Harriet Ann Jacobs: An Enslaved Woman’s Journey to Freedom

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into slavery but refused to let the institution define her. Ferociously independent, Jacobs stood up for herself in a time when such actions could result in her death. Fighting against sexual abuse, racism, and subjugation, Jacobs wove a life that resulted not only in freedom for herself, but for others too. Her involvement in abolition and her work as an author gave America perhaps its most comprehensive look into life as an enslaved woman, relevant not only in her time but in the centuries that followed.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into involuntary servitude, the daughter of two African-American slaves in Edenton, North Carolina. Jacobs’ parents were owned by two different masters, but her family was still close. Unfortunately, Jacobs lost her mother at the young age of six in 1819.

The child was taken into the home of the mistress, Margaret Horniblow, where, unlike most children in slavery, she was taught to read and write. Jacobs later recalled being very fond of Horniblow and believed that her mistress would one day give her her freedom. Unfortunately, this was not to be. When Ms. Horniblow died in 1825, she left Jacobs in her will to her three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom.

As Jacobs grew older, Norcom refused to allow her to marry. However, that didn’t stop Jacobs from becoming involved with a local lawyer, a white man named Samuel Sawyer, when she was 16. By the time she was 20, she had two children with Sawyer, Joseph and Louisa. This infuriated Norcom, and though Jacobs hoped her first pregnancy would encourage the doctor to sell her and her child, her hopes went unfulfilled. Instead, Norcom punished her by sending her to work as a field hand at one of his plantations—without her children.

Jacobs had no intention of remaining subjugated, especially under the hand of Dr. Norcom. She ran away from her field assignment and headed to the home of her maternal grandmother, who had been emancipated in 1828. Molly Horniblow allowed her granddaughter to seek refuge at her home, hiding her in a space under the front porch roof. There she remained in her crawl space, which was about seven feet wide and nine feet long, for seven years. She came out for brief periods at night to get exercise but otherwise remained hidden. During her time in hiding, Jacobs wrote to Norcom, hoping to convince him that she had absconded to the north and freedom. She hoped this would incite him to sell her children to their father, and eventually, he did. However, Sawyer didn’t emancipate his and Harriet’s children, and they remained in bondage. Their daughter was sent to New York to work as a servant, and in 1842, Jacobs decided to head north to reclaim her.

Harriet traveled from North Carolina to Philadelphia by boat, then to New York by train. She was able to retrieve Louisa and, later, her son. They first settled in Boston, where Jacobs secured a job working as a nursemaid to the children of poet Nathaniel Parker Willis and his wife. However, Norcom soon got wind of Jacobs’ location, forcing her to constantly move.

The Willis family assisted her efforts by sending Harriet to safety in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Willis’ family resided. Harriet also spent time in Rochester, New York, where her brother John Jacobs lived and who was also living the life of a fugitive slave. John worked in an abolitionist reading room and bookstore above Frederick Douglass’ newspaper offices, and Harriet worked with him for a time. There she met many local abolitionists and became interested as to how she could become an effective part of the cause. She befriended many women in this circle, including Amy Post, who was not only an abolitionist but a feminist. With the encouragement of Post and Mrs. Willis, Jacobs was encouraged to start writing about her personal experiences as a slave, and more specifically, as a woman in slavery.

In 1852, Mrs. Willis proposed to the Norcoms that she be able to purchase Harriet. She was successful in her venture, and ten years after escaping North Carolina, Harriet was finally granted her freedom by the Willis family. Soon after, Jacobs decided to take on the writing project that her friends had encouraged, with northern white women as her target audience. She wrote Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl, but publishers shied away from producing the shocking narrative. Eventually, Jacobs decided to self-publish in 1861, and her autobiography stunned the American public. While many had started to recognize the horrors of slavery, the sexual abuse and struggles that women faced under the American slavery system were eye-opening to many.

Some of the book was published by Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune, exposing it to an even wider audience. The book was published not only in the United States, but in England under the title The Deeper Wrong; Or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs’ descriptions of the sexual injustices imposed on women in slavery and details of how their mothers and other family members attempted to protect them made an impact, gathering acclaim in both countries. Jacobs was the first woman to publish an account of a fugitive slave in America.

Unfortunately, the coming Civil War quickly overshadowed Jacobs’ literary work, and it was never reprinted in her lifetime. However, the book would experience several revivals, including during the American Civil Rights and Women’s movements in the mid-20th century. A new edition by historian Jean Fagan Yellin in 1987 brought the book to light again, establishing it as the definitive American slave narrative in literature.

In her novel, Jacobs renamed some of the key figures in her life, including herself, Norcom, and Sawyer. She discussed sexuality frankly, acknowledging how she utilized sex as a tool against her evil master while, at the same time, she was being exploited. She did not wish to paint herself as a victim but as an agent in her own story. Jacobs wrote of the shame she felt at her “moral failings” but was open and honest in describing the “standards” to which enslaved women were held in comparison to the womanhood of a northern white woman.

During the Civil War era, Jacobs focused on supporting relief efforts for former slaves who found themselves displaced as a result of the war. She worked primarily in the Washington DC area, helping refugees from the south. She and her daughter founded a school in Virginia, the Jacobs Free School, where Louisa was headmistress. The two helped nurse black troops recovering from war wounds and assisted new freedmen in settling into their new lives. Jacobs even spent time in her former hometown of Edenton, promoting the welfare of the newly-freed.

Eventually, the racist violence of the south drove Jacobs back north, where she opened a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Little is known about the final decade of Harriet Jacobs’ life, but she passed away at age 84 on March 7, 1897, in Washington, DC. Her body was returned to Cambridge, where she was buried next to her brother, John, in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Harriet Ann Jacobs led a remarkable life, not only for herself but also for others. She could have quite easily succumbed to her seemingly hopeless situation in American slavery but instead chose to resist and work toward her ultimate goal of freedom. Not satisfied with only attaining this right for herself, Jacobs’ dedication to abolition and support of others resulted in a better life for dozens of people. A pioneer not only for antislavery causes but also for feminism, Harriet Jacobs’ impact on American history cannot be underestimated.