This post contains mentions of violence, abuse, and enslavement
One of the most important books in U.S. history, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, was almost lost to history.
The 1861 book was one of the first to discuss the sexual harassment and abuse endured by enslaved women and was considered by anti-slavery and women’s rights activists as an important documentation of the horrors of the system.
When it was first published, Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent and changed the names of the real people in her story. While Jacobs toured and spoke at many events about her experiences and was known as the author of the book, by the 1900s, she was mostly forgotten, and the story was regarded as exaggerated abolitionist propaganda fiction. The fake names, combined with the real stories of the suffering, harassment, and lengths Jacobs endured, were seen as too strange fiction to be authentic.
In the book, Jacobs details her life in Edenton, North Carolina, and how, after her mother died, she went and lived with her mistress. The mistress taught Jacobs to read and write, but after her death, Jacobs was inherited by the young daughter of Dr. James Norcom, who immediately began sexually harassing the 12-year-old Jacobs. When she rejected his advances, Norcom responded by selling off her brother and other family members. When Jacobs fell in love with a free Black man who offered to buy her from Norcom, the doctor refused out of spite.
In desperation to escape Norcom, Jacobs began a relationship with a white lawyer and elite North Carolinian named Samuel Sawyer, with whom she had two children. Yet Norcom continued to sexually harass Jacobs and threatened to sell her children if she did not give in to his desires.
When Jacobs hid in the crawlspace of her grandmother’s house, Norcom sold Jacobs’s two children to a slave trader, who, in turn, sold them to their biological father, Sawyer. Knowing her children were safe from Norcom, Jacobs fled north to Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Sawyer sent their children to live with a cousin in Brooklyn, eventually reuniting with Jacobs.
In making her way to Rochester, New York, Jacobs found herself connecting with anti-slavery and women’s rights advocate Amy Post. Post was a well-known activist, working with Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony on civil rights campaigns Jacobs had also become involved in.
It was only after many years of friendship that Jacobs gained enough trust in Post to tell her life story. Upon hearing it, Post encouraged Jacobs to write a book, but the shame of her sexual relationship with Sawyer initially kept her from doing it. Jacobs eventually relented and wrote the manuscript. She remained active in civil rights work through the Reconstruction and until her passing in 1897. At which time, she and her work were mostly forgotten about.
Until the 1980s, Jacobs’s book was thought to have been written by the white abolitionist and women’s rights activist, Lydia Maria Child. Starting her career writing domestic manuals, Child later published a range of work on issues like male chauvinism, white supremacy, and slavery that included fiction.
It was historian Jean Fagan Yellin who used a combination of historical documents, state archives, and Post’s collected letters to piece together that “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” was both a real story and written by Jacobs. Yellin published an updated version of the book that reintroduced all the real names in 1984.
In researching Jacobs, Yellin realized how important Jacobs had been to the abolitionist and feminist campaigns during and after the Civil War. This motivated her to publish a biography of Jacobs in 2004 to establish her importance alongside other historical activists of the era, like her friends Post and Douglass.
Yellin’s research uncovered much of Jacobs’s life that had been previously ignored, including her relief work helping people who had escaped enslavement during the war, establishing a school for Black children run by Jacobs’s daughter Louisa Matilda, and traveling to London to speak and fundraise for her work.
In recognizing Jacobs on Women’s History Month, we honor her extraordinary life, the countless unnamed women who endured and resisted the atrocities of slavery, and those remarkable women who made sure Jacobs’s story was told and neither her nor her story was forgotten.
