But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

Because of this freedmen were turning down job offers and whites were complaining that they did not want to work. The biggest demand of the people is that they pay for their child to get schooling they do not want to let their children enter charity school. The only problem with this school was that there were no accommodations for the teachers.

Jacobs' single work Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl publiHarriet Ann Jacobsd in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured.