Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs (born 1813, Edenton, North Carolina, U.S.—died March 7, 1897, Washington, D.C.) American abolitionist and autobiographer who crafted her own experiences into Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), an eloquent and uncompromising slave narrative.

Jacobs, who was born into enslavement, was taught to read at an early age. She was orphaned as a child and formed a bond with her maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow, who had formerly been enslaved. Beginning in 1825, Jacobs’s enslaver repeatedly sexually harassed and abused her. While in her teens she gave birth to two children fathered by a neighbour, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a young white lawyer. When she refused to become her enslaver’s concubine, she was sent to work on a nearby plantation. In an effort to remove her children from her enslaver’s control, Jacobs fled and spent the next seven years in hiding; meanwhile, her children were bought by their father and later sent to the North.

After escaping to the North in 1842, Jacobs worked as a nursemaid in New York City and eventually moved to Rochester, New York, to work in the antislavery reading room above abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star. During an abolitionist lecture tour with her brother, Jacobs began her lifelong friendship with the Quaker reformer Amy Post. Post, among others, encouraged Jacobs to write the story of her enslavement.

Self-published in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is arguably the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman. Writing as Linda Brent, Jacobs detailed the sexual abuse of enslaved women and the anguish felt by enslaved mothers, who frequently experienced the loss of their children. She explained her purpose in the book’s preface:

…I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was rediscovered in the 1960s during the American civil rights movement. It was often attributed to Lydia Maria Child—who is named as the book’s editor on its title page—and was considered a work of fiction, but in the 1980s the scholar Jean Fagan Yellin verified it as Jacobs’s own work.