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1. "Jacob's Linda Brent does not seek to inspire her audience to overcome individual character defects or to engage in reformist activity within the private sphere, but urges them to enter the public sphere and work to end chattel slavery and white racism." page xxii
2. "A central pattern in Incidents shows white women betraying allegiances of race and class to assert their stronger allegiance to the sisterhood of all women." page xxiii
3. After asking her master for his permission to marry a free black man, Jacobs writes, "For a fortnight the doctor did not speak to me. He thought to mortify me; to make me feel that I had disgraced myself by receiving the honorable addresses of a respectable colored man, in preference to the base proposals of a white man. But though his lips disdained to address me, his eyes were very loquacious. No animal ever watched its prey more narrowly than he watched me." page 40
4. "When southerners go to the north, they are proud to do them honor, but the northern man is not welcome south of the Mason and Dixon's line, unless he suppresses every thought and feeling at variance with their "peculiar institution." Nor is it enough to be silent. The masters are not pleased, unless they obtain a greater degree of subservience than that; and they are generally accommodated. Do they respect the northerners for this? I trow not. Even the slaves despise "a northern man with southern principles;" and that is the class they generally see. When northerners go to the south to reside, they prove very apt scholars. They soon imbibe the sentiments and disposition of their neighbors, and generally go beyond their teachers. Of the two, they are proverbially the hardest masters." page 44
5. Regarding a murder by Mr. Litch, a neighboring, ill-bread, uneducated, but wealthy planter who owned 600 slaves:
"He was so effectually screened by his great wealth that he was called to no account for his crimes, not even murder." page 46
"Murder was so common on his plantation that he feared to be alone after nightfall." p. 47
6. "Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities." page 47
7. "No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." page 51
8. "You may believe what I say; for I write only that whereof I know. I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds." page 52
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