Louisa Matilda Jacobs

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Photo probably depicting Louisa Matilda Jacobs

Louisa Matilda Jacobs (* 1832 or 1833 in Edenton (North Carolina); † April 5, 1917 in Brookline (Massachusetts) ) was an African American teacher and civil rights activist. Her first years of life are described in her mother Harriet Jacobs' autobiography . Her correspondence appeared in 2018 under the title Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879-1911 .

Childhood as a slave

Jacobs was born in Edenton (North Carolina) in 1832/33 to Harriet Jacobs. Harriet Jacobs belonged as a slave to a Dr. Norcom, which meant that their newborn daughter and son Joseph, who was two years older, would also be Dr. Belonged to Norcom. Joseph and Louisa Matilda's father was lawyer Samuel Tredwell Sawyer , a member of the North Carolina's white elite with whom Harriet Jacobs had entered into a relationship in order to provide some protection against the intrusions of Dr. To have Norcoms. In June 1835, Harriet Jacobs went into hiding. Dr. Norcom responded by throwing two-year-old Louisa, six-year-old Joseph, and her uncle, Harriet's brother John , into jail. After being held there for several weeks, Norcom sold all three to a slave trader who was supposed to take them to another state.

Contrary to the social convention that required a white "gentleman" to keep his children from relationships with slaves and not look after them, Sawyer had already secretly agreed with the slave trader that he would sell the three to him. While John Jacobs was officially becoming Sawyer's slave, the sales documents for Joseph and Louisa were made out to Molly Horniblow, Harriet Jacobs' free grandmother.

Louisa and her brother initially lived with their great-grandmother, unaware that their mother was hiding in a tiny room under the roof. In 1839, Sawyer, now married and elected Congressman, took his daughter Louisa with him to Washington. Half a year later she was sent to Sawyer's cousin in Brooklyn near New York. Sawyer had coordinated these steps with Harriet Jacobs through Molly Horniblow's mediation. Since slavery had already been abolished in New York by then, Louisa was actually free, but Sawyer's cousin did not treat her much better than a slave. In particular, she was not allowed to go to school even though Sawyer had promised her mother to go to school.

New York and Brooklyn 1842

It was not until 1842 that Jacobs' mother was able to leave her hiding place and flee Edenton. In New York she found a job as a nanny for the family of the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis , with whom both Harriet and Louisa Jacobs would remain lifelong. Mother and daughter could now see each other regularly, but at first the mother saw no way of getting her daughter out of the household of Sawyer's cousin. In 1843, Harriet Jacobs, who was still led by Dr. Norcom was wanted to flee to Boston, where her brother, who had escaped its owner, Sawyer, had settled. She took the opportunity to take her daughter with her. Louisa Jacobs' brother Joseph had been sent to Boston by his great-grandmother a few months earlier.

Training and job search

The 10-year-old Louisa Jacobs could not read yet. So her mother started teaching her at home. At the turn of the year 1848/49 she was admitted to the Young Ladies Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York, which her Uncle John had chosen for her. For the school, led by the clergyman Hiram H. Kellogg, the following applied: "The education of women is particularly important and is worth the attention and support of the Church" in order to prepare women for their roles as mothers and teachers.

After finishing school in 1852, Jacobs went west to look for a job as a teacher. After the job search had proven in vain, she spent some time helping her mother, who was again working for the Willis family. During this time she also copied the manuscript of her mother's autobiography, improving her spelling and especially her punctuation. Her mother's biographer, JFYellin, assumes that she otherwise had no further influence on the book. In 1856 she was able to take up a job in Brooklyn as governess for the daughter of Willis' sister, who also worked as a writer under the pseudonym Fanny Fern . Her work for Fanny Fern soon ended after a heated argument in which Fern's husband had to prevent his wife from beating Jacobs.

Teacher and civil rights activist

The Jacobs School

Harriet and Louisa Matilda Jacobs with their class in front of the Jacobs School, Alexandria, Virginia 1864

In the first months of 1861, the issue of slavery led to the secession of the southern states of the USA and then to civil war . Numerous African Americans who escaped slavery in the south gathered north of the front. Since the Lincoln government continued to regard the slaves as the property of their owners, these refugees were normally considered "contraband of war" (confiscated enemy property). The name contrabands soon caught on. Some of them vegetated under the most pitiful conditions in makeshift refugee camps. Harriet Jacobs now saw it as her job to help the contrabands .

In most slave states, it was forbidden to teach slaves to read and write before the civil war. In Virginia this ban even extended to free blacks. After the invasion of the Union troops in 1861, a few schools were opened in Alexandria that also accepted blacks, but initially there was no free school under Afro-American control. Harriet Jacobs now supported a school project that emerged from the black community in the course of 1863. In the fall of 1863, Louisa Matilda Jacobs went to Alexandria to support her mother. After some conflicts with white missionaries from the north who wanted to take control of the school, the Jacobs School was able to begin its work in January 1864 under the direction of Louisa Matilda.

Working with ex-slaves in Savannah

Lynching played an important role in maintaining White Supremacy after the defeat in the Civil War.

