In Chapter 1, Jacobs describes the precarious position her grandmother was in when she loaned her hard-earned money to her enslaver. Jacobs states a fallacy that lies at the heart of the legal system propping up the institution of slavery:
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!
According to this fallacy, an enslaved person cannot hold property because they are property. This is a circular argument that rests on the presupposition that an enslaved person is property. Anyone who proposes instead that an enslaved person is a person can break the faulty logic. This fallacy came into play especially in legal debates around the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The premise of this law was that enslaved people committed theft when they ran away from their enslavers. This logic relied on the double classification of the enslaved person as both a person (who could steal property) and property (which could be stolen). The double classification challenged the idea that enslaved people did not count as people with rights under the law. Jacobs uses this passage to prove the bad logic behind the Fugitive Slave Act and the institution of slavery more broadly.
Jacobs does not immediately label the logic forbidding Grandmother from owning property as a fallacy. First, she must walk readers into admitting the personhood of enslaved people. She urges the reader into this line of thinking by pointing out another fallacy: "The honor of a slaveholder to a slave!" Grandmother has no choice but to trust her enslaver with her "hard earnings" because she is not allowed to own property herself. Jacobs's exclamation at the end of the passage invites readers to falter over the reasoning behind this arrangement. It relies on the idea that an enslaver can behave honorably toward someone they enslave, but to enslave someone is to act utterly dishonorably toward them. In fact, if enslavers truly think those they enslave are not people, they should not owe them any honor at all. The fact that Grandmother's enslaver can be supposed to have a sense of honor toward Grandmother proves that they relate to one another as two people, not as one person and one piece of property. Jacobs exposes the faulty logic behind this entire system of "property" management and all but proves that humans cannot be classified as property. Grandmother should be able to own property, and she should not herself be considered property by any logical person.
In Chapter 13, Jacobs remarks on the situational irony of white Americans sending Christian missionaries abroad when Americans at home are kept "in the dark" about Christianity:
They send the Bible to heathen abroad, and neglect the heathen at home. I am glad that missionaries go out to the dark corners of the earth; but I ask them not to overlook the dark corners at home. Talk to American slaveholders as you talk to savages in Africa. Tell them it is wrong to traffic in men. [...]
Jacobs does not mean that Christianity is entirely foreign to Americans. Instead, she means that the version of Christianity delivered to both white and Black Americans in the South is a false version of the religion. Colonizers traditionally referred to people in colonized countries as "heathens" if they had not learned or accepted the teachings of Christianity. Missionaries supposedly teach Africans how to read the Bible, enabling them to follow Christianity straight from scripture. The irony Jacobs points out is that there are plenty of "heathens" at home. Literacy rates in the pre-Civil War South were extremely low. Enslavers who controlled the majority of the region's wealth thought that reading or writing might lead people (especially Black people, but also poor white people and others who did not benefit from slavery) to organize and rebel against them. Consequently, enslavers tried not to allow too many schools to operate in the South. Many people only knew scripture through the teachings of ministers, many of whom were paid by enslavers or were enslavers themselves. These ministers had an incentive to teach their followers that slavery was God's will.
This passage exposes the logic behind the entire enterprise of Christian proselytizing as a fallacy. If white Christian Americans were truly concerned about spreading the message of the Bible to as many people as possible, they would teach people at home what is actually in the Bible. Underlying this passage is a not-quite-explicit accusation: "Christian" missionary work abroad and at home alike is a scam. The focus of most of this work is on duping people into believing that Christianity justifies the institution of slavery. Through all this, Jacobs is careful not to alienate the reader who considers themself a true Christian. She herself believes in a truer version of Christianity, one that forbids its followers from treating one another as property. Rather than throw out Christianity altogether, she calls on "good" Christian readers to defend their religion by countering its perversion to justify the institution of slavery.
