Jacobs, Harriet

Harriet Jacobs (1813–97) is best known for her slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which has been widely anthologized and is the most widely read and taught of American slave narratives by women. Her narrative, with names changed to protect and conceal the innocent, is a fairly accurate retelling of her major life events, from birth to the purchase of her freedom. Among the most memorable details of her story are the circumstances surrounding the birth and parentage of her children and the efforts she took in order to protect them.

Jacobs was born to slave parents, but her early life, being raised as a foster sister of sorts to her mistress, afforded her the opportunity to learn to read and write and to avoid abuse. Once she was an adolescent, however, her mistress's father began to sexually harass her. In an effort to disgust him and frustrate his desire for her, she took Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a young lawyer, as her lover. He fathered her two children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. To protect herself and her children from her abuser's machinations, Jacobs lived hidden in her grandmother's garret for nearly seven years and suffered under horrible extremes of temperature, isolation, immobility, and infestations, among other problems.

Sawyer did not stay true to his promise of freeing Jacob's children, but she did manage to reunite with both of them, and her brother, John S. Jacobs in Boston. She sent her daughter to boarding school, and her son found work on a whaling ship. During this time, she and her brother tried, unsuccessfully, to open an antislavery reading room on the second floor of The North Star's newspaper office. She also worked for N.P. Willis as a maid and nanny. The [Page 599]second Mrs. Willis bought Jacobs's freedom for $300.

At this point, her ties to the abolitionist movement proved fruitful in the eventual writing and publication of her book. Jacobs spent the rest of her life in activism, working as a nurse during the Civil War, and running schools in the South for freed slaves with her daughter. She also continued to fundraise for her work and utilized the press to report conditions in the South to reformers in the North. Jacobs also used her writing as a platform for activism in helping her main cause, the abolition of slavery; and the subsequent transition to freedom for herself, her children, and many former slaves.