Writer, abolitionist and reformer Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, 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, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent in 1861, 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.

During her childhood in Edenton, young Harriet lived with her mother as part of a close-knit family. When Harriet's mother died in 1819, the six-year-old girl was taken into the home of her mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her how to read and write. Harriet was very fond of Miss Horniblow and expected to be emancipated. Instead, when Miss Horniblow died in 1825, she willed Harriet to her three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Within two years of moving into the Norcom home, Harriet found herself the object of Dr. Norcom's unwanted sexual advances and Mrs. Norcom's vindictive jealousy. In 1829, she began a liaison with Samuel Treadwell Sawyer. The couple had a son, Joseph, in 1829, and a daughter, Louisa Matilda, in 1833. In retaliation, Norcom sent Harriet to one of his plantations to be broken in as a field hand. Before her children could be sent to join her, Harriet ran away and went into hiding at her grandmother's house. Her maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow, had been emancipated during the American Revolution, sold back into slavery as a prize of war, and was re-emancipated in 1828. Harriet hid for six years and eleven months in a space under the front porch roof of Molly Horniblow's house.

In 1842, Harriet Jacobs escaped from Edenton by boat, traveling eventually to New York, where she went to work as a nursemaid for the family of abolitionist Nathaniel Parker Willis. For the next few years, she traveled between New York and Boston, eventually reuniting with her children. During this period, she became active in a circle of anti-slavery feminists and met Amy Post, who, along with Mary Willis, would eventually encourage her to write the story of her life. In order to subvert the continued efforts of Jacobs's former owners to re-enslave her, the Willises eventually bought Harriet and gave her her freedom in 1852. The next year, she began work on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Her first two attempts to publish the book came to nothing when both publishing houses that accepted the manuscript went bankrupt. She finally purchased the plates of her book and had it published by a Boston printer "for the author" in 1861. The book contained a preface written by Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist writer. The British edition, The Deeper Wrong, was published in 1862.

Through the war years, Harriet Jacobs lived in Washington, D.C., assisting contrabands, nursing black troops and teaching. After the war, she and her daughter did relief work in Savannah and Edenton. In 1868, they traveled to London to raise funds for an orphanage and home for the aged in Savannah. The year before her death in 1897, she was actively involved in organizing meetings of the National Association of Colored Women in Washington, D.C. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. For nearly a century, the authorship of her book was questioned, but a new edition published in 1987 by Harvard University Press named Harriet Ann Jacobs as the true author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Excerpt from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
published “for the author,” Boston, 1861
edited with introduction, Harvard University Press, 1987

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will begin to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other slaves in my master’s house noticed the change. Ma[n]y of them pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof; and they were aware that to speak of them was an offense that never went unpunished.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston: Published for the Author, 1861.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited with Introduction (pp. xiii-xxxiv) by Jean F. Yellin, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Additional information on Ms. Jacobs and her work can be found in:

Knott, Robanna S. Harriet Jacobs: The Edenton Biography. Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994.

Mills, Bruce. "Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." American Literature 64 (1992): 255-272.

Parramore, Thomas C. "Harriet Jacobs, James Norcom, and the Defense of Hierarchy. Carolina Comments 38 (May 1990): 82-87.

PMLA Bibliography "American Literature: 19th Century" for references to dissertations, books and articles listed under Harriet Jacobs' name.

Stevenson, George. "The Search for the Edenton Years of Harriet Ann Jacobs." Carolina Comments 38 (Mar. 1990): 51-57.

Yellin, Jean F. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.

Zafar, Rafia, and Deborah Garfield, eds. Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Links to further information:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl