whenever I had leisure from my duties" and who helps her expand her mind "under the influences of her intelligent conversation" (169).

Although still separated from her children, Linda can foresee her own ideal future in the life of Mrs. Durham, a well-educated woman "surrounded by her husband and children, in a home made sacred by protecting laws" (160). Her hosts show the respect for her privacy denied her as a slave: "I observed how careful they were not to say anything that might wound my feelings. How gratifying this was, can be fully understood only by those who have been accustomed to being treated as if they were not included within the pale of human beings" (161). Importantly, however, she also sees how tenuous that respect will be, as Mr. Durham indicates when she trustingly tells him her children are illegitimate. "'Your straight-forward answers do you credit; but don't answer every body so openly,'" he tells her. "'It might give some heartless people a pretext for treating you with contempt'" (160). Many critics have noted Linda Brent's claim that the slave woman "ought not to be judged by the same standard as others' (56). (20) It is important to note that she has a compelling reason for insisting that the ideal of female virtue is impossible under the Southern system, for her perceived lack of virtue, as the mother of illegitimate children, seemingly disqualifies her from participation in a bourgeois life in which freedom is premised on moral self-regulation.

As the minister's disheartening comments suggest, Philadelphia is a bittersweet place for Jacobs to find her freedom. Although the abolitionist movement was centered there and the city had an early history of promoting racial harmony, by the time of Linda Brent's arrival, blacks were being legally excluded from jobs because of white fears of unemployment, and upwardly mobile blacks were lampooned as pretentious (Nash 227, 251). In a symbolically devastating act, blacks were prohibited from attending the city's huge annual Fourth of July celebrations (Nash 181). The fire-bells, which seem to sound a song of freedom as Linda lies in bed without being compelled to labor, take on a sad resonance with the knowledge of Philadelphia's history: There were no black fire companies in the city because, when blacks tried to establish an African Fire Association in 1817, whites were so outraged by this "invasion of a civic function that whites alone were equipped to discharge" that they forced the association to disband (Nash 227). Linda could not be compelled to "drag [the engine] to the river's edge" as in her hometown; neither, however, would she have been allowed to.

Like Philadelphia's racial history, Incidents' trajectory is a journey into disillusionment. As Linda prepares to leave the city for New York, Mr. Durham warns her that she will "have a disagreeable ride" because he could not buy her tickets for the first-class cars (162). In her na'ivete, Linda offers more money. "'Oh no,' said he, 'they could not be had for any money. They don't allow colored people to go in the first class cars'" (162). In the South, "colored people were allowed to ride in a filthy box, behind white people, but they were not required to pay for the privilege," she notes acidly (163). In this bit of economic injustice, the North "aped the customs of slavery," giving "the first chill to [her] enthusiasm about the Free States" (162). Northern racism in this instance creates conditions worse than those under slavery. Unable to buy her way out of classification with the poorest passengers, Linda finds herself "stowed away in a large, rough car, with windows on each side," jammed with screaming babies and men smoking and drinking. "The fumes of the whiskey and the dense tobacco smoke were sickening to my senses, and my mind was equally nauseated by the coarse jokes and ribald songs around me," she says. "It was a very disagreeable ride" (163).

Metaphorically speaking, her ride gets no better. The freedom she would find, as a woman "tinged with the blood of Africa," would be compromised precisely in the free-market relations in which she believed liberty to inhere (176). Her fugitive status as well as her race put her at a severe disadvantage in the free-labor North. "The greatest difficulty in that way was, that those who employed strangers required a recommendation; and in my peculiar position, I could, of course, obtain no certificates from the families I had so faithfully served," she notes. She considers herself fortunate to get a position as a baby nurse with a "kind and gentle lady [who] proved a true and sympathizing friend" and who does not exhibit the "prejudice against color" she now realizes is so common, even in the North (168). However, the work, like the sewing she takes on in Boston, is a reminder that a woman in her position would be limited to the most menial and lowest-paid employment. She cannot in fact sell her labor for its true value, and the low pay she receives jeopardizes her dream of creating a home for her children "by dint of labor and economy" (169). When she visits her daughter Ellen, working as a virtual slave for Sands' relatives, she cannot tell the girl when she might be able to release her: "It made me sad to think that I could not give her a home until I went to work and earned the means; and that might take me a long time" (165). Ultimately, as in the South, she finds that she is not "entirely free to act a mother's part towards ... [her] children" (169). Ellen's keeper, Mrs. Hobbs, refuses to let Linda take her daughter to an eye doctor, claiming she fears that New York City is not safe. "I accepted the explanation in silence," Linda says, "but she had told me that my child belonged to her daughter, and I suspected that her real motive was a fear of my conveying her property away from her. Perhaps I did her injustice; but my knowledge of Southerners made it difficult for me to feel otherwise" (170). Indeed, not only is she denied access to Ellen, but she is also asked to begin paying her expenses, thwarting her ability to save for a home and replicating her own childhood, when her grandmother fed and clothed her while she worked for the Flints (169).

Freedom to Linda Brent is figured in the possibilities for social mobility within an economy that rewards effort and intelligence with monetary gain; accordingly, she indicts racism for thwarting open and equitable market exchanges. When she alone among the nursemaids is denied a seat in the dining room at a hotel in Rockaway and is eyed defiantly by the other women, "only one shade lighter in complexion," she finds the mistreatment appalling not only because of its racism but because of the economic arbitrariness it creates: "There was no difference in the price of board for colored and white servants, and there was no justification for difference of treatment, she says (176-77). She decries racism for inhibiting productivity as well, describing it as "that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people" (176). Her disillusionment is captured by her response to her son when he finally arrives in the North. He greets her excitedly: "'And, mother, I lost my clothes coming. What can I do to get some more? I 'spose free boys can get along here at the north as well as white boys,'" he babbles. His mother already knows better: "I did not like to tell the sanguine, happy little fellow how much he was mistaken. I took him to a tailor, and procured a change of clothes" (173). Former slaves cannot get along so well in the North as "white boys," as his mother now knows, their uncertain status preventing them from buying necessary items of clothing in any shop or even being allowed to work the jobs that will buy those clothes. This fact is reinforced when her son loses his apprenticeship because of abuse from the other boys, who discover that the fair-skinned boy is "a 'nigger,'" a discovery that "at once transformed him into a different being in their eyes (186). (21)

Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law completes the corruption of the North's free-labor ideals. Linda describes its consequences in terms of the slaves' loss of the produce of their work: After the law's enactment, she says, "many a poor washerwoman, who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends, and seek her fortune among strangers." Not only were goods lost, but families destroyed: "Many a wife discovered a secret she had never known before--that her husband was a fugitive, and must leave her to insure his own safety. Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and as 'the child follows the condition of its mother,' the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery." Her own difficulties are exacerbated. Like many other "intelligent and industrious" fugitives, she fears venturing into the streets, resorting to "back streets and by-ways" when she runs errands for her employers (191).

Linda Brent's release from bondage finally comes not from escaping the South but from a market transaction that confirms slavery's validity, her purchase by her employer. Brent's conception of the American ideal demands that no man or woman should have to accept freedom from anyone but God, so she initially declines Mrs. Bruce's offer: "I wrote to Mrs. Bruce, thanking her, but saying that being sold from one owner to another seemed too much like slavery, that such a great obligation could not be easily canceled--" (199). Indeed, after Mrs. Bruce secretly pays $300 to buy her freedom, she seemingly cannot cancel her obligations, for as the family's nursemaid she is placed in a permanent paternalistic relation with her employers, a member of their extended household and not her own. "But God so orders circumstances as to keep me with my friend Mrs. Bruce. Love, duty, gratitude also bind me to her side. It is a privilege to serve her who pities my oppressed people, and who has bestowed the inestimable boon of freedom on me and my children," she says tactfully (201). She is still obliged to labor by sentimental claims, not an entirely voluntary agreement. She has no time for the self-improvement she imagined pursuing in the North, apologizing in the preface that her job has not left her "with much leisure to make up for the loss of early opportunities to improve [her]self; and it has compelled me to write these pages at irregular intervals, whenever I could snatch an hour from household duties" (1). The bill of sale freezes her position as a woman not free but freed, making her liberty contingent on a contract she did not sign.

