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Irony
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.
Jacobs may or may not fully believe everything she claims here. In particular, it seems out of character for her to claim that Black men are "inferior." To understand why she makes this "admission," it is important to consider that she is using her memoir to persuade white people to organize against the institution of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law. She is specifically appealing to white Northerners, who had the potential to push for major political change if only they recognized both their power and their responsibility to abolish slavery. Jacobs writes, "I admit that the black man is inferior" specifically to counter that point with logic white Northerners will be able to follow. She starts from the belief (held by many sympathetic white people) that enslaved people endured an unfair fate but were not cut out to be full legal citizens of the United States. Taking the belief to be true for a moment, she demands, "But what is it that makes him [inferior]?" Instead of pausing to entertain the racist idea that Black men are innately "inferior" to white men, she goes on to ask white readers to imagine how they would behave if they and their ancestors had been tortured and deprived of education at the hands of white men. The cruelty of white men, Jacobs argues, "lashes the manhood of out [the Black man]." It is behavioral conditioning that creates "inferiority."
Jacobs builds logically from a belief system white Northerners commonly hold to prove that without the institution of slavery, Black men would be more fit for full American citizenship. Northerners who help support the institution of slavery by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law are in fact, she argues, "human bloodhounds:" they are losing their humanity under this system as well. By enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law and by allowing slavery to continue, Jacobs suggests, white Northerners are responsible for any truth to the racial stereotypes that were commonly used to justify slavery. Furthermore, they are endangering their own morality. She shatters the idea that white Northerners can claim "superiority" over anyone as long as they fail to push for abolition.
Related Themes:
