As the months went on, Stowe’s US royalties continued to amass. Within eighteen months of publication, Stowe earned $60,000. Requests for support likewise piled up, especially from her own family. Douglass sought her patronage for an industrial school for Black men he hoped to found. Though she had earlier approached him for advice about how to fund antislavery, she spilled out her frustration at his request for Black freedpeople: “If they want one [a school] why don’t they have one—many men among the colored people are richer than I am—& better able to help such an object—Will they ever learn to walk?”40
At times, Stowe resented her responsibility to the antislavery movement, but at others she assumed the mantle of its white-appointed leader with pride. A highlight of her 1853 trip to England was a lunch reception at Stafford House, the London mansion of the philanthropists the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland and an internationally famous center of reform. Inspired by Stowe’s novel, the duchess had helped coordinate a petition appealing to American white women to oppose slavery on the same sentimental grounds that Stowe had articulated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: slavery violated the sanctity of marriage, removed children from parents, and prevented slaves from obtaining Christian educations. The signatures of the 560,000 British women who endorsed the “Stafford House Address” were delivered as a personal gift to Stowe in twenty-six leather-bound volumes. This was a triumph for the author and evidence of her prominence within a key strain of feminism: white women’s moral authority.
At the mansion, Stowe was presented to lords and ladies, marquises and marchionesses, and poets and archbishops under the glow of a skylight forty feet aloft illuminating the gilt interior of the most lavish grand hall and double staircase in Europe. The duchess awarded the author with a valuable token to mark her personal appreciation for Stowe’s efforts: a heavy gold chain-link bracelet shaped in the form of slave shackles. “We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken,” the bracelet proclaimed, and other links were inscribed with the 1807 date of the vote to abolish the global slave trade and the 1833 abolition of slavery in British territory. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, Stowe had the 1863 date of US abolition inscribed on her golden slave-shackle bracelet.41
As news of Stowe’s trip appeared in the American press, Jacobs was needled by Stowe’s presumed ownership over the cause. “Think dear Amy that a visit to Stafford House would spoil me as Mrs. Stowe thinks petting is more than my race can bear,” she wrote to her confidante. “Well what a pity we poor blacks can’t have the firmness and stability of character that you white people have.”42 Stowe, she continued, was rather herself letting the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin get to her head.
While Harriet Beecher Stowe was being feted in England, Harriet Jacobs began to write in New York. The Willises had built a home on the Hudson River in order for Nathaniel Parker Willis to write and recover his failing health. Cornelia was pregnant once more, so it was left to Jacobs and the other four servants to pack up the Fourth Street house for their move upstate. Immersed in old newspapers, a public letter in the New York Tribune addressed to the Duchess of Sutherland and the ladies of England and authored by “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler” caught Jacobs’s eye. The former first lady Julia B. Tyler declaimed the “Stafford House Address,” defending slavery as a benevolent institution, alleging slave families were seldom separated, and telling British women to back off their high horse. “Leave it to the women of the South to alleviate the sufferings of their dependents while you take care of your own,” she scolded, referencing Britain’s widespread pauperism.43
Jacobs was incensed. That night, she picked up a pen to write something for the public eye for the first time. White women were holding a transatlantic debate about slavery, and she resolved to add her voice and experience, despite her lack of formal education. “Poor as [my account] may be, I had rather give it from my own hand, than have it said that I employed others to do it for me,” she wrote to the New York Tribune’s editor. Mrs. Tyler was wrong to assert that slaves are rarely sold, Jacobs insisted. In a tone both circumspect and blistering, she wondered aloud at white women like Tyler who defended a system that depended on sexual vice. “Would you not think that Southern Women had cause to despise that Slavery which forces them to bear so much deception practiced by their husbands?” she inquired. “A slaveholder seldom takes a white mistress, for she is an expensive commodity, not submissive as he would like.” She concluded her lengthy letter by endorsing the veracity of Stowe’s portrayal of slavery’s cruelties, adding, “But in Uncle Tom’s Cabin she has not told the half. Would that I had one spark from her store house of genius and talent I would tell you of my own sufferings.” Writing until the morning, she signed her letter “A Fugitive Slave,” sent it off to the Tribune, and boarded an early boat up the Hudson.44
That summer, while working sun-up to sundown tending the five Willis children, including caring for the newborn and sewing them all dolls, Jacobs found a spark. With Amy’s encouragement, she began to write her own narrative, by candlelight, after the children had gone to bed. She wrote in secret. Jacobs never trusted Nathaniel Parker Willis, who defended slavery. She didn’t tell Cornelia of her project either, a decision Jacobs’s biographer Jean Fagan Yellin attributes to her desire to maintain ownership over her text. “Mrs. Willis had bought her freedom,” Yellin writes, “but Jacobs alone would tell her story.”45
Nathaniel, a dandy famous for his extravagant style, had commissioned the architect Calvert Vaux, who the following decade would codesign Central Park, to create the eighteen-room house they called Idlewild. He intended the gabled estate to be a writers’ retreat for himself and his famous friends, including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Yet the most significant text ever written at Idlewild was penned by the nanny, up in the servants’ quarters, by the cover of night.