Linda Brent's disillusionment finds expression in the dual narrative voices in the text: that of the young Linda Brent making a triumphant escape from slavery and that of the disillusioned older woman writing the text at night, in secrecy, in the homes of her employers. If we revisit the Philadelphia quote--"I verily believed myself to be a free woman"--we can recover those two voices: one the expression of a woman who believes herself capable of finding freedom and the other marking the perspective of the writer who knows what she "believed" to be wrong. To be a "free woman" in America would not be possible under the terms in which young Linda Brent imagined it. As a member of the "colored race," she is excluded from making fair and equal economic exchanges; as a woman and an African American, from laboring for just compensation; and, denied both rights, all but disabled from creating a home for her children, the dream that drove her to flee slavery. "I and my children are free!" she says in conclusion, but to the older Linda Brent writing the tale, freedom means something other than it did to the young woman who idealized liberty. "We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north,--and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition." Her next lines encapsulate precisely how capitalism has failed the fugitive slave: "I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble." Linda Brent's escape from slavery is indeed a journey into capitalism, but not the capitalism that she envisioned. "The dream of my life," she concludes, "is not yet realized" (201).

Notes

(1.) The merchant quoted the price in terms of levies, which were worth about 11 cents and used in Philadelphia and Alexandria, according to Jean Yellin's footnote to the chapter (302). Linda Brent counts her change to determine the cost of her new gloves and veils and the value of a levy.

(2.) Defining capitalism requires "sound conceptualization ... and a thick skin," as Jonathan Chu notes (63). For an excellent summary of the historiographical debate over the meaning of capitalism, see Michael Merrill. For the purposes of this article, I draw on Merrill to define a capitalist economy as one with a formally flee-labor market and a bourgeois ideology valorizing individualism mediated by contractual relations.

(3.) The description of the South as precapitalist was most famously made by Eugene Genovese in the 1960s. Taking issue with historians who had construed the South's economy as "a strange form of capitalism [or] an undefinable agrarianism" (35), Genovese described the region as clinging to precapitalism in the face of "an increasingly hostile, powerful, and aggressive Northern capitalism" (34). The North-South divide can be said to be replicated in the research following Genovese, with scholars allying themselves into armed camps according to their analysis of the South's economic nature, of the slaveholders' ideology, and of the moment when capitalism conquered America. See Ashworth 80-84 for an analysis of the politically loaded nature of historians' analyses of the slaveholding economy. See Egerton for an overview of the debate and a forceful argument in support of the thesis that "unwaged labor blunted the influence of capitalism by advancing both a form of social relations and a premodern ideology that clashed with the competitive individualism and acquisitiveness that increasingly marked the capitalist North" (50).

(4.) See Stanley 1-97 for an analysis of the history of contract theory and its transformation in the nineteenth century. Stanley considers contract's idealization as a "metaphor of freedom" (2) to be the product of both the abolitionist movement and the burgeoning of industrial capitalism in the North, an attempt to determine "what was saleable and what was not" (ix).

(5.) On a discussion of contract as an ideological justification for capitalism and for wage labor in particular, see Stanley; Ashworth 10. On the dichotimization of North and South before the war, see Ashworth 19; Appleby 23.

(6.) The quote is from the Amercian Antislavery Society's Declaration of Sentiments in 1833 (qtd. in Stanley 19). See Stanley 1-97 for an overview of the slave law's relation to contract. "One general principle predominates in all the slave states, and this is, that a slave cannot make a contract," according to one treatise on slave law (qtd. in Stanley 19).

(7.) See Genovese; Egerton; Oakes xi-xiii for discussions of paternalism, with its "aristocratic, antibourgeois spirit" (Genovese 28), as antithetical to a Northern bourgeois ideology.

(8.) Several critics have discussed the economic aspects of Jacobs's text, but they tend to treat Linda Brent's relationship to capitalism with suspicion. Carla Peterson, for example, considers the "capitalist plot" (574) as masculine and argues that Jacobs subverts it "to forge a politics of fictional self-representation that might counter black underdevelopment" (568-69). Carla Kaplan recognizes the longing for the ideals of the social contract organizing Jacobs's text, but then moves on to discuss the narrative contract. Thomas Lovell has given the most thorough economic analysis of the text in his consideration of the text's relationship to the "salutary view of wage labor" (1). I expand his analysis in considering the larger body of contract principles underpinning capitalist ideology and in recognizing the narrative trajectory as an escape from precapitalism into capitalism.

(9.) By the end of the century, debates about labor conditions revealed the ambiguities inherent in contract freedom, recognized "as a legitimating symbol for social relations in which inequality was either cloaked by exchange or said to arise from consent" (Stanley 59).

(10.) Genovese considered paternalism to be the inevitable consequence of the master-slave relation. Other historians have described slaveowners' uses of paternalism in more pragmatic terms, as a philosophy that, with its assumption of natural inequality, provided a convenient rationale for slavery in the face of abolitionists' heightened rhetoric. James Oakes, for example, notes how slaveholders aggressively promoted the paternalistic ethic amid antislavery attacks, insisting on the material and emotional superiority of slavery to a society based on the cash nexus (Oakes 193, 96), Egerton conceives it thus: "The need to discipline and defend unfree labor, in short, gave rise to a hierarchical society founded upon paternalism--an ongoing process of negotiation and violence that many scholars regrettably reduce to a simplistic model of accommodation--which produced an ideology linking whites and blacks with mutual responsibilities and obligations in a decidedly precapitalist relationship" (51-52).

(11.) Eric Foner summarizes the typical proslavery argument, which reminds us that the moral claims of both sides rested on economic foundations: "In contrast to the southern slave, who was ostensibly provided for in sickness and old age, and regardless of the vicissitudes of prices and production, the free laborer was the slave of the marketplace, and his condition exceeded in degradation and cruelty that of the chattel slave" (58).

(12.) See Appleby 4 for a description of the culture of capitalism.

(13.) Capitalism is usually given credit for engendering the glorification of the home as the reward for industrious labor and a haven from the marketplace, as well as the separate-spheres ideology that designated women the home's moral keepers. See Ashworth 115 on the division of public and private spheres as a capitalist development. See Stanley ch. 4 on how "the moral legitimacy of wage labor in the era of slave emancipation rested on the promise that free commodity relations would afford more than slavery's equities--more than brute survival," especially a meaningful home life (138).

(14.) See Boydston for a discussion of how the transition to capitalism created the aggressive domestic ideology of the nineteenth century, an ideology to which Brent subscribes. "The intense expressions of nuclear family feeling that came to characterize nineteenth-century American culture ... may have served parallel ends, reconciling an increased reliance upon female labor with a more formal male assertion of economic privilege through a romance of family culture" (34-35).

(15.) See, for example, Hazel Carby's analysis.

(16.) Without children, domesticity lacks meaning or a future. Even Linda's grandmother finds her snug home bereft: "She would have been happy could her children have shared them with her," Linda writes, but she is not, for "there remained but three children and two grandchildren, all slaves" (17).

(17.) See Egerton; Oakes 503 for a discussion of city life as antithetical to a slave economy.

(18.) On the importance of consumerism to the capitalist economic transformation, see Gilje, Wages 6-7. Egerton considers capitalism incompatible with slavery precisely because slaves did not fuel the economy as consumers (54).

(19.) See Stanley 13 on how contract supplanted "the older cultural power of the gift" (13).

(20.) See Titus 210-11 for a discussion of this critical reading.

(21.) Freedom lies in England, not America, she decides after a visit abroad with the Bruces. Her descriptions are reminiscent of her experience in Philadelphia: "For the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom" (183). In retrospect, it seems Philadelphia has not been about freedom after all, and as her boat approaches home, "spectres seemed to rise up on the shores of the United States" (186). When she had arrived in Philadelphia, her face blistered from the sun, she had imagined that passers-by "could not easily decide to what nation I belonged" (160). It is clear to her now that, as a single, black mother, she belongs to no nation at all.

Works Cited

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--, ed. Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic. Madison: Madison House, 1997.

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Kaplan, Carla. "Recuperating Agents: Narrative Contracts, Emancipatory Readers, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girt." The Erotics of Talk: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 47-68.

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Lovell, Thomas B. "By Dint of Labor and Economy: Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the Salutary View of Wage Labor." Arizona Quarterly 52.3 (1996): 1-31.

Merrill, Michael. "Putting Capitalism in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 52 (Apr. 1995): 315-26.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Norton, 1998.

Peterson, Carla L. "Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s." American Literary History 4 (1992): 559-83.

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Titus, Mary. "'This Poisonous System': Social Ills, Bodily Ills, and Incidents in the Life of a Stave Girl." Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays. Ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 199-215.

Virginia Cope is an Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University-Newark.