Biography of harriet jacobs

A former North Carolina slave turned abolitionist and author, Harriet Jacobs was born in bondage in Edenton.  Her father was a white farmer and her mother a mulatto house slave.  After her mother died, Jacobs lived with her mother’s owner’s wife, Margaret Horniblow.  Soon Horniblow died and Jacobs was willed to a five-year-old relative. In the child’s stead, Dr. James Norcom acted as owner.

Her autobiography explains Norcom and his mentally abusive ways.   The doctor harassed the teenage Jacobs and persistently asked, in various ways, for her to have sex with her. Norcom refused Jacob’s requests to marry a free black man and continued harassing her.  As a form of slave resistance, Jacobs soon befriended a young white lawyer, became sexually involved with him, formed a consensual relationship with him, and eventually gave birth to two children (a slave child’s status depended that of his or her mother).

After a revengeful Norcom planned to work Jacobs&#; children as field slaves, she decided to run away.  For seven years in Edenton, Jacobs was hidden and lived in a crawlspace approximately nine feet long and seven wide.  The lawyer, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a state legislator and later member of the 25th Congress, had purchased her (and his) two children.  Although she lived in cramped quarters, she knew her children’s whereabouts and remained in contact with them.  

Jacobs eventually fled northward in and ended up working as an abolitionist with Frederick Douglass.  Even up North, she worried that Norcom might claim her and she might be returned to Edenton.  She reunited with her daughter and her fugitive brother in New York and later went to Boston.  In , a few days before she fled to Massachusetts, a friend purchased Harriet Jacobs and ended the possibility that she might be returned to bondage in North Carolina.  

From the moment she absconded until her death, Harriet Jacobs worked to improve the lives of

Activist,

Although millions of African American women were held in bondage over the years that slavery was legal in the United States, Harriet Jacobs () is the only one known to have left papers testifying to her life.

Harriet Jacobs is now known as the author of Incident in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written by Herself (), the most important slave narrative written by an African-American woman. Jacobs is also important because of the role she played as a relief worker among Black Civil War refugees in Alexandria, Virginia and Savannah, Georgia. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Jacob’s autobiography was thought to be a novel by a white writer, and her relief work was unknown. With the publication of an annotated edition of her book, however, Jacobs became established as the author of the most comprehensive antebellum autobiography by an African American woman.  Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, holds a central place in the canon of American literature as the most important slave narrative by an African American woman.

Harriet Ann Jacobs, writer, abolitionist and reformer, was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in She was the daughter of two slaves owned by different masters. The story of her life, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent in It helped build Northern sentiment for emancipation during the Civil War and was probably the only slave narrative to deal with sexual oppression as well as oppression of race and condition. Harriet visited New Bedford on several occasions as her brother John Jacobs, also a freedom seeker, lived here for a time and worked on ships in the port of New Bedford.  The New Bedford Women’s Anti-Slavery Society also supported Harriet’s work through active fundraising and support.

During her childhood in Edenton, young Harriet lived with her mother as part of a close-knit family. Her father was a sk

African-American abolitionist and writer (d. )

"Linda Brent" redirects here. For the actress, see Linda Brent (actress).

Harriet Jacobs ( or – March 7, ) was an African-American abolitionist and writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an "American classic".

Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, she was sexually harassed by her enslaver. When he threatened to sell her children if she did not submit to his desire, she hid in a tiny crawl space under the roof of her grandmother's house, so low she could not stand up in it. After staying there for seven years, she finally managed to escape to the free North, where she was reunited with her children Joseph and Louisa Matilda and her brother John S. Jacobs. She found work as a nanny and got into contact with abolitionist and feminist reformers. Even in New York City, her freedom was in danger until her employer was able to pay off her legal owner.

During and immediately after the American Civil War, she travelled to Union-occupied parts of the Confederate South together with her daughter, organizing help and founding two schools for fugitive and freed slaves.

Biography

Family and name

Harriet Jacobs was born in in Edenton, North Carolina, to Delilah Horniblow, enslaved by the Horniblow family who owned a local tavern. Under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, both Harriet and her brother John were enslaved at birth by the tavern keeper's family, as a mother's status was passed to her children. Still, according to the same principle, mother and children should have been free, because Molly Horniblow, Delilah's mother, had been freed by her white father, who also was her owner. But she had been kidnapped, and had no chance for legal protection because of her dark skin. Harriet and John's father was Elijah Knox,^&