Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813 - March 7, 1897) was an American writer, escaped slave, abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs' single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym "Linda Brent", was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual abuse they endured. Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813[1] and had a brother John S. Jacobs. Her father Elijah Knox was an enslaved mulatto house carpenter owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Elijah was said to be the son of the enslaved woman Athena Knox and a white farmer, Henry Jacobs.[2] Harriet's mother was Delilah Horniblow, an enslaved mulatto woman held by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet and John inherited the status of "slave" from their mother. Harriet lived with her mother until Delilah's death around 1819, when Harriet was six. Then she lived with her mother's mistress Margaret Horniblow, who taught Harriet to read, write and sew. In 1825, Margaret Horniblow died and willed the twelve-year-old Harriet to Horniblow's five-year-old niece. The girl's father, Dr. James Norcom, became Harriet's de facto master. Three months before she died, Jacob’s mistress had signed a will leaving her slaves to her mother, but Dr. James Norcom and a man named Henry Flury witnessed a later codicil to the will directing that Harriet be left to Norcom's daughter, Mary Matilda. The codicil was not signed by Margaret Hornibow. [3] Norcom sexually harassed Harriet for nearly a decade. He refused to allow her to marry, regardless of a man's status. Hoping to escape his attentions, Jacobs took Samuel Sawyer, a free white lawyer, as a consensual lover. He would become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. With Sawyer, she had two children, Joseph and Louisa. As the children shared Harriet's status and were born into slavery, Norcom was their master.[4] Harriet reported that Norcom threatened to sell her children if she refused his sexual advances. By 1835 her domestic situation had become unbearable, and Harriet deftly managed to escape. Jacobs hid in the home of a slaveowner in Edenton to keep an eye on her children. After a short stay, she took refuge in a swamp called Cabarrus Pocosin. She then hid in a crawl space above a shack in her grandmother Molly’s home. Jacobs lived for seven years in her grandmother's attic before escaping to the North by boat to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1842. Her children lived with Jacobs's grandmother so, while in hiding, Jacobs had glimpses of them and could hear their voices. Before Jacobs escaped from North Carolina, Sawyer purchased her two children from Norcom and gave them freedom.[5] He helped arrange for their travel to the North and work there. After reaching the North in 1842, Jacobs was taken in by anti-slavery friends from the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee. They helped her get to New York in September 1845.[6] There she found work as a nursemaid in the home of Nathaniel Parker Willis and made a new life. She was also able to see her daughter, Louisa, who had been sent to New York at a young age to be a “waiting-maid.” Her brother, John S. Jacobs, was also there and could help warn her if Dr. Norcom arrived in New York to look for her. In 1845, Jacob’s employer Mary Stace Willis died. Jacobs continued to care for her daughter Imogen and assist Nathaniel Willis. In January she traveled to England with him and his daughter. In letters home, Jacobs claimed there was no prejudice against people of color in England. After returning from England, Jacobs left her employment with the Willises and moved to Boston to visit with her daughter, son and brother for 10 months. Her brother, John S. Jacobs, who was part of the anti-slavery movement, in 1849 decided to open an anti-slavery reading room in Rochester, New York. [7] John Jacobs found a school for Louisa and by November 1849, she was attending the Young Ladies Domestic Seminary School located in Clinton, New York. The school was founded by abolitionist Hiram Huntington Kellogg in 1832. In 1849 Jacobs joined her brother in Rochester, New York, where she met Quaker Amy Post. Amy and her husband Isaac were staunch abolitionists. As Jacobs became part of the Anti-Slavery Society, she became very politicized. She helped support the Anti-Slavery Reading Room by speaking to audiences in Rochester to educate people and to raise money. On October 1, 1850 John S. Jacobs's speech was quoted in Meetings of Colored Citizens. Following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, both John Jacobs and Harriet Jacobs feared for each other’s safety. They left Rochester together and returned to New York City. John, furious about the act, wanted to leave the country. When he heard that the new state of California did not enforce the Act, he decided to go there. He worked in the gold mines during the Gold Rush, where he was joined in 1852 by Joseph, Harriet's son. On February 29, 1852 Jacobs was informed that Daniel Messmore, the husband of her young legal mistress, had checked into a hotel in New York. To avert the risk of Jacobs being kidnapped, Cornelia Grinnell Willis took Harriet and the Willis baby to a friend’s house where they would hide. Willis encouraged Jacobs to take the baby and go to Willis relatives in Massachusetts. Without Jacobs's knowledge, Cornelia Willis paid $300 to Messmore for the rights to Harriet, to end her jeopardy. Jacobs was then a free woman and returned to New York with the Willis child.