Jacobs, Harriet

By: Kate Culkin

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Jacobs, Harriet

Sex:  Female

Born:  Edenton, North Carolina, United States
c.1813

Died:  Washington, District of Columbia, United States
7 March 1897

Activity/Profession:  Slave Narrative Author, Slave, Social Reformer

(b. 1813; d. 7 March 1897),
abolitionist.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, to the carpenter Elijah Knox and Delilah Horniblow, both of whom were slaves. Her brother, John S. Jacobs, was born two years later. Only when Delilah died in 1819 did Harriet understand that she was enslaved. Margaret Horniblow, Harriet's owner, soon taught the young girl to write and sew. Upon her death in 1835, however, Margaret left Jacobs to her young niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, the daughter of Dr. James and Mary Norcom. Elizabeth Horniblow, the owner of Jacobs's grandmother, Molly Horniblow, died three years later, and Elizabeth's sister, Hannah Prichard, purchased Molly in order to free her.

After Jacobs entered adolescence, Dr. Norcom pursued her relentlessly. In 1829, attempting to thwart Norcom's sexual advances, she had a son, Joseph, with the lawyer Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. Jacobs and Sawyer also had a daughter, Louisa Matilda, in 1833. Jacobs eventually moved into the house of her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, who had been emancipated some years earlier and had purchased a house with money earned from selling baked goods. Jacobs was able to remain there partly because of Mary Norcom's intense jealousy. In 1835, however, Dr. Norcom became enraged at another rejection and sent Jacobs to his son's plantation in Auburn, North Carolina.

When Harriet learned that Dr. Norcom also planned to send her children to Auburn, she escaped; she hoped her disappearance would cause Dr. Norcom to sell Joseph and Louisa to Sawyer. Jacobs first hid around Edenton, then in a cupboard above her grandmother's storeroom. The space was cramped and stifling, and the only light came from holes Jacobs bored in the wall. That space, in which she was unable to stand, was what she called home for almost seven years.

Soon after Jacobs escaped, Sawyer indeed purchased Louisa and Joseph, but he did not free them. In 1842 Jacobs finally sailed to Philadelphia, where members of a vigilance committee assisted her. Within days she moved to New York, there securing a position as the nurse for the editor Nathaniel Parker Willis's family. Jacobs soon reunited with Louisa, who was then living in Brooklyn with Sawyer's cousins, Mary and James Tredwell.

Several times fear of capture caused Jacobs to flee New York. In 1843 and 1844 she ran to Boston, where her brother, John, who had escaped in 1838, was an antislavery activist. In 1849 she again joined John, now in Rochester, New York. He had spent much of the previous three years on antislavery lecture tours, including one with Frederick Douglass earlier in 1849, and introduced his sister to western New York's vibrant abolitionist circle. Harriet lived with the Quaker abolitionists Amy and Isaac Post, and both John and Harriet worked in the Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room, located above Douglass's North Star. Jacobs encountered Douglass regularly and casually noted his appearances at gatherings in the Reading Room. Douglass expressed more interest in her brother, worrying that John had grown disillusioned with the abolitionist movement.

In 1852 Cornelia Grinnell Willis, Nathaniel Parker Willis's second wife, purchased Jacobs and freed her. While grateful, Jacobs resented the fact that even in the North she could be bought and sold. Soon, encouraged by Amy Post, she decided to write her story. Although her sexual history embarrassed her, Jacobs came to believe it critical that a woman once held in slavery depict the sexual exploitation that female slaves endured. She refused Harriet Beecher Stowe's offer to include her history in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1853 she published three articles in the New York Tribune, including a description of a master's sexual harassment of a female slave. In 1858 Jacobs finally finished her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.

Advertisement for the capture of Harriet Jacobs, 1835. It appeared for two weeks in June and July in the American Beacon, Norfolk, Virginia.

North Carolina State Archives.

view larger image

While Douglass's narrative centers on his quest to live as a free man, Jacobs's story focuses on a slave woman's desire to control her body and to care for her children. She expresses shame at bearing children out of wedlock but also argues that slave women, with so few options, could not be judged by the same standards as free white women. Lydia Maria Child edited the work, suggesting the author remove a chapter on John Brown but also praising Jacobs's skill as a writer. Jacobs, concerned about the material's incendiary nature, asked Amy Post to contribute an appendix attesting to the story's veracity and the author's character. After Jacobs's publisher went bankrupt, she purchased the plates and published the work under the pseudonym Linda Brent in 1861. The following year William Tweedie published the work in England with the added primary title of The Deeper Wrong. Both the American and English reform presses published extensive and enthusiastic reviews of the book. While many in the twentieth century doubted that a slave had written such a lucid text, nineteenth-century abolitionists well knew that Harriet Jacobs was Linda Brent.

Despite her celebrity, Jacobs, unlike Douglass and her brother, never pursued a career as a lecturer. Instead, from 1862 through 1866 she and her daughter helped fugitive and freed slaves in Washington, D.C.; Alexandria, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia. In 1864 Jacobs established the Jacobs School for former slaves in Alexandria; she expressed her hope in her pupils' potential in wondering if there might not be a Frederick Douglass among them. Douglass himself lectured in Alexandria in late 1864, and he and Jacobs toured the area together. Jacobs later returned north, and the battle over suffrage in the late 1860s proved to be a turning point for her, as it was for Douglass. While many activists originally hoped to win universal suffrage, heated debates erupted over whether black men or white women should receive the vote first. Douglass ultimately supported black male suffrage, arguing that the situation for black men was more pressing. Jacobs was unable to make such a choice.

While Harriet never publicly voiced her opinion, Louisa campaigned for universal suffrage with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond in 1867. Disillusioned by Stanton's and Anthony's racist rhetoric, however, both Jacobs women soon left large-scale organized reform movements altogether. Harriet later worked at the New England Woman's Club and ran boardinghouses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. She still followed her fellow activists' careers; in 1877 she congratulated Douglass on his appointment as the marshal of the District of Columbia, noting that she had scoured newspapers for information about the event. Jacobs died in Washington, D.C., in March 1897.

See also Anthony, Susan B.; Brown, John; Child, Lydia Maria; Douglass, Frederick; North Star; Post, Amy and Isaac; Remond, Charles Lenox; Rochester, New York; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Suffrage, Women's; Uncle Tom's Cabin; and Women.

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