Logos

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

by Harriet Jacobs

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Logos 1 key example

Definition of Logos

Logos, along with ethos and pathos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective speaking or writing). Logos is an argument that appeals to... read full definition
Logos, along with ethos and pathos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective speaking or writing). Logos is... read full definition
Logos, along with ethos and pathos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective... read full definition
Chapter Eight: What Slaves are Taught to Think of the North
Explanation and Analysis—Behavioral Conditioning:

In Chapter 8, Jacobs describes how some enslaved Black men have endured so much brutality at the hands of their white enslavers that they deliberately "sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters." Jacobs uses logos, or logic, to persuade white readers that this is because of Black men's conditioning under slavery, not because of any natural cowardice or inferior sense of honor:

Do you think this proves the black man to belong to an inferior order of beings? What would you be, if you had been born and brought up a slave, with generations of slaves for ancestors? I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. They do the work.