EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; HARRIET JACOBS P/125

                                                        Read Part One HERE                                                                                                                  

In this post I will continue to to focus on a woman named Harriet Jacobs. She lived from 1813 -1897. For ten years Harriet lived the tense and uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She found her daughter in Brooklyn, secured a place for both her children to live with her in Boston, and went to work as a nursemaid to the baby daughter of Mary Stace Willis. Dr Norton, in whose home Harriet had worked as a slave, made several attempts to locate her in New York, which forced her to keep on the move. 

In 1849, Harriet took up an eighteen-month residence in Rochester, New York, where she worked with her brother in a Rochester anti-slavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglass's newspaper "The North Star." In Rochester she met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitinist and pioneering feminist who gently urged the fugitive slave mother to consider making her story public. By the summer of 1857 Harriet had completed " a true and just account of my own life in slavery," an account of the sexual abuse of her and other slave women and their mothers' attempts to protect them.

Harriet's book was published by a Boston printer in 1860. The British edition appeared a year later. The anti-slavery press in the US as well as the anti-slavery press in the UK praised her book. However, the success of the book was quickly overshadowd by the gathering clouds of civil war in the US.

Read Part One Hundred And Twenty-Six HERE