Jacobs wrote her narrative to invite solidarity with free Black Northerners and to kindle abolitionist fervor among Northern women by revealing that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs invited alliance with white women while refusing the analogy they insisted upon that equated white women’s experiences with the condition of enslavement. Employing the nineteenth-century style of direct address, she summoned intimacy in one breath while foreclosing the possibility of extractive sympathy in the next. “O reader, can you imagine my joy? No, you cannot, unless you have been a slave mother,” she wrote of her Northern reunion with Louisa.46
Over the course of two hundred pages, Jacobs achieved a remarkable feat: she portrayed her life to be both structured by a brutal political and economic system that depended on her body’s sexual capacity and punctuated by negotiations in which she found, against the odds, loopholes of retreat. She named her narrator Linda Brent, a pseudonym that enabled her to conceal her own identity as well as create a new speaking voice. When introducing Brent’s parentage on the very first page, Jacobs discreetly broached the topic of enslavers’ rape by noting that her grandmother Molly was fathered by a South Carolina planter. In this way, white men’s assault of Black women’s bodies figures literally as the precondition of her own tale and of her own body. Over and over, she illustrates that the institution of slavery was wrung out of the bruised, bleeding, and leaking bodies of Black women, often with white women’s tacit or explicit endorsement. Her account is not of individual bad actors, but of a structure saturated with misery.
Yet Jacobs stopped far short of providing what some readers likely most craved: the prurient details of sentimental torture porn. In the wake of Stowe’s novel, the abused, degraded slave woman was becoming a marketable figure of slavery’s cruelties. White taste for Black women’s pain too easily turned the enslaved into “erotic objects of sympathy,” in literary critic Marianne Noble’s apt summation. Sigmund Freud, sixty years later, would note how often his patients turned to the slave-beating scenes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for masturbation material.47 Where her wh
ite readers would have anticipated finding a desirable object of suffering, Jacobs instead presented them with a Black woman’s speaking subjectivity.
Jacobs approached her affair with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, which violated the respectability politics her grandmother had instilled within her and that her audience would demand of any woman worth their tears, with a mixture of forthrightness and mortification. “I will not try to screen myself behind the plea of compulsion from a master,” she advised. “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!” She closed the lengthy passage with once more asserting her capacity as a reasoning subject in full control of her actions: “Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”48
Harriet Jacobs. (Courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library)
Throughout her narrative, Jacobs wove an account of Linda Brent as a reasoning subject with agency and feeling together with an appeal to white women readers for their sympathy. The result is akin to the feedback sandwich known to teachers everywhere: package criticism within reassuring praise. Passage by passage, her narrator insists upon her full humanity as a person capable of reason and feeling, a survivor of an abusive system looking for solidarity. While white women readers warmed up easily to Black figures portrayed as subordinates, as “sweet, loving, defenseless, if sometimes naughty children” in Angela Davis’s description of the enslaved characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jacobs confronts her readers with her own agency and strategic appeals for their compassion. She turned sentimental writing into a vehicle for her own self-determination rather than a genre producing cathartic specimens of the suffering slave that ultimately stimulate the privileged reader.49
Morality, Jacobs insisted, does not transcend material conditions; it is enabled by them. Yet her narrator’s voice remains somewhat unconvinced by her own claims. Her shame at violating the standards of Christian monogamy bleeds through her writing. Whether this shame is a transparent reflection of Jacobs’s own feeling, or a strategic figuration of the trope of the suffering slave her white women readers would have expected of Linda Brent, is difficult to determine. Though she wrote within the sentimental genre, she aimed to elicit empathy and understanding for the position of enslaved women—not to glorify the transformative power of white women’s tears. The beating heart of the narrative is Linda Brent’s intertwined agency and defeat.
After four years of writing at night between the cries of the Willis babies and lingering pains shooting through her limbs from her seven years entombed, Jacobs completed her manuscript. Her brother John wrote from England, where he was now working as a sailor, inviting her to visit. She knew that American slave narratives were often released first by British publishers before they found backing stateside. In May 1858, she crossed the Atlantic once more, after outfitting herself with letters of introduction from prominent Garrisonian abolitionists in Boston. Her connections did glean her an invitation from the Duchess of Sutherland to a party at Stafford House, but John had already sailed for Constantinople, and she was unable to secure a publisher. Perhaps the sexual content, Yellin speculates, violated the rigid standards of public taste in Victorian England.50
Jacobs returned to America, dampened in spirits and in finances. John Brown’s attempted raid on Harpers Ferry the following year rekindled her spark, and she approached the Boston publisher Phillips and Sampson. They were interested but only willing to publish her narrative with a preface from a well-known white author, specifically Stowe or Nathaniel Parker Willis. Given the slaveholding guests Willis entertained at Idlewild and the romantic sketches of Southern life he printed in the nation’s leading magazines, Jacobs remained convinced that her employer supported slavery, and she wouldn’t stoop to asking him.51 Swallowing her pride, she once more reached out to Stowe.
