Persons of Color You Need to Know

Person of Color Details: Harriot Jacobs

General Information:
Full Name: Harriot Jacobs
Biography: Writer. "Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl." Was born in North Carolina and escaped to New York City in 1842. She lived in various parts of NY including Monroe County. She was the first woman to author a slave narrative. She spent 18 months in Rochester. Worked in an anti-slavery reading room and bookstore above Frederick Douglass's newspaper "The North Star."
Life Events:
Year: 1813	Event: BIRTH	(Unknown) County
Year: 1842	Event: RESIDENCE	New York County
Year: 1861	Event: LITWORK	(Unknown) County "Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl."
Year: 1880	Event: DEATH	(Unknown) County
Year: ?	Event: OTHER	Monroe County Spent 18 months in Rochester, NY

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 - March 7, 1897) was an American abolitionist and writer. She is best-known as the writer of the 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. She was one of many escaped slaves who wrote autobiographical narratives in an effort to shape opinion in the Northern United States on the "peculiar institution" of slavery.

Reward notice issued for the return of Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813 to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Her brother's name was John. Daniel Jacobs was a mulatto slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Delilah (last name unknown) was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Born to a slave, Harriet inherited the status of "slave" from her mother. Harriet lived with her mother until Delilah's death around 1819, when Harriet was a child of six. Then she lived with her mother's slave-owner and mistress, Margaret Horniblow. Margaret taught Harriet to read, write, and sew.

In 1825, Margaret Horniblow died and willed the twelve-year-old Harriet to Horniblow's five-year-old niece, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, thus became her de facto master. Norcom sexually harassed Harriet for nearly a decade. He refused to allow her to marry any other man, regardless of status. Harriet had a consensual lover, Samuel Sawyer, who was a free white man and a lawyer who eventually became a Senator. She and Sawyer were parents to two children, Joseph and Louisa, also owned by Norcom. Harriet reported that Norcom threatened to sell her children if she refused his sexual advances.

By 1835 her domestic situation had become unbearable, and Harriet managed to escape. She lived for seven years in a small crawlspace in her grandmother's attic before escaping by boat to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She started living as a free woman and later moved to New York City in 1842. Jacobs found employment as a nursemaid before and during the American Civil War. Her most notable employer was the writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl while living and working at Idlewild, Willis's home on the Hudson River.[2] Jacobs's autobiographical accounts started being published in serial form in the New York Tribune, owned and edited by Horace Greeley. Her reports of sexual abuse were considered too shocking to the average newspaper reader of the day, and publication ceased before the completion of the narrative.

Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print the work in book-form — if Jacobs could convince Willis or Harriet Beecher Stowe to provide a preface. She refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe turned her down, though the Phillips and Samson company closed shop anyway.[3] She eventually managed to sign an agreement with the Thayer and Eldridge publishing house and they requested a preface by Lydia Maria Child.[3] Child also edited the book and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women would remain in contact for much of their remaining lives. Thayer and Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy before the narrative could be published. The narrative in its final form was published by a Boston, Massachusetts publisher in 1861.

The narrative was designed to appeal to Middle class white Christian women in the North, focusing on the impact of slavery on women's chastity and sexual virtues. Under slavery, female slaves were virtually defenseless against harassment and rape -- a risk Christian women could perceive as a temptation to masculine lusts and vice as well as to womanly virtues.

She criticized the religion of the Southern United States as being un-Christian and as emphasizing the value of money ("If I am going to hell, bury my money with me", says a particularly brutal and uneducated slaveholder). She described another slaveholder in the sentence, "He boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer follower." Jacobs argued that these men were not exceptions to the general rule.

Much of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is devoted to the Jacobs' struggle to free her two children after she runs away herself. In one heart-rending scene, Harriet spends seven years hiding in a tiny space built into her grandmother's barn in order to occasionally see and hear the voices of her children. Jacobs changed the names of all characters in the novel, including her own, to conceal their true identities. Despite documents of authenticity, many have accused the narrative of being based on false accounts. The villainous slave owner "Dr. Flint" was clearly based on her former master, Dr. James Norcom.

