66 Facts About Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs was an African-American abolitionist and writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is considered an "American classic".

Harriet Jacobs found work as a nanny and got into contact with abolitionist and feminist reformers.

Harriet Jacobs was born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, to Delilah Horniblow, enslaved by the Horniblow family who owned a local tavern.

Harriet Jacobs then lived with her owner, a daughter of the deceased tavern keeper, who taught her not only to sew, but to read and write.

Harriet Jacobs willed Harriet to her three-year-old niece Mary Matilda Norcom.

Dr Norcom hired John, so that the Harriet Jacobs siblings lived together in his household.

John Harriet Jacobs was bought by Dr Norcom, thus he and his sister stayed together.

Harriet Jacobs was caught, paraded in chains through Edenton, put into jail, and finally sold to New Orleans.

When Harriet Jacobs fell in love with a free black man who wanted to buy her freedom and marry her, Norcom intervened and forbade her to continue with the relationship.

Harriet Jacobs threatened to expose her children to the hard life of the plantation slaves and to sell them, separately and without the mother, after some time.

Harriet Jacobs asked and obtained Jacobs's approval to send their daughter to live with his cousin in Brooklyn, New York, where slavery had already been abolished.

Harriet Jacobs suggested sending their son to the Free States.

In 1842, Harriet Jacobs finally got a chance to escape by boat to Philadelphia, where she was aided by anti-slavery activists of the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee.

In 1843 Harriet Jacobs heard that Norcom was on his way to New York to force her back into slavery, which was legal for him to do everywhere inside the United States.

Harriet Jacobs asked Mary Willis for a leave of two weeks and went to her brother John in Boston.

Harriet Jacobs had gained his freedom by leaving his master in New York.

From Boston, Harriet Jacobs wrote to her grandmother asking her to send Joseph there, so that he could live there with his uncle John.

Harriet Jacobs's stay there was interrupted by the death of Mary Stace Willis in March 1845.

Harriet Jacobs undertook several lecture tours, either alone or with fellow abolitionists, among them Frederick Douglass, three years his junior.

In 1849, John S Jacobs took responsibility for the Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room in Rochester, New York.

Harriet Jacobs lived at the house of the white couple Amy and Isaac Post.

In 1850, Harriet Jacobs paid a visit to Nathaniel Parker Willis in New York, wanting to see the now eight-years old Imogen again.

Willis's second wife, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, who had not recovered well after the birth of her second child, prevailed upon Harriet Jacobs to become the nanny of the Willis children.

Harriet Jacobs, in whose autobiography the constant danger for herself and other enslaved mothers of being separated from their children is an important theme, spoke to her employer of the sacrifice that letting go of her baby daughter meant to her.

Cornelia Willis answered by explaining that the slave catchers would have to return the baby to the mother, if Harriet Jacobs should be caught.

In February 1852, Harriet Jacobs read in the newspaper that her legal owner, the daughter of the recently deceased Norcom, had arrived at a New York Hotel together with her husband, obviously intending to re-claim their fugitive slave.

Some days later, she wrote a letter to Harriet Jacobs informing her of her intention to buy Harriet Jacobs's freedom.

Harriet Jacobs replied that she preferred to join her brother who had gone to California.

When Harriet Jacobs came to know the Posts in Rochester, they were the first white people she met since her return from England, who didn't look down on her color.

In late 1852 or early 1853, Amy Post suggested that Harriet Jacobs should write her life story.

Harriet Jacobs's brother had for some time been urging her to do so, and she felt a moral obligation to tell her story to help build public support for the antislavery cause and thus save others from suffering a similar fate.

Finally, Harriet Jacobs overcame her trauma and feeling of shame, and she consented to publish her story.

At first, Harriet Jacobs did not feel that she was up to writing a book.

Harriet Jacobs wrote a short outline of her story and asked Amy Post to send it to Harriet Beecher Stowe, proposing to tell her story to Stowe so that Stowe could transform it into a book.

