Wealth & Money Quote by Harriet Ann Jacobs

Jacobs slices through the Souths pious self-image with the precision of someone who has watched sanctimony up close. The line turns on a brutal contrast: Christianity as a moral practice versus religion as a social credential. In her formulation, the communion table isnt a site of repentance; its a stage. You can take the sacrament, drop cash in the church treasury, and be publicly certified as righteous even if that money is "the price of blood" - profit extracted from slavery, violence, coercion, the whole machinery that made the antebellum economy run.

That phrase is doing heavy work. "Price of blood" echoes biblical language about betrayal and guilt, but Jacobs repurposes it to indict a system where the church functions as laundromat, converting stolen life into spiritual respectability. The subtext is not just hypocrisy; its complicity. Religion here isnt failing because individuals are flawed. Its failing because the institution has become a moral technology for maintaining power: it blesses the enslavers, polices appearances, and keeps social order intact.

Context matters. Jacobs wrote as a formerly enslaved Black woman detailing how "Christian" households could be simultaneously devout and cruel, tender with scripture and cold with human bodies. The intent is corrective and accusatory: dont mistake ritual for ethics, dont confuse churchgoing for conscience. She is also warning readers in the North - many eager to imagine slavery as a regional aberration - that the Souths religious culture isnt incidental to slavery. It is one of its most effective alibis.