Jacobs's correspondence with Child reveals her enthusiasm over the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. She felt that her suffering people were finally free. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution of 1865 would indeed put an end to slavery.

Grave of Harriet Jacobs at Mount Auburn Cemetery

Jacobs lived the later years of her life in Washington, D.C.. She died March 7, 1897. Six days later, she was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts; her headstone reads: "Patient in tribulation, fervent in spirit serving the Lord".

References

• Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2
• Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books, 2004. ISBN 0465092888

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Harriet Jacobs

• Essays by Harriet Jacobs at Quotidiana.org

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Ann_Jacobs"

Categories: 1813 births | 1897 deaths | People from North Carolina | American slaves | African American writers | American abolitionists | American nurses | American Civil War nurses

Hidden categories: Articles to be expanded since April 2008 | All articles to be expanded

Person of Color:David Walker

African American abolitionist David Walker (1785-1830) wrote Walker's Appeal, urging slaves to resort to violence when necessary to win their freedom.

David Walker was born free, of a free mother and slave father, in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 28, 1785. He early learned to read and write, and he read extensively on the subjects of revolution and resistance to oppression. When he was about 30, he left the South, because "If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. As true as God reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrows which my people have suffered." In 1826 Walker settled in Boston, Mass., where he became the agent for Freedom's Journal, the black abolitionist newspaper, and a leader in the Colored Association. For a living he ran a secondhand clothing store.

Walker published an antislavery article in September 1828; with three others, it became the pamphlet Walker's Appeal (1829). The articles were articulate and militant in their bitter denunciation of slavery, those who profited by it, and those who willingly accepted it. Walker called for vengeance against white men, but he also expressed the hope that their cruel behavior toward blacks would change, making vengeance unnecessary. His message to the slaves was direct: if liberty is not given you, rise in bloody rebellion.

Southern slave masters hated Walker and put a price on his head. In 1829, 50 unsolicited copies of Walker's Appeal were delivered to a black minister in Savannah, Ga. The frightened minister, understandably concerned for his welfare, informed the police. The police, in turn, informed the governor of Georgia. As a result, the state legislature met in secret session and passed a bill making the circulation of materials that might incite slaves to riot a capital offense. The legislature also offered a reward for Walker's capture, $10,000 alive and $1,000 dead.

Other Southern states took similar measures. Louisiana enacted a bill ordering expulsion of all freed slaves who had settled in the state after 1825. The slaveholding South was frightened by men like Walker, and their harsh reactions to the threat they saw in Walker's Appeal seemed justified when black slave Nat Turner led his bloody rebellion in 1831.

Most abolitionists disagreed with Walker's advice to the slaves to resort to violence to obtain freedom. White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who believed in immediate emancipation but thought it could be accomplished through persuasion and argument, did endorse the spirit of the Appeal, however, and ran large portions of it, together with a review, in his paper, the Liberator. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass accepted a more activist position, probably due to Walker's influence and that of Henry H. Garnet, who also called for massive slave rebellions.

Walker died in Boston on June 28, 1830, under mysterious circumstances. His challenge to the slaves to free themselves was an important contribution to the assault on human slavery.

Sources

Walker's Appeal is available in recent editions: Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles [by] David Walker; An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America [by] Henry Highland Garnet (1948; reprinted 1969 with an introduction by W. L. Katz and a brief sketch of Walker's life); David Walker's Appeal, edited by Charles M. Wiltse (1965); and One Continual Cry: David Walker's Appeal ... Its Setting and Its Meaning, edited by Herbert Aptheker (1965). A brief biography of Walker appears in Historical Negro Biographies, edited by Wilhelmena S. Robinson (1968). Lerone Bennett, Jr., Pioneers in Protest (1968), contains a chapter on Walker. Walker figures in the surveys by John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947; 3d rev. ed. 1968), and Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962 (1962; 4th ed. 1969).