The violence that thousands of slaves endured on a daily basis is unfathomable to anyone that has not experienced it.  The crimes of these slave owners would never have been exposed without a few determined literate slaves that broke the oppression and voiced what they had witnessed.  Although the process of becoming literate exposed them to the reality of their enslaved life, it enabled the eyes of the North be opened to what was really occurring in the southern American slave system.  The silence code kept many slaves broken down and subjugated for so long, and when the slave narratives of Jacobs, Douglass and many others finally broke it, the floodgates let open for the stories of the African American slaves to be heard.  Christian men who used their Whiteness to justify using black bodies as their physical outlets of frustration and salvation for sin were brought to the attention of the north. The act of raping a woman, and tearing her away from the children that she bore could not have been kept silent for much longer.  The slave systems of many other countries did not have the cruel habits of destroying families, both black and white, and many Americans were ignorant to the fact.  Although many slave’s stories of the violence, rape, family separation, and emotional turmoil they experienced will never be heard, we do have a glimpse of the reality of the slave trade through the narratives of Jacobs, Douglass, Emerson and others.  The ignorance of many was broken, and the slave system that caused a dark period in our nation’s history was finally put to an end because of the actions of those who escaped the White man’s oppression.