[8] In late 1852 or early 1853, Amy Post suggested that Jacobs should write her life story. She also suggested that Jacobs contact the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was working on The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Stowe wanted to use Jacobs's history in her own book, Jacobs decided to write her own account. She wrote secretly at night, in a nursery in the Willis’ Idle-wild estate. In June 1853, Jacobs was motivated to respond to an article in the New York Tribune by former first lady Julia Tyler, called “The Women of England vs. the Women of America”. her letter was her first published work. She thought since she had been through the slave life that Tyler wrote about, she had every right to comment on Tyler's article. Jacobs continued to write her life and letters to newspapers for the next few years. In 1854, as Nathaniel Parker Willis was downstairs writing Out-doors at Idlewild; Or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson, Jacobs was upstairs completing her own manuscript. In 1856, Jacobs's daughter Louisa became a governess in the home of James and Sara Payson Willis Parton (also known as the writer, Fanny Fern and Nathaniel Parker Willis' sister).[9] Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl while living and working at Idlewild, Willis's home on the Hudson River.[10] Jacobs's autobiographical accounts were first published in serial form in the New York Tribune, a newspaper owned and edited by abolitionist Horace Greeley. Her reports of sexual abuse were considered too shocking for the average newspaper reader of the day, and the paper ceased publishing her account before its completion. Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print the work in book form, if Jacobs could convince Willis or Harriet Beecher Stowe to provide a preface. She refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe turned her down. As it happened, the Phillips and Samson company soon closed shop.[11] Jacobs did sign an agreement with the Thayer and Eldridge publishing house, which requested a preface by Lydia Maria Child.[11] Child also edited the book and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women remained in contact for much of their lives. Thayer and Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy before the narrative could be published. Finally the narrative was published by a Boston, Massachusetts publisher in 1861. The narrative was designed to appeal to middle class white Christian women in the North, focusing on the impact of slavery on women's chastity and sexual virtues. Christian women could perceive how slavery was a temptation to masculine lusts and vice as well as to womanly virtues. Jacobs criticized the religion of the Southern United States as being un-Christian and as emphasizing the value of money ("If I am going to hell, bury my money with me," says a particularly brutal and uneducated slaveholder). She described another slaveholder with, "He boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer follower." Jacobs argued that these men were not exceptions to the general rule. Much of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was devoted to the Jacobs's struggle to free her two children after she escaped. Before that, Harriet spent seven years hiding in a tiny space built into her grandmother's barn to see and hear the voices of her children. Jacobs changed the names of all characters in the novel, including her own, to conceal their true identities. The villainous slave owner "Dr. Flint" was based on Jacobs's former master, Dr. James Norcom. Despite the publisher's documents of authenticity, some critics attacked the narrative as based on false accounts. There was a reaction against the more horrific details of slave narratives, and some readers acted as if they could not be true. Starting in January 1861, the United States began to slowly fall apart; South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had all seceded from the Union. In February, representatives from the southern states elected Jefferson Davis to be President of the Confederacy. At this time, Harriet Jacobs and her editor, Lydia Marie Child, were trying to sell Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. They wrote to authors and editors of newspapers, to bookstore owners, and to friends or frequent correspondents; they wanted anyone to advertise or sell Jacob’s narrative. In May of 1861, John S. Jacobs, Harriet’s younger brother, was in London to publish a condensed version of her narrative called A True Tale of Slavery. This book tells Harriet Jacobs's story quite accurately; however, it leaves out any evidence of sexual harassment by her owner. John S. Jacobs's goal in writing his book was to convince the people of England to support the Union and to oppose slavery. Not long after he published his narrative, tensions grew to an all-time high between the North and the South in the United States, and the Civil War began in April 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.