Harriet Ann Jacobs

by

Sandra Gunning

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0143

Introduction

Now celebrated for her classic slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Ann Jacobs (b. 1813–d. 1897) was an abolitionist, educator, and advocate for former slaves during and after the American Civil War. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, to enslaved parents Delilah and Elijah, Jacobs learned to read and write from her mistress Margaret Horniblow. On the latter’s death in 1825 Harriet Jacobs and her brother John Swanson Jacobs entered the household of Dr. James Norcom who for the next four years subjected her to intense sexual harassment. Finally in 1829, after Norcom refused an offer of sale from Jacobs’s free Black lover, she engaged in a sexual affair with Norcom’s white neighbor Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. Here she gambled that Sawyer’s affections might lead him to purchase her, and though she expressed great shame in Incidents regarding this stratagem, she argued against judging enslaved women who only sought to protect themselves. In 1835 after the birth of son Joseph and daughter Louisa, Jacobs hid in the attic space of her grandmother’s house, tricking Norcom into believing she had fled North. Assuming Jacobs was entirely out of reach, Norcom sold the children and their uncle John Swanson Jacobs to a slave trader with whom Sawyer was secretly in league. Sawyer purchased all three. With her family safe now from Norcom, Jacobs finally escaped to New York in 1842, seven years after going into hiding. Once North, Jacobs reunited with her children and brother, only to find herself in danger yet again with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Though Norcom was now dead, his daughter pursued Jacobs, until white friends arranged for her purchase in 1852. Finally free and with national tensions rising over the question of slavery, Jacobs published her life story as Incidents in 1861, under the pseudonym “Linda Brent” and with the aid of Lydia Maria Child. For the next five years she traveled with the now adult Louisa, performing relief work among displaced ex-slaves in Washington, DC, Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia. In 1867, after a failed attempt to raise funds in Britain to aid freed people, Jacobs faced dwindling financial resources. For the rest of their lives Jacobs and Louisa struggled to support themselves. At times they took in boarders, sold homemade preserves, or in Louisa’s case took short-lived teaching and clerical jobs. Harriet Jacobs died in 1897 and is buried in Boston’s Auburn Cemetery.

Editions, Extant Family Documents, and General Background

Though modern scholars have been aware of [Jacobs] 1861 for some time, Yellin 1987 is the first authoritative edition of the narrative that verifies the identity of “Linda Brent” as the former slave Harriet Ann Jacobs. Yellin 1987 also links the other characters of the narrative to their real-life historical counterparts. An updated edition, Yellin 2000 reproduces all the material in Yellin 1987, with the addition of an 1861 version of John Swanson Jacobs’s slave narrative entitled “A True Tale of Slavery.” To date Yellin 2004 is the only existing biography of Jacobs and includes detailed information on daughter Louisa Jacobs. The compendium of journalism, letters, and legal documents in Yellin 2008 brings to light a wealth of information on the Jacobs family, their Edenton owners, the father of her children Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, and Jacobs’s reform activities with daughter Louisa during and after the Civil War. Whitacre 2017 provides glimpses of Jacobs and Louisa at work among ex-slaves in the letters of the white Quaker activist Julia Wilbur. Foster and Yarborough 2019 offer additional footnotes to the text of Incidents, as well as a sampling of period documents and critical essays. Finally, in the form of an online interactive map Zarrera 2019 retraces of all the journeys undertaken by Jacobs as outlined in the narrative.

• Foster, Frances Smith, and Richard Yarborough, eds. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Norton, 2019.

  Provides additional footnotes to the text, and a selection of primary sources that do not duplicate Yellin 1987 or Yellin 2000. Includes a selection of scholarly essays.

• [Jacobs, Harriet A.]. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by L[ydia] Maria Child. Boston: n.p., 1861.

  Original edition published in the United States with the author’s name omitted from the title page and leaving only the name of the white editor Lydia Maria Child. Jacobs further obscured her identity by signing the preface “Linda Brent.”

• Whitacre, Paula Tarnapol. An Uncivil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’s Struggle for Purpose. Omaha, NE: Potomac Books, 2017.

  Julia Wilbur was a white Quaker reformer working side by side with Jacobs to aid slaves who had fled to the Union army in occupied Alexandria. As with Jacobs, Wilbur was an agent for the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, and her letters provide numerous observations of Jacobs and the living conditions of former slaves.

• Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. By Harriet A. Jacobs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

  Landmark edition reproducing crucial correspondence between Jacobs and white abolitionists Amy Post and Lydia Maria Child. Reveals Jacobs’s initial plan to end Incidents on militant abolitionist John Brown, though Jacobs changed the ending on the advice of Child. Footnotes verify the identity of every character, including Dr. James Norcom (“Dr. Flint”); Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (“Mr. Sands”); and Jacobs’s children Joseph and Louisa (“Benny” and “Ellen”). Includes a recovered photograph of Jacobs in old age.

• Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. By Harriet A. Jacobs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

  Enlarged edition of Yellin 1987 with the addition of “A True Tale of Slavery,” a much abbreviated version of John Swanson Jacobs’s 1855 slave narrative, published in 1861 in the British periodical The Leisure Hour.

• Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2004.

  Reconstructs white and enslaved Black lives in early-19th-century Edenton; Jacobs’s fugitive years in the North as a nanny for the family of Nathaniel Willis Parker and his first and second wives; Jacobs’s struggle to bring her story to the public; its northern reception; and her later reform work. Details Jacobs’s trips to Britain and sheds light of the activist careers of John Swanson Jacobs and Louisa Jacobs.

• Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

  Impressive compilation of known primary sources in the form of letters, memoranda, articles, and legal documents dating from 1810 to 1917, covering every aspect of Jacobs and her family including their owners and white associates before and after slavery. Includes some photographic reproductions.

• Zarrera, Elizabeth Della. “Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs: A Virtual Tour of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Lapham’s Quarterly (15 April 2019).

  Interactive map of crucial locations in North Carolina (Edenton and its environs), the Northeast (e.g., Boston, New York, Rochester, Philadelphia, Saratoga Springs, New Bedford), and in London, where Jacobs and her children resided or visited during the period covered by the narrative. Copiously illustrated with period-specific maps, paintings, engravings, photographs, and documents.