John S. Jacobs

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John S. Jacobs (* 1815 or 1817 in Edenton, North Carolina; † December 19, 1873 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an African-American author and anti- slavery activist . After his escape from slavery, he published his autobiography in 1861 under the title A True Tale of Slavery in four consecutive editions of the English weekly The Leisure Hour . He plays an important role in the autobiography of his sister Harriet Jacobs , Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , which is now considered a classic in American literature.

Life

Youth as a slave

John Jacobs was born in Edenton , North Carolina in 1815 to Delilah Horniblow, a slave in the Horniblow innkeeping family. The father of John and his sister Harriet, who was two years older than him, was Elijah Knox, who was also a slave, but who enjoyed certain privileges as a skilled carpenter. He died in 1826.

John's mother died when he was four years old. He continued to live with his father until he was nine years old to the doctor Dr. James Norcom, son-in-law of the late innkeeper, was rented out. His sister Harriet, who had been inherited from her previous owner to the 3-year-old daughter Norcoms, also lived in Norcom's household.

Slave auction

After the widow Horniblow's death, her slaves were auctioned off at the New Year's auction in 1828, including John, his grandmother Molly and their son Mark. To be auctioned off in public was a traumatic experience for 12-year-old John. It was auctioned by Dr Norcom and so stayed with his sister in his household.

While he was a slave at Norcom, John Jacobs managed to teach himself to read (a skill extremely few slaves possessed) but could not write when he escaped from slavery as a young adult.

Norcom soon began sexually harassing John's sister, Harriet. Hoping to escape Norcom's intrusiveness, Harriet got involved in a relationship with white attorney Samuel Sawyer , who was later elected to the US House of Representatives. The relationship resulted in two children.

In June 1835 the situation had become so unbearable for Harriet that she decided to flee. Norcom then sold John Jacobs and Harriet's two children to a slave dealer in the expectation that he would sell them to another state and thereby separate them from Harriet forever. However, the dealer had previously secretly arranged with Sawyer to resell the three to him, so that Norcom's plans for revenge were thwarted.

Flight and Abolitionism

John accompanied his new owner Sawyer in 1838 as a servant on his honeymoon through the north of the USA and achieved freedom by leaving him in New York , where slavery had already been abolished at that time. In their respective memoirs, it is important for both siblings to mention that John left everything in good order according to his duties as a servant and did not steal any money from his master. He then hired a whaler and took numerous books with him on the three-and-a-half-year journey in order - as he writes in his memoirs - to catch up on the education he had missed in his youth.

William Lloyd Garrison
Mirror-inverted daguerreotype from Walker's right (!) Hand taken in 1845

After returning from the whaling voyage, John S. Jacobs, as he called himself since his escape from slavery, became increasingly involved in abolitionism. H. for the anti-slavery movement led by William Lloyd Garrison . In 1847/48 he went on a lecture tour with Captain Jonathan Walker . Walker, a white man, was able to show the barbaric brutality of the slave owners his hand, which had been branded with the letters SS (for “slave stealer”) because he had tried to escape a group of slaves help. He went on other lecture tours together with Frederick Douglass, who was three years his junior, or alone.

In 1849 John S. took over the Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room in Rochester, New York, for a few months . His sister Harriet supported him.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law , which made it easier for fugitive slave owners to force the refugees back into slavery. John S. Jacobs was one of the speakers in the protests against this law. At the end of the year he moved to California to try his luck as a gold digger . A few years later, accompanied by Harriet's son Joseph, he moved to Australia , where he also worked as a gold digger . It is not clear whether the decision to go to California and Australia was conditioned by the Fugitive Slave Law. His sister expressly writes that John was not affected by the law because his owner had brought him to the north and did not get there by escape. On the other hand, many years later, at John's funeral, Garrison wrote that he had stayed in the north until the Fugitive Slave Law was passed and then left the country "because he knew that there was no longer any safety for him on our soil."

After he had not found the wealth he had hoped for in either California or Australia, he moved on to England and worked as a seaman for the next few years. When his sister came to England in 1858 and again in 1867/68, the siblings missed each other, as John was on a long sea voyage both times - in the Middle East in 1858, and ten years later in India. However, the siblings were in correspondence.

Autobiography

Frederick Douglass (photographed between 1847 and 52)

The idea of ​​writing down their experiences with slavery could not have been alien to the Jacobs siblings. As early as 1845, Frederick Douglass had written A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (a tale of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave). John S. himself had urged his sister to write down her life story. The committed abolitionist and suffragette Amy Post, whom Harriet Jacobs met through John, then gave the decisive impetus, and in 1853 Harriet Jacobs began work on her biography Experiences from the Life of a Slave Girl , which was published in January 1861 at a time when Douglass' (second) autobiography was already available in German translation.

