Source identified1
Image design Lavender
Read & copy
“Trust them, make them free, and give them the responsibility of caring for themselves, and they will soon learn to help each other.”
Meaning & context
Jacobs argues that emancipation should be joined with trust and responsibility rather than paternalistic assumptions that formerly enslaved people cannot organize mutual support.
Source details
“Life Among the Contrabands,” The Liberator, September 5, 1862, represented by Encyclopedia Virginia’s primary-document transcription. Jacobs writes from her relief work among people who had escaped slavery in Washington and Alexandria; the sentence belongs to a Civil War abolitionist report and should not be detached from the material deprivation and racist assumptions she is answering.