Slavery changes a person’s perspective on trust. Trust does not come easily to slaves because of their constant mistreatment by slave owners. Slaveowners are not the only people to treat slaves terribly; the federal government ignores their right as human beings and brands them as the property of these slave owners. As a female slave, Jacobs uses Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to demonstrate how the government and slave owners turn the blind eye toward their mistreatment and how it leads to the distrust slaves have towards them.
The law does not protect everyone. It protects the Southern farmer rather than the helpless slave. An escaped Southern slave will have to live in trembling fear of being caught by their master for the duration of their life outside the plantation. In a scholarly article called, The Constitutionality of The Fugitive Slave Acts by Allen Johnson, he describes an instance where Pennsylvania passes a law that goes against the kidnapping of escaped slaves which thereby protects them. However, as a result, a case is brought to the Supreme Court called Prigg v. Pennsylvania and leads to the Supreme Court declaring Pennsylvania’s law unconstitutional. As Johnson says, “the owner’s right to his property continues in the State to which the slave has fled, and he is therefore clothed with entire authority to seize and capture his slave” (Johnson 167). A fugitive slave is seen as through the eyes of the law as property and gives permission to slave owners to bypass state lines to retrieve that is deemed their property.
The federal government claims that everyone is required to undergo due process. However, as Allen Johnson points out, there is some amount of constitutionality to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1980 because the Supreme Court claims a fair trial will be held in the state the slave is originally from. As Johnson claims, “to Northern men and women living in the heated atmosphere of the slavery controversy, […] they had full confidence that the fugitive from justice would receive a fair trial in the State from which he had fled; they did not feel the need of throwing safeguards around the summary process” (Johnson 179). The outsider to these processing can easily believe that these trials will be held to a fair standard but the opposite occurs. Judges are bribed towards siding with the slave owner and leads to an unjust trial.
The federal government will not protect the civil liberty of slaves; therefore, trust is hard to give when someone is a slave. In a book called, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes her hardships and struggles undergone as a female slave. She displays distrust in the captain at the end of her trip even though he brought her all the way to her destination. As she states, “He saw that I was suspicious, and he said he was sorry, now that he had brought us to the end of our voyage, to find I had so little confidence in him. Ah, if he had ever been a slave he would have known how difficult it was to trust a white man” (Jacobs 125). This signifies the amount of distrust a slave would have towards people with authority. Since the government has already betrayed Jacobs with the Fugitive Slave Act and the constant strife with her previous slave owner, these two factors contribute heavily towards her distrust in white men.
Slavery creates doubt and suspicion amongst African Americans and white individuals. As Jacobs describes on her voyage, she states, “I was naturally of a confiding disposition, but slavery had made me suspicious of everybody” (Jacobs 124). Slaves grow up in such a terrible living conditions that they are predisposed to question and doubt their own surroundings and the people they are with. This skepticism is a survival skill that slaves obtained through their surroundings and associations with their slave owners. As much as it appears to be a debilitating trait, this trait allows Jacobs to escape and flee from her abusive slave owner.
Trust is no longer an option for slaves because it is a disadvantage. Slaves need to be secretive in order to survive. However, it is harder for them to stay up North because of the bounty that the federal government has out for Northerners to help retrieve an escaped slave. Trials are not held up to code and judges are bribed to vote in favor of the slave owner. So, it is hard for a slave to not only survive in America but it would be seen as impossible to be able to trust white Americans in such hard circumstances.
