Harriet Jacobs: Part II

In the late 1820s, Harriet Jacobs fell in love with a free Black man who worked as a carpenter in her home town. The couple wished to marry, but as a slave, Jacobs could not marry without her owner’s permission, least of all to a free man. Her incipient fiancé offered to buy Jacobs from Norcom (alias Dr. Flint) but Norcom refused.

            Of what happened next, Jacobs writes:

And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame…The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world. I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation. But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished, I, also could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by laws; and I should have been spared the painful task of confessing what I am not about to relate; but all my prospects have been blighted by slavery.

            This passage serves as a reminder that Jacobs’ purpose in writing her narrative was to convince White Northern women of the evils of slavery. Despite the fact that American women would not have a federally guaranteed right to vote until 1920, there was already a strong tradition of female activism by the time Jacobs wrote her narrative in the 1850s (it came out in 1861). In the North in the early 19^th century, the women’s movements focused on abolitionism as well as women’s suffrage.

            The way that Jacob’s directs her narrative to a White, female audience shows a few interesting things. One, it reveals a belief that despite lacking a franchise, women could still exert a degree of influence over American political life. It also shows a burgeoning “cult of domesticity” in the United States. In a nutshell, this middle class ideal of gender roles emphasized religious piety and sexual purity in women. It also raised “the home” onto a pedestal as a place of refuge from the rough and tumble life of industrialization in the outside world. Jacobs recognized that her sexual history placed her far outside this ideal, something that could discredit her whole story because she was a “fallen woman.” Jacobs therefore wanted to emphasize how the institution of slavery legally barricaded her and other Black women from achieving this ideal, ergo proving the evils of slavery.

            So, what was this shameful, sorrowful thing that Jacobs had done “with deliberate calculation?”

            She took a White lover, in large part to frustrate her nemesis, Dr. Norcom. As a teenager, still being pursued by Dr. Norcom, Jacobs had come to the acquaintance of a White man whom she called Mr. Sands. Most historians believe that he was Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a lawyer and future representative of North Carolina in Congress. Like Norcom, Sawyer demonstrated and interest in Jacobs but in a kinder, more flirtatious, less creepy way. Additionally, Sawyer was at the time unmarried (so, no jealous wife) and more importantly, Jacobs was not his property, making the relationship less coercive. Jacobs calls his attentions flattering but frames the affair as primarily a way to snub Dr. Norcom.

            Jacobs and Sawyer had two children together, Joseph in 1829, and Matilda Louise in 1833. Because Jacobs was a slave, so too were the children, however, Sawyer ultimately bought his children from Norcom and sent them to live with Jacobs’ freed grandmother, before sending them to the North to live more truly free lives.

            Both Norcom and Jacobs’ grandmother were furious with her for engaging in this affair. While Jacobs’ grandmother eventually forgave her, Norcom punished her by sending her to work on his son’s plantation.

            In between the birth of her son and daughter, Jacobs’ life was upset by one of the watershed moments of American history: Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831.

            Southern slave-holders had tried to assuage Northern discomfort with slavery by claiming that slaves were happy in their condition and that being enslaved was in fact “good for them.” Post-Civil War historical narratives, up until the Civil Rights movement tried to again perpetuate the myth that slavery “wasn’t so bad” and tried to erase all incidents of slave rebellion. While full blown slave rebellions were not as common as small acts of defiance – such as Jacobs’ affair with Sawyer – they did happen and White slaveholders were terrified of them, especially after the Haitian Revolution in 1789-1804 resulted in a successful slave uprising and the first free Black republic in the Caribbean (which the U.S. government under Jefferson significantly weakened through isolation and boycott).

           

            The early 19^th century was a time of religious revival in the United States known as the “Second Great Awakening.” For Harriet Jacobs, religious revival provided a lens through which she viewed the hypocrisy of slave owners. For Nat Turner, it helped to provide the motivation to rebel. In case the degradation of slavery was not enough, Nat Turner was one of many Americans at this time who believed he was receiving revelations from God and his revelations told him to rebel and lead his people to freedom. In August of 1831, Turner and his conspirators attacked the auspiciously named town of Jerusalem, Virginia, killing his master, his master’s wife and children, along with some fifty other Whites. Most of the conspirators were caught right away, but Turner escaped, and a manhunt for him continued for several months before he was caught, executed, and his remains distributed as souvenirs/ rendered for wagon wheel grease.

             Nationally, Nat Turner’s rebellions stoked the fire of the slavery controversy that had been burning since the foundation of the republic. Abolitionists saw the rebellion as further proof that slavery should end, arguing that without emancipation, more violent rebellions loomed in the future. The immediate result of the rebellion, however, was for slaveholders to double down, further restricting the freedoms and movements of slaves in order to prevent rebellion. (You know, because that always works.)

            For Jacobs, the rebellion brought violence to Edenton, but not in the form of a copycat slave revolt. Perhaps the most clever, dangerous, and diabolical thing that the Southern White planter class did was to mobilize poor Whites against slaves and free Blacks. Socio-economically, the poor Whites had far more in common with free Blacks and enslaved people than with planters. Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 in Virginia saw an alliance of Black slaves and White indentured servants that terrified the big wigs, who used racial ideologies to drive a wedge between these otherwise natural allies.

            In the autumn of 1831, Jacobs witnessed this mobilization firsthand. After the rebellion, the town leadership called upon the militia, mostly composed of poor Whites, to search Edenton for conspirators and possible rebellion. Jacobs knew exactly what this meant:

I knew the houses were to be searched; and I expected it would be done by country bullies and the poor whites. I knew nothing annoyed them so much as to see colored people living in comfort and respectability…It was a grand opportunity for low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation.  

What followed was a brief but intense reign of terror by these deputized Whites upon the Black population (free and enslaved) of Edenton. Jacobs considered herself and her family lucky: her grandmother’s house was trashed and some of her property stolen, but they were spared the violent attacks that many other Black inhabitants suffered.

            Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Harriet Jacobs’ life is her protracted escape from slavery. Jacobs ran away both to escape Norcom, but also, in hopes that Sawyer would buy and free their children (which he duly did). However, rather than running straight for the North, Jacob’s only got as far as her grandmother’s attic, where she hid for seven years in a crawl space estimated to be nine feet long, seven feet wide, and no more than three feet tall at its highest point. Unable to move or exercise, scarcely protected from the elements, Jacobs’ remained concealed for seven years, her only comfort being the small hole through which she could sometimes observe her children. Meanwhile, Norcom and others assumed that Jacobs had escaped to the North and had sent agents looking for her.

            Even when Jacobs was at last smuggled out of her grandmother’s house and to the free states in North, it did not mean full freedom yet, due to the Fugitive Slave Laws. These laws insisted that escaped slaves in the North were not free by virtue of their escape, but were in fact still property and therefore, their owners had the right to reclaim them. This is one of the reasons why many slaves on the underground railroad sought refuge in Canada. As long as they remained in U.S. jurisdiction, they were targets for the bounty hunters that prowled Northern cities, looking for runaways. Most Northerners hated the law for a number of reasons. First, it delegitimized their status as “free” states. Second, it legalized kidnapping and free Blacks often got caught up in the net. In days before photo ID, there were few ways to definitively prove that they were not runaway slaves. The law compelled Northern jurisdictions to cooperate in the “recovery of property” and for the most part, Northerners simply neglected to enforce the law. (Not unlike the “sanctuary cities” of today, where local municipalities leave immigration enforcement up to the federal government.)

The advertisement issued by Norcom offering a reward for Jacobs and a description of her.

  Finally reunited with her children and brother in New York, Jacobs’ life was once more darkened by Norcom who came to reclaim her. She was only at last free of him when her employer, Cornelia Willis, bought Jacobs from Norcom and set her free. Afterwards, Jacobs ran in abolitionist circles and was eventually persuaded to write her memoirs. She was reluctant at first to write her story due to her shame at her sexual history. She was especially concerned about how her daughter – who didn’t know the story – would react.

Louisa Matilda responded positively to the truth and believed her mother to be courageous not only for what she endured, but for sharing her story. For the rest of Jacobs’ life, the mother daughter duo continued to fight for the rights of African Americans by working as nurses in the Civil War, by helping freedmen adjust to emancipation, and working with the National Association of Colored Women in Washington, DC.  

Sources:

For sources specifically on Harriet Jacobs, see my first post in this series.

Samuel Tredwell Sawyer

America’s Response to the Haitian Revolution

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

            National Geographic

            Did African American Slaves Rebel? By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

From the August 1861 issue of The Atlantic, an account of the rebellion by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Time Magazine

            History Matters, GMU

Fugitive Slave Laws

            Time Magazine: What the Fugitive Slave Acts Can Teach Us About Sanctuary Cities

            Miscellaneous other articles about the Fugitive Slave Acts

Bacon’s Rebellion

Advertisement for the capture of Harriet Jacobs

Catherine J. Lavender, ʺNotes on The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood,ʺ Prepared for Students in HST 386: Women in the City, Department of History, The College of Staten Island/CUNY (1998), https://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/history/files/lavender/386/truewoman.pdf

Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Part I

You are probably familiar with slaves-turned escapees-turned activists such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. I want to tell you about another such woman who is not taught as often and maybe you haven’t hear of: Harriet Jacobs, known more widely in the North by her nom-de-plum “Linda Brent” which she adopted in writing her memoir to protect those who had helped her escape slavery. Although less well known today than Tubman or Truth, much of what Jacobs recalls in her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is representative of the type of abuse typically faced by female slaves.

Jacobs was born around 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina. Jacobs describes it as being a small town where everyone knew each other, a fact that she felt sheltered her some degree from her master’s abuses and which ultimately allowed her to escape. Had she lived in the isolation of a plantation, Jacobs suggests that she may have suffered a worse fate.

Jacobs recalled her childhood and her first mistress fondly, however, before the reader gets too cozy with the false narrative that slavery “wasn’t so bad,” Jacobs has this to say, “I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America.” However enjoyable her early childhood may have been, Jacobs was still considered chattel and in her mistress’ will, Jacobs was bequeathed her mistress’ four-year-old niece.

Jacobs was eleven at the time, and has little to say about the young girl she was enslaved to, but the girls’ parents – whom Jacobs called Dr. and Mrs. Flint in her narrative – treated their slaves cruelly, something that Jacobs herself began to experience after she turned fifteen. Dr. Flint, who was forty years older than teenage Jacobs, began to make salacious comments at her and tried to solicit sex from her. In Jacobs’ own words:

Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but always in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows…She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn 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 cannot tell you 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.

This form of abuse was not unusual. In fact, sexual abuse of female slaves was commonplace and there were no laws to protect slaves from rape and sexual abuse any more than there were laws to protect them from being beaten or killed by their masters. They were, after all, “property.” (One of the great and infuriating ironies is that after emancipation, there were widespread fears within white communities of black men raping white women, and countless black men were lynched on such charges, when in fact, for centuries, there had been systemic rape and sexual abuse of black women perpetrated by white men.) Even though it was not illegal or unusual for slaveholders to have sex with their slaves, it was still socially unacceptable and was therefore, often swept under the rug.

            Perhaps you remember Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress Sally Hemmings? (If you don’t, stay tuned for an upcoming post.)

This political cartoon that circulated during the election of 1804 not only associated Jefferson with the violence of the French Revolution by depicting him as a rooster (it was a revolutionary symbol – don’t worry about it) but also derided him for his alleged relationship with Sally Hemmings. The Jefferson-Hemmings controversy shows not only that the American public has always been scandalized by politicians’ sex lives, but also shows that to the 19^th century American public, sex between a man and his slave was even more scandalous.

            Just in case slavery by itself wasn’t bad enough, in American slave codes the status of a child as free or enslaved depended on the status of one’s mother, thus allowing for a self-perpetuating slave population in the United States, even after the international slave trade ended. Moreover, we know that since sexual relations between white men and their slaves was not uncommon, that often the children of female slaves were also the children of white slave owners. However, to again reference the slave codes, if your mom was a slave, you were a slave, even if your dad owned the whole dang plantation. Therefore, raping female slaves provided white slaveholders with a cheap way of maintaining his slave population by LITERALLY ENSLAVING HIS OWN CHILDREN. (If this does not make your blood boil with rage and fury, go back and re-read this paragraph and then really let it sink in.)

            The white wives of philandering slave holders were frequently aware of what their husbands were up to. As Jacobs recalled, sometimes these women would insist that their husbands free their illegitimate mixed race children, but more often, the wives would insist on selling their husband’s children, and possibly the unfortunate mothers as well. As I mentioned in my previous post, women tend to identify more strongly with their race and social class than with gender, meaning that most white wives of slave holders were not at all sympathetic to their husbands’ black victims, and often treated them with disdain and cruelty.

Dr. James Norcom, whom Harriet Jacobs called "Dr. Flint" in her narrative

            Jacobs describes how Mrs. Flint responded when she confronted Jacobs over Dr. Flint’s dogged sexual harassment of his still teenaged slave girl:

She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed.

Jacobs was certainly sympathetic to Mrs. Flint’s position, and wished that Mrs. Flint had showed some kindness or sympathy to her in return. 

Mary Matilda Horniblow Norcom, "Mrs. Flint" who was 16 when she married 32-year-old Dr. Norcom in 1810.

After learning that Jacobs had avoided having sex with Dr. Flint, Mrs. Flint provided Jacobs with a modicum of protection, however, Jacobs never felt that this protection was for her own benefit, and Mrs. Flint became an abuser in her own way. For instance, Dr. Flint insisted that his young daughter should sleep in his room, which would require a slave or servant to also sleep in the room to tend to the child if she woke up. Guess who he picked for the job? But Mrs. Flint interceded:

She now took me to sleep in a room adjoining her own. There I was an object of her especial care, though not of especial comfort, for she spent many a sleepless night to watch over me. Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she whispered in my ear, as thought it was her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer. If she startled me, on such occasions, she would glide stealthily away; and the next morning she would tell me I had been talking in my sleep and ask who I was talking to. At last, I began to be fearful for my life. It had been often threatened; and you can imagine, better than I can describe, what an unpleasant sensation it must produce to wake up in the dead of night and find a jealous woman bending over you.

Harriet Jacobs had mild hope of escaping this awful situation when she fell in love with a free black man who wanted to marry her. But alas, this was not to be.

To be continued…

Sources:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (full text available on Project Gutenberg)

I also consulted Book 5 of the Bedford Anthology of World Literature which has excerpts from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and also a context guide that I found very helpful in my research.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of Harriet Jacobs’ story next week – or click the Project Gutenberg link and read on for yourself! Or, check out this website for more information about Jacobs and her life.

For more information on Dr. and Mrs. Norcom (aka Dr. and Mrs. Flint)