In Jacobs escaped to the North by boat, determined to reclaim her daughter from Sawyer, who had sent her to Brooklyn, New York, to work as a house servant. For ten years after her escape from North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs lived the tense and uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She found Louisa in Brooklyn, secured a place for both children to live with her in Boston, and went to work as a nursemaid to the baby daughter of Mary Stace Willis, wife of the popular editor and poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis.
Norcom made several attempts to locate Jacobs in New York, which forced her to keep on the move. In she took up an eighteen-month residence in Rochester, New York, where she worked with her brother, John S. Jacobs, in a Rochester antislavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star. In Rochester Jacobs met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitionist and pioneering feminist who gently urged the fugitive slave mother to consider making her story public.
After the tumultuous response to Uncle Tom's Cabin , Jacobs thought of enlisting the aid of the novel's author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in getting her own story published. But Stowe had little interest in any sort of creative partnership with Jacobs. After receiving, early in , the gift of her freedom from Cornelia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of her employer, Jacobs decided to write her autobiography herself.
In Jacobs took her first steps toward authorship, sending several anonymous letters to the New York Tribune. In the first, "Letter from a Fugitive Slave. Slaves Sold under Peculiar Circumstances" June 21, , Jacobs broached the sexually sensitive subject matter that would become the burden of her autobiography -- the sexual abuse of slave women and their mothers' attempts to protect them.
By the summer of Jacobs had completed what she called in a June 21 letter to Post "a true and just account of my own life in Slavery. Persevering, Jacobs with the support of her antislavery friends saw to the publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl late in by a Boston printer.
Praised by the antislavery press in the United States and Great Britain, Incidents was quickly overshadowed by the gathering clouds of civil war in America. Never reprinted in Jacobs's lifetime, it remained in obscurity until the Civil Rights and Women's Movements of the s and s spurred a reprint of Incidents in Zoom Out. More Information Less Information. Enter the password to open this PDF file:. Cancel OK. File name: -. File size: -. Title: -. Author: -. Even in New York, however, Jacobs was at the mercy of the Fugitive Slave Law, which meant that wherever Jacobs lived in the United States, she could be reclaimed by the Norcoms and returned to slavery at any time.
Around , her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, purchased her freedom from the Norcoms. Jacobs's decision to write her autobiography stemmed from correspondence with her friend, Amy Post, a Quaker abolitionist and feminist activist.
Jacobs had befriended Post in Rochester, New York in the late s after she had moved there to join the abolitionist movement with her brother John. Jacobs confided her past to Post, who encouraged her to write it down herself after Harriet Beecher Stowe rejected Jacobs's request for an amanuensis.
Despite her use of a pseudonym, Jacobs did gain fame for a time after its publication. She entered into public service with her daughter during the s, aiding refugees during the Civil War and opening the Jacobs Free School in Alexandria, Virginia. After several trips south and one abroad to England, Jacobs reestablished herself as a relief worker in Washington, D.
From the time she was born she was taught to be wary of the white men. Two of her sisters had been sold to a slave trader and she vowed that she would never let that happen to her.
She had a rebellious nature, always getting into trouble. However, Ironically Harriet believes these fortunes were actually her curse.
The fact that she was well kept and light skinned as well as being attractive lead to her victimization as a sexual object. Consequently, Harriet became a prospective concubine for Dr. She points out that life under slavery was as bad as any slave could hope for. Harriet talks about her life as slave by saying,? You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.?
Home Page What did freedom mean to harriet jacobs. What did freedom mean to harriet jacobs Satisfactory Essays. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, freedom can be defined as the quality or state of being free: as liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another. One of those slaves was a young woman by the name of Harriet Jacobs. She became the author of a slave narrative titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which describes her life as a slave under the pseudonym Linda Brent.
I believe Harriet Jacobs used Linda Brent to tell her story not only to protect those who were involved, such as her children and her grandmother, but also because she was an escaped slave and had been under the constant threat of being tracked down and having her freedom taken away from her.
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