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That larger political or communal objective, that “sacred cause,” not only defined what Douglass wanted to achieve in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but it also defined what Harriet Jacobs hoped to accomplish in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In showing her commitment to a purpose larger than her own freedom, Jacobs, in the preface to her narrative, writes:

I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself . . . But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. (Incidents 1-2)

Booker T. Washington, in his Up from Slavery (1901), had a political agenda as well. Famed scholar William L. Andrews asserts of Washington’s narrative: