In chapter 8, "What Slaves Are Taught To Think Of The North," of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, the narrator, Linda Brent, offers a scathing critique of Northerners who visit and then choose to reside in the South.

Southern gentlemen indulge in the most contemptuous expressions about the Yankees, while they, on their part, consent to do the vilest work for them, such as the ferocious bloodhounds and the despised negro-hunters are employed to do at home. When southerners go to the north, they are proud to do them honor; but the northern man is not welcome south of Mason and Dixon's line, unless he suppresses every thought and feeling at variance with their "peculiar institution." Nor is it enough to be silent. The masters are not pleased, unless they obtain a greater degree of subservience than that; and they are generally accommodated. Do they respect the northerner for this? I trow not. Even the slaves despise "a northern man with southern principles;" and that is the class they generally see. When northerners go to the south to reside, they prove very apt scholars. They soon imbibe the sentiments and disposition of their neighbors, and generally go beyond their teachers. Of the two, they are proverbially the hardest masters.

They seem to satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that God created the Africans to be slaves.

The Northerners who reside in the South and come to own slaves appear to strive to out-Southern the Southern slave owners, or at least to out-Southern the Northerners' perception of Southern slave owners. Late arrivals in the South, like the Johnny-come-lately Northerners that Linda Brent calls to task in the book, have no real sense of the culture and traditions of the South, of Southern slavery, or of Southern slave owners.

The Northerners simply adopt the "sentiments and disposition of their neighbors" as their own and make an outward show of acting the part of a Southern slave owner. In a sense, they make a mockery of the abhorrent institution of Southern slavery. It's simply not in the Northerners' blood to be Southern slave owners, and they're never truly able to assimilate the role.

In chapter 18, "Aunt Nancy," Linda Brent offers some further critical observations about Northern travelers who might happen upon a slave funeral in the South.

My uncle Phillip asked permission to bury his sister at his own expense; and slaveholders are always ready to grant such favors to slaves and their relatives. The arrangements were very plain, but perfectly respectable. She was buried on the Sabbath, and Mrs. Flint's minister read the funeral service. There was a large concourse of colored people, bond and free, and a few white persons who had always been friendly to our family. Dr. Flint's carriage was in the procession; and when the body was deposited in its humble resting place, the mistress dropped a tear, and returned to her carriage, probably thinking she had performed her duty nobly.

It was talked of by the slaves as a mighty grand funeral. Northern travellers, passing through the place, might have described this tribute of respect to the humble dead as a beautiful feature in the "patriarchal institution;" a touching proof of the attachment between slaveholders and their servants; and tender-hearted Mrs. Flint would have confirmed this impression, with handkerchief at her eyes. We could have told them a different story. We could have given them a chapter of wrongs and sufferings, that would have touched their hearts, if they had any hearts to feel for the colored people. We could have told them how the poor old slave-mother had toiled, year after year, to earn eight hundred dollars to buy her son Phillip's right to his own earnings; and how that same Phillip paid the expenses of the funeral, which they regarded as doing so much credit to the master. We could also have told them of a poor, blighted young creature, shut up in a living grave for years, to avoid the tortures that would be inflicted on her, if she ventured to come out and look on the face of her departed friend.

To Linda Brent, Northerners are all too ready to take the South at face value and never look beyond the surface sentiments. Northerners don't understand the slaveholding South, and they simply cannot conceive of what it is to own a slave or to be a slave in a society based fundamentally on the vile institution of slavery.

How does Harriet Jacobs critique Northerners' views on slavery in different regions?

In chapter 8 of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes that when Northerners travel to the South, they are obliged to suppress "every thought and feeling at variance" with the peculiar institution of slavery. Even silence, however, is not enough for the slave-masters. The Northerner in the South must exhibit "a greater degree of subservience" than this, presumably meaning that he must show active approval of slavery to appease his hosts. However, no one respects the Northerner for this flexibility, and even the slaves despise "a northern man with southern principles."

Even worse than the Northern visitor to the South is the Northerner who comes to live there and who becomes a slave-master himself. The Northerners who do this, according to Jacobs, generally behave more harshly than their Southern neighbors.

Jacobs describes a range of views on the topic of slavery among Northerners who remain in the North. The type who become or would become enthusiastic slave-masters in the South are those who "consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den." Northerners of this type are also happy to marry their daughters to Southern slave-masters.

Some Northerners, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bruce, who help Jacobs in her escape, are sincere abolitionists who are fully alive to the monstrous nature of slavery. The majority, though, are of the type who would be silent or acquiescent when visiting the South, who do not hold strong views on the subject. It is to these people that Jacobs principally addresses herself in this book, seeking to show the full degradation and horror of the institution and asking,

In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right?