During the last three decades of legal slavery in America, from the early 1830s to the end of the Civil War in 1865, African American writers perfected one of the nation’s first truly indigenous genres of written literature: the North American slave narrative. The genre achieves its most eloquent expression in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave<span> and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 </span>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl<span>. Like all slave narratives, Jacobs’s and Douglass’s works embody the tension between the conflicting motives that generated autobiographies of slave life. An ironic factor in the production of these accounts can be noted in the generic title “Fugitive Slave Narrative” often given to such works</span>
Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass both managed to escape slavery. Jacobs was hesitant to write or publish her account, however Douglass was not and published several versions of her story.
When someone is described as a "martyr", all this means is that this person died for a cause they they believed in, and that their death inspired others to follow in the cause in question, often in the face of opposition.