Harriet Jacobs then asked Cornelia Willis to propose to Stowe that Harriet Jacobs's daughter Louisa accompany her to England and tell the story during the journey.

Harriet Jacobs felt betrayed because her employer thus came to know about the parentage of her children, which was the cause for Harriet Jacobs feeling ashamed.

In June 1853, Harriet Jacobs chanced to read a defense of slavery entitled "The Women of England vs the Women of America" in an old newspaper.

Harriet Jacobs spent the whole night writing a reply, which she sent to the New York Tribune.

In May 1858, Harriet Jacobs sailed to England, hoping to find a publisher there.

Harriet Jacobs carried good letters of introduction, but wasn't able to get her manuscript into print.

Disheartened, Harriet Jacobs returned to her work at Idlewild and made no further efforts to publish her book until the fall of 1859.

Harriet Jacobs then sent the manuscript to publishers Phillips and Samson in Boston.

Harriet Jacobs was unwilling to ask Willis, who held pro-slavery views, but she asked Stowe, who declined.

Harriet Jacobs now contacted Thayer and Eldridge, who had recently published a sympathizing biography of John Brown.

Harriet Jacobs confessed to Amy Post, that after suffering another rejection from Stowe, she could hardly bring herself to asking another famous writer, but she "resolved to make my last effort".

Harriet Jacobs met Child in Boston, and Child not only agreed to write a preface, but to become the editor of the book.

Harriet Jacobs suggested dropping the final chapter on Brown and adding more information on the anti-black violence which occurred in Edenton after Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion.

Harriet Jacobs kept contact with Jacobs via mail, but the two women failed to meet a second time during the editing process, because with Cornelia Willis passing through a dangerous pregnancy and premature birth Jacobs was not able to leave Idlewild.

Harriet Jacobs succeeded in buying the stereotype plates and to get the book printed and bound.

Harriet Jacobs arranged for a publication in Great Britain, which was published in the first months of 1862, soon followed by a pirated edition.

Originally, Jacobs had planned to follow the example her brother John S had set nearly two decades ago and become an abolitionist speaker, but now she saw that helping the Contrabands would mean rendering her race a service more urgently needed.

Harriet Jacobs emphasizes her conviction that the freedmen will be able to build self-determined lives, if they get the necessary support.

Harriet Jacobs supported a project conceived by the black community in 1863 to found a new school.

Mother and daughter Harriet Jacobs continued their relief work in Alexandria until after the victory of the Union.

Harriet Jacobs ordered the removal of many freedmen from the land which had been allotted to them by the army just one year before.

Already in July 1866, mother and daughter Harriet Jacobs left Savannah which was more and more suffering from anti-black violence.

Once again, Harriet Jacobs went to Idlewild, to assist Cornelia Willis in caring for her dying husband until his death in January 1867.

John S Jacobs later went to England, while Joseph stayed in Australia.

Harriet Jacobs died in December of the same year, 1873.

Harriet Jacobs died on March 7,1897, in Washington, DC, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge next to her brother.

Harriet Jacobs's tombstone reads, "Patient in tribulation, fervent in spirit serving the Lord".

However, Yellin found and used a variety of historical documents, including from the Amy Post papers at the University of Rochester, state and local historical societies, and the Horniblow and Norcom papers at the North Carolina state archives, to establish both that Harriet Jacobs was the true author of Incidents, and that the narrative was her autobiography, not a work of fiction.

Today, Harriet Jacobs is seen as an "icon of female resistance".

In 2017 Harriet Jacobs was the subject of an episode of the Futility Closet Podcast, where her experience living in a crawl space was compared with the wartime experience of Patrick Fowler.

Harriet Jacobs was, in Emerson's sense, 'representative'; expressing the idea of the struggle for freedom, her life empowers others.

Harriet Jacobs has to flee from New York and is reunited with her brother and both her children in Boston.