Enslaved black people who claimed they were content might have just been showing white people what they knew they wanted to see. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a duplicitous character named Bledsoe castigates the narrator for taking a white university donor to a poor, black section of a southern town, and says “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!” If Douglass is describing black people who had the same belief as Ellison’s character, this may explain why white people received reports that confirmed their beliefs about black peoples’ supposed acceptance of slavery.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs refers sarcastically to the idea of enslaved peoples’ supposed contentment as she describes the tumult that passed through her town because of Nat Turner’s insurrection. Jacobs suggests that if white people truly believed their slaves were happy, they wouldn’t have been so worried about a revolt.