In Chapter 18, Jacobs alludes to Patrick Henry's infamous 1775 "liberty or death" speech, about American colonial rights:
I had succeeded in cautiously conveying some messages to my relatives. They were harshly threatened, and despairing of my having a chance to escape, they advised me to return to my master, ask his forgiveness, and let him make an example of me. But such counsel had no influence with me. When I started upon this hazardous undertaking, I had resolved that, come what would, there should be no turning back. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” was my motto.
For Henry, the phrase was purposefully melodramatic. It was meant to whip up emotions, rallying colonists into action against the oppressive British government. It worked, and it became something like a motto for the Revolutionary cause. The allusion marks out Jacobs's awareness of American political history. Despite being legally excluded from full citizenship, this reference suggests that she is as American in her mind and heart as Patrick Henry. This is one of many instances where the memoir marks out a place for Black people within American identity and American patriotism. Jacobs may have felt strongly that she was an American, but it was also strategically savvy to signal her Americanness to white readers she hoped to sway to abolitionism. One of the arguments people used to defend slavery was that formerly enslaved Black people would not be able to participate fully in American life and culture if given the opportunity. Jacobs prepares her readers to use her memoir as evidence against this argument.
The allusion also subtly criticizes the way white Americans have historically conceived of liberty, as something that is possible while the institution of slavery still exists. For Jacobs, the trade-off between liberty and death is not melodramatic so much as a practical assessment of the situation she's in. Her life is on the line in a way Patrick Henry's never was. If white Americans truly believe that liberty is more important than life itself, the allusion suggests, they need to stop stealing the liberty of Black Americans.
In Chapter 21, Linda goes into her new hiding place in the garret of Grandmother's shed. When she discovers a way she can make some holes to let in air and light, she makes an allusion to Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe:
One day I hit my head against something, and found it was a gimlet. My uncle had left it sticking there when he made the trap-door. I was as rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could have been at finding such a treasure. It put a lucky thought into my head. I said to myself, “Now I will have some light. Now I will see my children.”
Defoe's novel is about an Englishman who has two older brothers. His junior status in the family means he won't inherit much, so he takes to the sea to find his fortune. His ship is wrecked, and he gets stranded alone on a desert island that he turns into his personal little kingdom. One of the most notable moments in the novel is when he discovers a human footprint on the beach and realizes that he is not alone. He eventually meets the indigenous man who left the footprint and names him Friday. According to Crusoe, whose meticulous journal entries constitute the whole book, Friday becomes his sidekick. Their relationship is founded on exploitation but also Crusoe's real need for companionship.
Linda compares herself to Crusoe because she, too, is alone and in desperate need of some companionship, even if it's just seeing passersby. Finding the gimlet and knowing that she will be able to make herself the tiniest of windows is, for Linda, like finding a footprint on the beach. Robinson Crusoe's plight would have been familiar to white American readers, and many of them also would have thought of him as a hero for being a self-made man. The allusion allows Jacobs to demand that her readers understand her as the hero of her own story. It also allows her to convey her experience of loneliness in terms white readers understood.
The comparison between Linda and Robinson Crusoe furthermore suggests that enslavement leaves Black individuals alone and without wealth, cursed to make what they can of dire circumstances. Linda is surrounded by people, but there are times when she may as well be on a desert island where all the elements are trying to kill her. Linda manages extraordinary things to better her own circumstances, but she holds society responsible for failing to save her. In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe is constantly blaming "Providence" (divinely ordained fate) for his circumstances. Linda believes in divine will, but she blames slavery, a man-made institution, for all of the terrible things that happen to her. She constantly reminds the reader that humans are responsible for dismantling this institution.
In Chapter 31, Jacobs alludes to the AME Bethel church in Philadelphia:
I made my way back to the wharf, where the captain introduced me to the colored man, as the Rev. Jeremiah Durham, minister of Bethel church. He took me by the hand, as if I had been an old friend. He told us we were too late for the morning cars to New York, and must wait until the evening, or the next morning. He invited me to go home with him, assuring me that his wife would give me a cordial welcome; and for my friend he would provide a home with one of his neighbors.
This allusion to Bethel church is important. The AME Bethel church in Philadelphia played a hugely important role in abolition and the organization of Philadelphia's Free Black community in the pre-Civil War era. Many prominent Black leaders had been ministers or congregants there. From its founding, the church was associated with mutual aid in the Free Black Philadelphia community. Its founder, Richard Allen, had bought himself out of enslavement and had previously worked with another formerly enslaved Black minister, Absalom Jones, to found the Free African Society. This organization consolidated funds to provide social services to Black Philadelphians. It was also a place where Black people could share ideas, promote literacy, and organize activist ventures. Allen's church emphasized hospitality and neighborliness. Church leaders were also known for firing back at white community leaders and legislators who refused to act neighborly.
The fact that Linda meets someone from this church and falls in with him and his family immediately foreshadows her involvement in the abolitionist movement. By publishing her memoir, Harriet Jacobs positioned herself as someone who, like Richard Allen and other leaders in the Bethel church, uses her writing to speak up for herself and for Black communities. The allusion also supports the book's overall investment in communities with strong mutual support networks. This kind of strong mutual support of strangers, Jacobs suggests, is necessary for abolition. Furthermore, Bethel church represents what Christianity can do (help people help one another). It stands in contrast to the hypocritical Christianity Linda has seen in the South. This church gives her a real model of the kind of community and life she might have outside of South Carolina.
In Chapter 40, in New York, Linda goes on the run again because Emily Flint (now Emily Dodge) is looking for her and could legally kidnap her back to South Carolina under the new Fugitive Slave Law. Jacobs alludes to one of the most famous scenes in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin:
I was sent into New England, where I was sheltered by the wife of a senator, whom I shall always hold in grateful remembrance. This honorable gentleman would not have voted for the Fugitive Slave Law, as did the senator in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; on the contrary, he was strongly opposed to it; but he was enough under its influence to be afraid of having me remain in his house many hours.
Stowe's novel came out in 1852, two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. This law made it dangerous for people like Linda to even leave the house, but Stowe's novel aimed to raise the alarm among white Northerners about the danger the law posed to them. The institution of slavery was never totally confined to one part of the United States, but the Fugitive Slave Law broke down the illusion that the North was a safe haven morally exempt from dealing with slavery. The new law threatened to prosecute any Northerner who harbored someone who had escaped enslavement. It also made the federal government responsible for the expenses to Southern enslavers of stalking and kidnapping those who had escaped captivity. In short, this law made slavery a national institution in a way white Northerners could not ignore.
In Stowe's novel, a formerly enslaved woman named Eliza and her young son take refuge with a Northern senator and his wife. The house is just over the border between Kentucky (a state where slavery is legal) and Ohio (a state where it is not). The senator, Senator Bird, does not like the institution of slavery but has voted for the Fugitive Slave Law in Congress. Mrs. Bird presents an impassioned moral and religious argument against voting for it. What eventually persuades Senator Bird to defy the newly passed law is when he sees Eliza with her son and realizes that he would be jeopardizing his own humanity by refusing to sympathize with their plight.
This allusion helps readers of Jacobs's narrative (especially readers who realize that she is a real person) understand how simplified Stowe's version of events is. Stowe is not wrong that the Fugitive Slave Law hurts white people, and the blockbuster novel did in fact drive public sentiment against the law. Still, Stowe does not capture just how insidious the law is, or how completely the institution of slaver has bound the entire country. In Jacobs's real experience, even a Northerner who is naturally inclined against the Fugitive Slave Law is disinclined to become an accomplice in her evasion of it. Real abolitionism is going to require Northerners to put themselves on the line, not only by opposing bad laws but also by risking their safety in more real and public ways. Most real white Northerners need much more convincing to do this than Stowe seems to think.