John Jacobs' own memories were much shorter. They appeared in the four February issues of the London weekly The Leisure Hour on February 7, 14, 21 and 28, 1861 under the title A True Tale of Slavery , the first three episodes being his life up to the attainment of freedom and tell of the beginning of the whaling journey, while the fourth episode describes atrocities against other slaves whom he had witnessed. In their memories, both siblings tell both experiences and events from each other's life. It is noticeable that John neither writes about Norcom's intrusiveness towards his sister nor about her relationship with Sawyer. Harriet's children are just there in John's story, without the father, who is John's last owner, after all. Although he reports that his sale and that of Harriet's children to Sawyer between him and the slave dealer without the knowledge of Norcom, it is ultimately incomprehensible why Sawyer was so interested in buying the two children and their uncle John . Also, why Sawyer treated his slave John well from the beginning, but not his numerous other slaves, remains unexplained if one does not include Harriet's memories.

Both the first and last names of all persons have been changed in Harriet Jacobs' story, she writes under the pseudonym Linda Brent, and is regularly addressed in the book as "Linda". John (called "William" by Harriet) gives the correct first names in his story, but only mentions the first letter of all surnames, with the exception of Sawyer, whose name he initially abbreviates but later spells out in full. He mentions his own surname only once, namely as a signature under the letter written by a friend informing Sawyer that he has left him: "No longer yours, John S. Jacobs" . Jacobs)

Old age and death

Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1875

In the mid-1860s, around the age of 50, John Jacobs married the Englishwoman Elleanor Ashland, who already had two children from a previous relationship. The only child together, Joseph Ramsey Jacobs, was born around 1866.

In 1873 John Jacobs moved back to the USA with his wife and three children and settled in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in the immediate vicinity of his sister and her daughter Louisa Matilda . He died that same year, on December 19, 1873. At the special invitation of Louisa Matilda, William Lloyd Garrison attended his funeral. Harriet and Louisa Matilda Jacobs were later buried next to him in Mount Auburn Cemetery .

His widow lived until 1903, but there is no evidence of any further contact between her and her children on the one hand and Harriet and Louisa Matilda on the other. In her biography of Harriet Jacobs, Jean Fagan Yellin suspects the reason that his widow, in view of the racism in the USA, denied her Afro-American relatives and the origins of Joseph Ramsey, who apparently did not show his African roots.

literature

  • Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself . Boston: For the Author, 1861. Enlarged Edition. Edited and with an Introduction by Jean Fagan Yellin. Now with "A True Tale of Slavery" by John S. Jacobs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987-2000. ISBN 978-0-6740-0271-5 .
  • Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs: A Life . New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004. ISBN 0-465-09288-8 .
  • Jean Fagan Yellin (ed.): The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers . The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8078-3131-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacobs was two years younger than his better-known sister Harriet. The calculation of his date of birth therefore depends on hers. Her biographer Yellin, who has examined numerous documents about Harriet Jacobs and her family in Edenton, names 1813 as Harriet's year of birth, without giving precise details of the day, month or even season; see. Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 3. However, your tombstone names February 11th, 1815 as the date of birth (John's tombstone has no dates). Mary Maillard, who edited Harriet's daughter's letters in 2017, advocates the thesis of 1815 as the year of birth in an article published in 2013: Dating Harriet Jacobs: Why Birthdates Matter to Historians . Black past. Retrieved March 21, 2020. The dates and ages in this article will follow Yellin.
  2. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 92.
  3. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 18.
  4. ^ A True Tale of Slavery . S. 86 (English, unc.edu [accessed November 29, 2019]).
  5. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 363 (note on p. 254).
  6. ^ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself . S. 94 (English, unc.edu [accessed September 19, 2019]).
  7. ↑ a b c A True Tale of Slavery . S. 126 (English, unc.edu [accessed November 29, 2019]). Corresponds to page 220f in H. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. JFYellin, Cambridge 2000.
  8. ↑ Yellin says that with the "S." wanted to honor its last owner, Sam Sawyer; see. Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 75. John S. Jacobs writes about his relationship with Sawyer, "The lawyer [Sawyer] I have quite a friendly feeling for, and would be pleased to meet him as a countryman and a brother, but not as a master. " A True Tale of Slavery . S. 126 (English, unc.edu [accessed November 29, 2019]).
  9. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 93.
  10. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 98.
  11. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 102f.
  12. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 107f.
  13. ^ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself . S. 287 (English, unc.edu [accessed September 19, 2019]).
  14. ↑ "... knowing that there was no longer any safety for him on our soil.", Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 226.
  15. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 137f, 212.
  16. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 118f.
  17. ↑ My bondage and my freedom: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. ISBN 1404371680 . German slavery and freedom . Autobiography. Translated from English by Ottilie Assing . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1860 ( limited preview in the Google book search, MDZ Munich )
  18. ^ Reprinted in: Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Boston: For the Author, 1861. Enlarged Edition. Edited and with an Introduction by Jean Fagan Yellin. Now with "A True Tale of Slavery" by John S. Jacobs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987-2000, pp. 207-228.
  19. ^ A True Tale of Slavery . S. 109 (English, unc.edu [accessed November 29, 2019]). Corresponds to page 215f in H. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. JFYellin, Cambridge 2000.
  20. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 148f.
  21. ↑ When Harriet visited her brother's family in England in 1867/68, Joseph was a "toddler", Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 212.
  22. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 226f.
personal data
SURNAME Jacobs, John S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION African American author
DATE OF BIRTH 1815
PLACE OF BIRTH Edenton , North Carolina
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1873
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts