by Harriet Jacobs
First edition, first printing of the scarce feminist narrative of escape from slavery
Boston: Published for the Author [by Thayer & Eldridge], 1861. First edition. 306 pp. Bound in publisher's brown ribbed cloth, expertly rebacked, boards blind ruled with floral ornamentation. Very Good with scattered flecks, mottling, and moderate wear to original cloth, toning and heavy foxing throughout.
"I was born a slave, but I never knew it until six years of happy childhood passed away." So begins Harriet Jacobs' memoir, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Jacobs' happy childhood came to an abrupt end with the death of her mother, and went from bad to worse after the death of her mistress. Jacobs was willed to a young relative, at whose father's hands she endured relentless sexual harassment.
Jacobs had two children with a young White neighbor (future Congressman Samuel Tredwell Sawyer). When she fled her enslavers at the age of twenty-two, her master sold her children to their father, as Jacobs had hoped, but Sawyer refused to free them. Their mother endured almost seven years of hiding in a tiny attic in her grandmother's house before escaping North and reuniting with her children. She joined a circle of abolitionist activists who persuaded her to publish her memoir, which was edited by the iron-jawed feminist and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child.
The book was well-reviewed in the Black and reform press and overseas, and Jacobs spent the Civil War raising money and aid for Black refugees, joining the executive committee of the Women’s Loyal National League in 1864. In 1868 she retired from public life and continued her work quietly for the next thirty years. Her memoir, gripping enough that many readers assumed it was fiction, is one of the most important Black autobiographies of the 19th century.