Harriet Jacobs was born enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina, spent nearly seven years hiding in a tiny garret to escape a master who pursued her sexually, and fled north in 1842. Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, confronted Northern readers with the sexual abuse at the center of slavery. Long dismissed as fiction, it was authenticated by the historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s and is now one of the most widely taught American slave narratives.
At a Glance
- Born
- Fall 1813 (exact date unknown), Edenton, North Carolina
- Died
- 7 March 1897, Washington, D.C.
- Birth name
- Harriet Ann Jacobs
- Known for
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861); nearly seven years hidden in her grandmother’s garret; relief and school work among freedpeople during the Civil War
- Fields
- Literature · Abolition · Education
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in the fall of 1813, to enslaved parents; her father was, in her words, a carpenter considered so skilled that he was called on for unusual building work across the region. Her maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow, had gained her freedom and ran a bakery business in Edenton, and she remained the central figure of Jacobs’s life. Jacobs later wrote that she did not know she was enslaved until she was six, when her mother died.
Her owner, Margaret Horniblow, taught her to read and sew. When Horniblow died in 1825 she willed the eleven-year-old Harriet to her three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, which placed the girl under the control of Mary’s father, Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician. From her early teens Norcom subjected her to sexual harassment and threats, while his wife treated her with jealous hostility. Seeking some protection, Jacobs entered a relationship with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white attorney, with whom she had two children, Joseph and Louisa.
Life and Work
In the summer of 1835, after Norcom sent her to a plantation and, by her account, threatened to bring her children there to be broken in to field labor, Jacobs ran away, hoping that her disappearance would lead Norcom to sell the children to their father. After hiding briefly elsewhere in Edenton, she concealed herself in a crawl space above a storeroom in her grandmother’s house. The garret, she wrote, was nine feet long and seven wide, and only three feet high at its highest point. She remained there for nearly seven years, sewing, reading the Bible, watching her children through a small hole she bored in the wall, and writing letters to Norcom arranged to appear to come from the North. Sawyer bought the children as she had hoped, and in 1837 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but he did not free them.
In 1842 Jacobs escaped by boat to the North. She found Louisa, whom Sawyer had sent to work as a servant in Brooklyn, and took a position as nursemaid in the household of the editor and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis. Norcom and his family repeatedly tried to recover her, and she lived for a decade as a fugitive. In 1849 she spent about eighteen months in Rochester, New York, working with her brother, John S. Jacobs, in an antislavery reading room above the offices of Frederick Douglass’s North Star. There she met the Quaker abolitionist and feminist Amy Post, who encouraged her to tell her story. Early in 1852 Cornelia Grinnell Willis, her employer’s second wife, bought Jacobs’s freedom. Jacobs recorded her anguish at the transaction: “A human being sold in the free city of New York!”
Jacobs began writing in 1853 with anonymous letters to the New York Tribune, and by the summer of 1857 she had finished a manuscript she called a true and just account of her life in slavery. The abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child agreed to edit it. When the Boston publishers Thayer & Eldridge went bankrupt, Jacobs arranged publication herself; the book appeared at the end of 1860 with a title page reading “Boston: Published for the Author, 1861.” A British edition, The Deeper Wrong; Or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, appeared in London in 1861. Written in the voice of “Linda Brent,” with pseudonyms for everyone, it spoke directly to white Northern women about the sexual coercion that slavery licensed and the impossible moral choices it forced on enslaved mothers.
During the Civil War, Jacobs turned to relief work among freedpeople. From 1862 she distributed supplies and organized aid in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, with support from Quaker and other antislavery groups, and in Alexandria she and Louisa founded and ran a free school for Black children. Her letters describing conditions in the crowded refugee camps appeared in the antislavery press and helped raise money and supplies from Northern supporters. In 1865 the two women moved their work to Savannah, Georgia.
“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”
Legacy
Jacobs later ran a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in her last years lived in Washington, D.C., where she died on 7 March 1897. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
Incidents was praised by the antislavery press but quickly overshadowed by the war, and it was not reprinted in her lifetime. For a century many readers assumed it was a novel, or that Child had written it. Jean Fagan Yellin’s archival research, which identified the real people behind the pseudonyms and traced Jacobs’s correspondence with Child and Post, established her authorship; the Harvard University Press edition of 1987 made the case definitive, and Yellin’s biography followed in 2004. Frequently described as the first narrative of slavery written by a formerly enslaved woman in the United States, Incidents is now central to the study of American literature, slavery, and the history of Black women’s resistance.
Harriet Jacobs exposed the sexual exploitation at the heart of slavery and, by telling her own story on her own terms, claimed authority that slavery and prejudice denied her. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- Fall 1813 Born enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina.
- 1825 Willed to Mary Matilda Norcom; enters the household of Dr. James Norcom.
- Summer 1835 Runs away and soon hides in the garret of her grandmother’s house.
- 1842 Escapes by boat to the North after nearly seven years in hiding.
- 1849 Works in an antislavery reading room in Rochester, New York; meets Amy Post.
- 1852 Cornelia Grinnell Willis purchases her freedom.
- 1857 Completes the manuscript of her autobiography.
- 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published in Boston, edited by Lydia Maria Child.
- 1862 – 1865 Relief work and a free school for freedpeople in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia.
- 7 March 1897 Dies in Washington, D.C.
Sources and Further Reading
- Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861). Link
- William L. Andrews, “Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813–1897,” Documenting the American South. Link
- Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004).
- Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
- North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, “Harriet Jacobs, c. 1813–1897 (A-72).” Link
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