Mother and daughter Jacobs continued their work in Alexandria until after the Union won the Civil War. Under the impression that the former slaves in Alexandria could now take care of themselves, they followed a call from an aid organization in New England looking for teachers for the freed slaves in Georgia . In November 1865 they arrived in Savannah, Georgia , which had only seen the invasion of Union troops and the liberation of the slaves 11 months earlier. Over the next few months, they distributed clothes and set about building a school, an orphanage, and an old people's home.

The political situation had changed in the meantime, however: After the murder of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, a southerner and former slave owner, had become president. As early as July 1866, mother and daughter Jacobs left Savannah, which was increasingly marked by violence against the blacks.

Speaker for the American Equal Rights Association

In February 1867, Louisa Matilda Jacobs began lecturing for the American Equal Rights Association in New York State. The Association fought both for women's suffrage and for blacks' suffrage, which was particularly hotly contested after the abolition of slavery. She undertook this lecture tour together with veteran activist Charles Lenox Remond , with whom her uncle John S. had already worked two decades earlier. Since the prospect that Congress would guarantee blacks' voting rights through a constitutional amendment was good, but women's suffrage was not to be expected for the time being, conflicts arose in the association . Some feminists have said that female slavery in marriage is worse than the newly abolished black slavery. At an event in Troy, well-known feminist Susan B. Anthony said that in times of slavery the black woman was protected from her tyrannical husband by her white master. This was in blatant contradiction to the experiences of Jacobs' mother and the former slaves with whom Jacobs had worked in Alexandria and Savannah. Jacobs, who spoke the following day, was put in an embarrassing situation. JFYellin, her mother's biographer, says that besides these conflicts, a lack of talent as a speaker was also the reason why Jacobs' first lecture tour was her only one.

At the end of 1867, Jacobs and her mother traveled to Great Britain to raise funds for the homes in Savannah, the construction of which had not got beyond the planning stage in 1866. On her return, however, she had to realize that the terror against the blacks prevailing in Georgia, which was partly organized by the Ku Klux Klan , made these projects impossible. The collected money was given to the home fund of an aid organization.

Old age and death

Harriet Jacobs 1894
Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

After their return from England, mother and daughter Jacobs largely withdrew from the public. Together they ran a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts , in which, among others, professors from Harvard University lived. In 1877 they moved to Washington, DC, where Louisa Matilda was hoping for a job as a teacher. But she only found work for a short time; Mother and daughter ran a boarding house again until Harriet Jacobs fell so seriously ill in 1887/88 that she had to give up this job. With odd jobs and the help of friends, the two struggled to stay afloat. Jacobs nursed her mother in Washington, DC until her death on March 7, 1897

After her mother's death, Jacobs worked as a matron at the National Home for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children, and later as a matron at Howard University . She retired in 1908 at the age of 75. She spent most of her old age with Edith Willis Grinnell, the daughter of Nathaniel Parker Willis, in whose house she had lived since 1914.

On April 5, 1917, she died in Brookline, Massachusetts at the home of Edith Willis Grinnell and was buried next to her mother and uncle in Mount Auburn Cemetery .

literature

  • Harriet Ann Jacobs: Experiences from the life of a slave girl . Translated by Petar Skunca. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014. ISBN 978-1-5003-9277-2 .
  • Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself . Boston: For the Author, 1861. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987-2000. ISBN 978-0-6740-0271-5 .
  • Mary Maillard (ed.): Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879-1911 . Madison (Wisconsin): The University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0299-311-803 .
  • 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. ^ "Thought to be a photograph of Louisa Matilda", 3rd panel after p. 266 in: Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004.
  2. ↑ According to her mother's autobiography, she was two years old in June 1835.
  3. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 77.
  4. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 96f.
  5. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 96f.
  6. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 132f.
  7. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 157.
  8. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 176-178.
  9. ↑ The photo is from Georgia, 1920s. Curt Teich Postcard Archives Digital Collection (Newberry Library) . (English, illinois.edu [accessed January 4, 2020]). Photos that are closer in time to the topic of this section exist on Commons, but are often of poor quality or of even greater brutality.
  10. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 186.
  11. ↑ The organization was called the New England Freedmen's Aid Society ( New England aid society for the freed slaves)
  12. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 190-194.
  13. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 191-202.
  14. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 202-204
  15. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 210f, 217.
  16. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 217-261.
  17. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, pp. 263-265. Mary Maillard (ed.): Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879-1911. Moving into Edith Grinnell's house and indicating that this house was in Brookline, Massachusetts. Note 22 on p. 185.
  18. ↑ The date of death according to the photo of her headstone on the African American Heritage Trail - Harriet, John & Louisa Jacobs . (English, mountauburn.org [accessed January 5, 2020]).
  19. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 265.
  20. ^ Jean Fagan Yellin: Harriet Jacobs. A life. New York 2004, p. 265.


personal data
SURNAME Jacobs, Louisa Matilda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION African American teacher and civil rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH 1832 or 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH Edenton , North Carolina
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 1917
Place of death Brookline (Massachusetts)