Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Slave owners often tell lies to prevent slaves from wanting to run away. One man tells Linda that he’s seen her runaway friend literally dying of starvation in New York and begging to return to slavery; later, Linda meets the same friend and finds that she has never “thought of such a thing.” However, many slaves believe stories like this, having never known any life other than the one they live currently.

Linda says it’s imperative to teach slaves about the importance of liberty and dignity—values their masters strive to conceal—but impossible to do so when the Free States allow fugitives to be thrown back into slavery, making their freedom completely insecure.

Linda continues that under the conditions of slavery, it’s nearly impossible for people to develop the moral compass that they could as free men. For example, some men “have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters,” but this is because of their environment, not their innate nature. Linda challenges the reader, asking “what would you be” if raised in similar circumstances.

Southerners often say terrible things about Yankees, even though Northerners often cooperate with them by hunting down and returning fugitive slaves. Northerners are not accepted into the South unless they vocally profess support for slavery, and even then they aren’t respected. As if to compensate for this, Northern transplants often become the worst masters.

Such people justify their actions by saying that God intended black people for slavery, but this contravenes the Biblical principle that all people are “of one blood.”

Many slaves have some idea that people in the North are against slavery and even working to end it, but their knowledge is very confused. One woman tells Linda a rumor that the “Queen of ‘Merica” is arguing with the president for the freedom of the slaves.