Once more, Stowe declined to offer any support.
Jacobs approached a second publisher, who offered a contract if she secured a preface from a different white author, the well-known abolitionist novelist and journalist Lydia Maria Child. Fearing Child would behave as Stowe had, Jacobs confided to Amy Post that “I tremble at the thought of approaching another Satellite of so great a magnitude,” but am “resolved to make my last effort.” Fortunately, while Child was also a sentimental novelist who preferred “Mrs. Stowe to all other writers in the world,” she was cut from different cloth than her literary idol. Child accepted the project and offered her editing services to Jacobs, primarily in rearranging the order of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for continuity and dramatic tension. Remarkably, given Jacobs’s utter lack of formal education, Child changed fewer than fifty words of the prose itself. The searing writing of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the work of Jacobs alone.52
But the path to publication was not yet smooth. Despite a signed contract, undertaken in Child’s name to maintain Jacobs’s anonymity, and advertisements announcing the text’s impending publication date, the publisher failed to issue Jacobs’s book. They had just released the third edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an illustrated, 450-page book more lavish than any they had undertaken before, and their coffers were empty. Thayer and Eldridge defaulted on all their contracts and hauled in their sidewalk shingle. Unfortunately, the debut of the Calamus poems, one of the most explicit gay works to be published in the United States for the next half century, had prevented the appearance of the country’s first self-authored female slave narrative.53 Yet again, Jacobs found herself with a book but without a publisher.
With characteristic drive, Jacobs decided to publish and distribute Incidents herself. She purchased the stereotyped plates from Thayer and Eldridge, arranged for the book to be printed and bound, and bought a thousand copies of the green-and-gold leather volume. Beginning in the winter of 1861, she toured throughout Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, on the Garrisonian abolitionist circuit, selling her book for $1 a copy. The Garrisonian press published warm reviews, though the book didn’t gain a broad readership in the United States. A London edition soon followed, however, that received high praise from mainstream English newspapers.54
Yet it would take more than a century for Jacobs’s book to be recognized as the groundbreaking work it is. As the study of literature consolidated into a profession in university English departments in the twentieth century, scholars insisted that no enslaved woman could have lived such a life or penned such a tale. The text was pure fiction, they declared, invented by the talented Lydia Maria Child. Jacobs’s authorship was not forgotten—it was dismissed. Some Black women librarians, however, reportedly refused this new orthodoxy and still cataloged and shelved Incidents as Jacobs’s work. But it wasn’t until feminist scholar Jean Fagan Yellin completed nearly a decade of archival research in the mid-1980s that Jacobs was once more widely recognized to be the author—and publisher!—of her own autobiography.55
A few months into Jacobs’s book tour, the South Carolina militia bombarded Fort Sumter to force federal retreat from the newly seceded territory, launching the Civil War. Over the next year, tens of thousands of enslaved people fled the homes and plantations of the lately formed Confederacy for the free territory of the North. While Congress had suspended the Fugitive Slave Law among seceded states, refugees from slavery nonetheless faced homelessness, hunger, and severe poverty—many did not even have shoes—as they gathered in the Union-controlled city of Washington, DC, just under a hundred miles from the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
Jacobs was well on her way to establishing herself as a major abolitionist speaker and writer, a career that likely would have enabled her greatest wish, a home of her own. But as she read of the dangerous condit
ions those escaping slavery suffered, she felt called instead to solidarity work with her fellow self-emancipators on the streets of DC. She spent the winter of 1862 creating a supply chain of shoes, clothing, and blankets in New York and Philadelphia, and made lengthy trips to DC beginning in early spring.56 That summer, she worked in the refugee camp, composed mostly of women, children, the elderly, and disabled who couldn’t travel as freely nor enlist in the Union Army as younger men could. Conditions were despicable. People often lacked blankets or a change of clothing, and measles, smallpox, and typhoid fever were rampant. Jacobs began each day by counting the dead bodies lying upon the floor; some mornings ten people hadn’t made it through the night.
Over the next five years, Jacobs organized with Black women’s and white women’s groups to improve conditions, gathering supplies, fighting to stop guards from whipping migrants for violating camp rules, and serving as a camp matron in Alexandria, Virginia. Meanwhile, she wrote lengthy letters to the abolitionist press filled with the suffering and self-determination of the self-emancipating; her first communication to William Lloyd Garrison for his Liberator ran forty thousand words. At the same time, Jacobs dipped her toes into national feminist organizing. At a fall 1863 meeting in New York, she was unanimously appointed to the executive committee of Stanton and Anthony’s Woman’s National Loyal League, their organization founded to circulate their mass petition urging emancipation.57
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