ABSTRACT
The image of children being ripped away from their mothers, an all-toocommon occurrence, was successfully manipulated by abolitionists to help end human enslavement. Abolitionists realized that for middle-class white women, whose social and ideological and political role was increasingly constructed as “mother,” no other aspect of slavery, not even the physical brutality endured by women, would be as powerful. The anguish of mothers separated from children is a theme found throughout the famous abolitionist narratives, such as Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (1968), Frederick Douglass’s autobiography (2001), and particularly Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a narrative that focuses solely on the efforts of an enslaved woman to rescue her children from bondage while escaping the lecherous advances of an evil enslaver (Jacobs 2000). Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her melodramatic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, played upon the sentimental views held by Christian mothers in the character of Eliza, to astonishing effect.
