The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (42 page)

Like Frederick Douglass, Jacobs was a very privileged slave, compared to the mass of field hands—but, given her situation, she was even more miserable than Douglass. Both of these slaves had happy early childhoods, lost contact with mothers, and became close to grandmothers. Harriet’s first owner,
Margaret Horniblow, taught her to read and write. Both slaves were sent to plantations as a kind of punishment and both overcame their masters’ efforts to break their rebellious spirits. Both attempted in different ways to escape—Harriet by hiding for seven years in a cramped space not far from her master—and both succeeded in reaching free soil in the North, in changing their names, and in avoiding recapture until supporters actually purchased their freedom.
³³

Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 (five years before Douglass). At age twelve, upon the death of Margaret Horniblow, she became the property of Horniblow’s three-year-old niece—Dr. James Norcom’s daughter. Before long, Jacobs attracted the libido of Norcom, who became her de facto master. Jacobs was as determined to resist his sexual advances, originally in the form of notes and whispers, as Douglass had been determined to resist Edward Covey’s assault upon his manhood. Norcom’s wife, Mary, became intensely jealous of Jacobs’s hold on her husband’s sexual attention, and Jacobs would awaken in the middle of the night to find Mrs. Norcom leaning over the bed to make sure her husband was not there. Because Mary
Norcom was so eager to get
Jacobs out of the house, she was able to move and live with her nearby grandmother, who had been freed and had purchased a house thanks to her sales of prepared foods.
³⁴

As Norcom’s sexual advances continued, Jacobs concluded at age fifteen or sixteen that the only way to prevent an inevitable end to these solicitations would be to agree to an affair with a friendly and eminent local lawyer, later a U.S. Congressman,
Samuel Tredwell Sawyer.

Jacobs’s affair with Sawyer led to the birth of two children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. Sawyer eventually purchased both, as well as Jacobs’s younger brother,
John S. Jacobs, and allowed all three to continue living with Jacobs’s grandmother. But while Sawyer was of much help in enabling Jacobs to have contact with her children and free herself from Norcom, the affair caused her to struggle with a sense of guilt, given her religious commitment to Victorian standards of female morality, which she answered with the claim that slave women must be judged by a different set of moral standards. Her editor,
Lydia Maria Child, realized that the sexual content of
Incidents
might offend Victorian sensibilities and defended lifting the “veil” “for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them.”
³⁶

Although Norcom was infuriated by the continuing affair, he was still obsessed with having sex with Jacobs, without actually raping her: “You are mine; and you shall be mine for life. There lives no human being that can take you out of slavery. I would have done it; but you rejected my kind offer.”
³⁷
Norcom finally issued a clear-cut ultimate demand: Jacobs could either live in a cottage as his concubine, with the promise that her children would be freed; or he would send her to his son’s plantation in Auburn, North Carolina, a place, she heard, “to break us all in to abject submission to our lot as slaves.”
³⁸
When Jacobs rejected the cottage, Norcom’s fury was too extreme to be printed: “ ‘Very well. Go to the plantation, and my curse go with you,’
he replied. ‘Your boy shall be put to work, and he shall soon be sold; and your girl shall bee [
sic
] raised for the purpose of selling well. Go your own ways!’ He left the room with curses, not to be repeated.”
³⁹

Jacobs was spared from field work on the plantation, but worked endless hours as a house maid for Norcom’s son’s new wife. Above all, she concluded that unless she took some drastic step, such as running away, Norcom would use the treatment of her children as a device for abusing her, even sending them to the plantation to be “broken” as slaves. If she did escape, she thought he might well sell Joseph and Louisa to their father, who might free them. As it happened, contrary to Norcom’s wishes,
Sawyer did secretly purchase the children and her brother by means of a slave speculator, after she became a fugitive. But it took him a long time to free even his own children, perhaps because he feared that doing so would harm his political ambitions.
⁴⁰

Meanwhile, one midnight, Jacobs prayed to God for guidance and protection, jumped from a high window into the rain, and then, aided by her uncle, hid for some time in various local refuges, including a swamp, before moving to a cupboard or garret above her grandmother’s storehouse, seven feet wide and sloping down to a height of three feet, with a small trapdoor through which family members could give her food and other necessities. Incredibly, she lived in that cramped space, undetected, for seven years. Since she could stand up at one end of the garret, she bored holes in the cupboard for air and light, and was able to sew cloth and read the Bible and other works. Surrounded by mice and rats, she baked in the summer and had frostbite in the winter. Nevertheless, she considered this choice far better than the life of most slaves:

Predictably, the news of
Jacobs’s disappearance infuriated Norcom, who advertised a reward of $100 for the apprehension and delivery of his “light mulatto” “Servant Girl HARRIET,” who “will probably appear, if abroad, tricked out in gay and fashionable finery.” Warning all persons “under the most rigorous penalties of the law” against harboring her or helping her escape, Norcom stressed that since “this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation, it is probable she designs to transport herself to the North.”
⁴²
Locally, he searched countless locations and terrorized her family and friends, even confining some of them in jail. Norcom now transferred his sexual obsession into an obsession for tracking down this rebellious fugitive and recovering his power as a master. In Yellin’s words, Norcom “angrily marshaled the entire resource of the slave power—sheriff, patrols, courts, and the press—to catch her.” He even traveled three times to
New York City in search of his once-desired concubine and during the rest of his life (he died in 1850) pursued various schemes for her recapture.
⁴³

Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who was elected to Congress in 1837 and married the next year, saw Jacobs in hiding and promised that he would free their children and try to get Jacobs sold to him. Communicating through her grandmother, Jacobs agreed that Louisa should be sent north to live with Sawyer’s cousin in Brooklyn, since Norcom was claiming that the sale of the children to the slave speculator was illegal.
⁴⁴

By 1842, Jacobs became convinced that she needed to get north in order to see Louisa and send for Joseph, in part because she feared that Louisa was being treated as a slave. After a friend told her grandmother about a ship she could board, she succeeded in fleeing to New York, receiving help on the way from the
Vigilance Committee in
Philadelphia. In New York she became a nurse to a prominent family and was able to spend time with Louisa, who, to her distress, had not been freed and was not being sent to school as promised.
⁴⁵

Jacobs’s life during the next years became extremely complicated, as a result of the continuing danger of her being apprehended, her relations with her children and brother, and her ties with her wealthy New York employer, the
Willis family. Attempts to capture Jacobs, which led to moves between New York and
Boston, even involved her legal owner, Norcom’s grown daughter and her husband, who traveled to the North in search of her (and eventually sold her, thanks to
the
Willis family’s intervention).
Jacobs’s brother John S. (probably for “
Sawyer”) ran away from Sawyer in 1838, served as a sailor for two years, and ended up in Boston and then Rochester as an abolitionist speaker. Jacobs and her children built a flourishing life in Boston and interacted closely with the black community there. But after tending
Mary Stace Willis’s baby daughter in New York, Jacobs retained close ties with that family. When Mary died in childbirth in 1845, her husband traveled to Boston and persuaded Jacobs to accompany him on a trip to England, to take care of the daughter as they visited his wife’s grieving family.
⁴⁶

In 1849, John S. Jacobs succeeded through his abolitionist contacts in obtaining his niece Louisa’s entrance as a “colored female” into the exclusive
Young Ladies Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York, and he prepared a move to Rochester and an itinerary with
Frederick Douglass. Harriet Jacobs understandably chose to move to Rochester so that she could be nearer her daughter’s boarding school and could work with her brother on his new project of running the
Anti-Slavery Reading Room, above the offices of Douglass’s new newspaper, the
North Star.
Since her brother was often away on lecture tours, Jacobs in effect ran the reading room. She lived with noted
Quaker abolitionists, Amy and
Isaac Post, and was surprised to find herself feeling at home with this white family. The Posts were pillars of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and strong supporters of the
North Star
and of Douglass’s challenge to school segregation.
Amy Post had recently attended the
Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention and according to one historian, she and her circle “reshaped the landscape of female activism in Rochester.”
⁴⁷

Jacobs developed an intimate friendship with Amy Post, to whom she slowly and bit by bit confided her personal history as a slave. It was Amy Post, reinforced by Jacobs’s brother, who finally overcame Jacobs’s strong reluctance to contribute to the abolitionist cause by writing and publishing a full account of the “incidents” in her life as a slave. As Post later recalled, Jacobs could not think of divulging her secrets to strangers “when it was all she could do to sob them into her friend’s ear”: “Though impelled by a natural craving for human sympathy, she passed through a baptism of suffering, even in recounting her trials to me.… The burden of these memories lay heavily upon her spirit.”
⁴⁸

In 1853, a year after a recapture scare and after Cornelia Grinell
Willis solicited funds to purchase her freedom, Jacobs decided to begin to write her story. (She had earlier rejected an offer to have it included in
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.) At one crucial moment, she heard that her beloved but judgmental grandmother had died in North Carolina. This removed the last psychological obstacle to revealing her troubled sexual history. A few months earlier she had published three letters in the
New York Tribune,
signed “A
Fugitive Slave,” describing the kind of sexual crimes masters committed against their female
slaves.
⁴⁹

Working mostly at night, after caring for the children and family with whom she lived, Jacobs completed the manuscript in 1858. Despite
Lydia Maria Child’s offer to edit the work and write an introduction, there were fortuitous problems in getting it published. Two Boston publishers accepted the manuscript but then went bankrupt. In 1861, it was published by a Boston printer “for the author,” but the book sold widely in bookstores and by antislavery agents and was even pirated by a publisher in England. When Jacobs went off to Washington early in the
Civil War to do relief work among the so-called contrabands who had fled from
slavery—and she would continue to work for
Quakers in distributing clothing, teaching, and providing health care—she was well recognized by abolitionists as the author of the most vivid and compelling account of the anguish, suffering, and dilemmas slave women faced as they lost real control over their “owned” bodies.
⁵⁰

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs achieved remarkably free and successful lives after escaping to free soil, but the hazards they faced are indicated by the fact that both achieved true liberty only after friends purchased their
legal
freedom. The boundaries fugitives faced involved both physical space and the law, and free soil was defined by law. We turn now to the conflict between North and South over the meaning of free soil—a nonissue before 1777, when racial slavery was legal and relatively unchallenged in all the North American colonies.

The American Revolution led to the emancipation of the small number of slaves in Vermont in 1777 and in Massachusetts in the 1780s and to laws providing for the
gradual freeing of slaves in Pennsylvania in 1780 and in four other northeastern states by 1804. In 1787,
the
Northwest Ordinance seemed to ensure that the institution was doomed in the vast Northwest Territory north of the
Ohio River. These measures were very slow to take effect. Slavery remained legal if in diminishing importance in
New York until 1827, in Connecticut and
Illinois until 1848, and in
New Jersey until the Civil War. But as early as the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, a meeting in a state then committed to future freedom, it became clear to Southerners that the new nation would be divided between “free” and “slave” states and that this division would affect various crucial issues in the Constitution, ranging from national representation to the African slave trade. Although the Constitution significantly avoided use of the terms “slave” and “slavery,”
South Carolinians in particular were successful in gaining a provision regarding
fugitive slaves: