Harriet Jacobs:  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

About the Author

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. Her father was a carpenter named Elijah Knox, a mulatto who was probably the son of a white farmer, Henry Jacobs, and a slave named Athena Knox; her mother was Delilah Horniblow. Harriet had a brother, John S. Jacobs. After her mother’s death in about 1819, Harriet Jacobs lived with her mother’s mistress, Margaret Horniblow, where she learned to read and write and became an accomplished seamstress. Margaret Horniblow died in 1825, apparently leaving Harriet, now twelve years old, to her five-year-old niece (although there are questions about the legitimacy of the codicil to the will that made this bequest, which Horniblow did not sign). The result was that the niece’s father, Dr. James Norcom, became in effect Jacobs’s master—and her tormentor for nearly a decade, alternatively threatening and cajoling her in making advances; he never did resort to using force. Jacobs, in an effort to escape his unwanted attentions, paired herself with a white lawyer, Samuel Sawyer, and the two had two children, Joseph and Louisa. Norcom yet threatened to force the children to work on a plantation as slaves if Jacobs did not submit to him. Determined not to let this happen, Jacobs escaped in 1835, to spend seven years hiding out in the attic of her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a free black who operated a bakery out of her home. Norcom, as Jacobs had predicted, no longer had any use for the children, so he sold them to Sawyer, who granted them their freedom and then arranged for Jacobs and the children to flee to the North.

In 1842 Jacobs was able to escape to Philadelphia, where members of the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, an antislavery group, took her in. In 1845 the group helped her get to New York, where she found work as a nursemaid in the home of a prominent writer, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and his wife, Mary. After Mary died, Jacobs remained with Willis and even traveled with him to England. Upon her return to the United States she left Willis’s employment and went first to Boston to be with her children and then to Rochester, New York, to be with her brother, John, who had opened a local antislavery reading room and was an abolitionist lecturer. There she became friends with Amy Post, a Quaker and staunch abolitionist who had recently attended the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Jacobs joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, raising money for the reading room by giving lectures.

When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, Jacobs and her brother began to fear for their safety, for Norcom had been unrelenting in his efforts to find her. John decided to join the California gold rush, principally because California was not enforcing the act. By this time, Jacobs was back in New York City, where she was informed that the husband of her legal owner had checked into a hotel. Fearing that she would be kidnapped, she returned to the Willis family. In 1852 the new Mrs. Willis purchased Jacobs’s freedom for $300. Jacobs was grateful, but at the same time she expressed her dismay at having to gain her freedom by being “purchased.” She wrote that she felt she had been deprived of a victory in gaining her freedom this way.

Sometime around 1852 or 1853, Post suggested that Jacobs write her life story. Jacobs favored the idea, and over the next several years she wrote while living at the Willis home, named Idlewild, in Cornwall, New York. She completed the manuscript in 1858 but was initially unable to find a publisher. One publisher agreed to publish the book only if the well-known writer Lydia Maria Child would pen an introduction for it. Child agreed, but before the book could be published, the firm went out of business. Finally, the book was published privately in 1861. During the Civil War, Jacobs used her newfound celebrity to raise funds to help southern blacks who had fled the Confederacy. After a stay in Savannah, Georgia, she returned north in 1866, to spend her final decades with her daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died, having survived into her mid-eighties, on March 7, 1897.