Jacobs, Harriet (1813-1897), was an African American writer, abolitionist , and reformer. She became the first woman to write a fugitive slave narrative in the United States with her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). It was written under the name Linda Brent. The narrative was rare among autobiographical accounts written before the American Civil War (1861-1865) because it focused on the hardships suffered by female slaves, including sexual abuse.
Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina . Her enslaved parents were owned by different families. When Jacobs was 6 years old, her mother died, and Jacobs was sent to live with her mother’s owner and mistress, Margaret Horniblow. Horniblow taught Jacobs to read, write, and sew. In 1825, Horniblow died, and Jacobs was willed to Horniblow’s 3-year-old niece. The niece was the daughter of a physician, James Norcom, who became Jacobs’s actual master. Norcom later bought Harriet’s brother, John S. Jacobs, and eventually moved both siblings to his Edenton household.
When Harriet Jacobs was 15 years old, Norcom began to make sexual advances toward her. Jacobs asked Norcom for permission to marry a free black man, but he refused. Jacobs befriended Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, an unmarried white lawyer. She bore two children with Sawyer: Joseph, who was born in 1829, and Louisa Matilda, who was born in 1833.
Before the birth of Joseph, Jacobs had moved to the home of her grandmother, who had become a free black woman after arranging to purchase her freedom in 1828. When Harriet continued to refuse to become Norcom’s mistress, she was sent to his son’s plantation to work in the home. In 1835, Jacobs escaped after she learned that Norcom intended to put her children to work as plantation slaves. She hoped that Norcom would sell her children to Sawyer.
During her escape, Jacobs was harbored by both black and white neighbors. She then moved into a small crawlspace above a storeroom in her grandmother’s home. Jacobs hid in the space for almost seven years, coming out only for brief periods at night to exercise. While Jacobs was in hiding, Sawyer purchased their children and her brother John. In 1842, Jacobs escaped to Philadelphia. She was soon reunited with Louisa in New York City, where Sawyer had sent her to work as a house servant. Jacobs found a job in New York as a nursemaid for the family of Nathanial Parker Willis, a poet and editor. In 1843, she was reunited with John. She arranged for Joseph, who had been living with her grandmother, to travel north and stay with John in Boston. For a while, Jacobs secured a place for her children to live with her in Boston. Over the years, Norcom and members of his family continued to seek Jacobs out in an effort to re-enslave her.
In 1849, Jacobs moved to Rochester, New York, where she worked with John in an antislavery reading room and bookstore. It was located above the offices of the North Star, an antislavery newspaper founded by the African American leader Frederick Douglass . In Rochester, Jacobs met the abolitionist and feminist Amy Post, who eventually encouraged her to publicize her story. Jacobs went back to work for the Willis family in 1850. In 1852, Cornelia Willis, the second wife of Jacobs’s employer, arranged for Jacobs’s purchase and freed her.
In 1853, Jacobs wrote several anonymous letters to the New-York Tribune in which she described the experiences and sexual abuse many female slaves endured. The newspaper published the letters. With the support of Jacobs’s antislavery friends, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published by a Boston printer in 1861. Jacobs changed the names of all the characters in the book, including her own, to conceal their true identities. The book was edited by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child , who also wrote the introduction. The book was praised by the antislavery press in the United States and the United Kingdom.
From 1862 to 1865, Jacobs devoted herself to relief efforts in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, among former slaves who had become refugees during the Civil War. After the war ended, she continued her relief efforts with Louisa in Savannah, Georgia. Jacobs later ran a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then in Washington, D.C. She died on March 7, 1897.
