ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the complexities of the slaves. Many aspects of antebellum slave society are disturbing; some may be surprising. Slaves did not passively accept their hard fate; instead, they found ways of resisting the complete control many masters wanted to exert. Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in 1813 in North Carolina. Her life revolved around a few common themes: sexual harassment; the attempts of slave women to exert power in a system where overt power was vested in the hands of the master class; the healing, yet sometimes stifling, love of family; and the perseverance of spirit. Women owned slaves, and Rebecca Latimer Felton was one of those women. In her eighties when she wrote Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, Felton spoke of slaves with degrees of civility and perhaps warmth, and her words reveal the extent to which owners believed that slaves were childlike members of an extended family.
