Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was a freedom seeker best known today for her gripping memoir recounting the cruel treatment and sexual abuse she suffered under slavery. Born into slavery in coastal Edenton, North Carolina, a teenaged Jacobs resisted her slaveholders’ sexual advances by beginning a relationship with another white man, Samuel Sawyer. Sawyer and Jacobs had two children, Joseph and Louisa, whom Sawyer purchased but did not liberate, instead sending Louisa north to work as a domestic servant. After hiding for more than seven years in her grandmother’s home, Jacobs escaped northward by boat in 1842 in hopes of reuniting with her children. Jacobs moved throughout New England until New Bedford, Massachusetts abolitionist Cornelia Grinnell Willis purchased Jacobs’s freedom in 1852. Jacobs went on to write her memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860), making her one of the first women to author a slave narrative in the United States. During the Civil War, Jacobs spearheaded efforts to provide humanitarian aid and education to freedpeople in Washington, DC and Georgia, before ultimately settling in Washington, where she died in 1897.
ESSAYS: Crew // Foner
ROLES: Abolitionist // Freedom Seeker
