Truth, Sojourner c. 1797–1883

Owing to her powerful and compelling personality and her forceful speaking for abolitionism and women’s rights, Sojourner Truth is likely the best-known black woman of the U.S. antebellum period. Born to enslaved parents in upstate New York, Truth left a story presenting two sides of the racially charged debate about the mental capacities and judgement of black persons. The most substantial written records of Truth’s life—an autobiography narrated by her to a transcriber, an account of her renowned “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and newspaper reports of her speeches and activity—were recorded predominantly by white writers. Yet these records present two representations of the same person.

On one hand, there is the stereotyped eighteenth-century black woman speaking broken English in a Southern dialect. On the other hand, there is the self-assured, self-aware person who walked away from bondage, preached against enslavement, and provided important support for abolitionism and women’s rights. Truth often appears to have been conscious of dispelling notions that the historical accident of her illiterate and formerly enslaved black female body meant she lacked intellect, power, and ingenuity. The historian Nell Irvin Painter originally observed the role of stereotypes in Truth’s life in Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996). Painter notes Truth’s first language and first owners were Dutch, and that she spent her life in the northern United States. These two facts alone cast Truth outside images of enslaved black women typically populating the colonial imagination.

Sojourner Truth was originally named Isabella Baumfree, taking her surname from her first owner. Along with approximately ten siblings, she was sold away from her parents at age nine. Accounts of her early life also include memories of mother Elizabeth’s moral and religious instruction and prayers with Isabella and her younger brother Peter, and of Elizabeth’s death shortly after Isabella and Peter’s sale.

Echoing the era’s Protestant evangelicalism and traditions of black religiosity, Truth credited some of her most bold and independent actions and views to divine support. Isabella saw her father, James, only twice after Elizabeth’s death. One visit occurred when she was around thirteen, a time when Isabella felt especially burdened by abusive slavers, the Nealys, who repeatedly whipped her for speaking only Dutch. She attributes James’s role in her subsequent purchase by John J. Dumont to divine intervention. Isabella stayed with Dumont for about sixteen years—the majority of her enslaved adult life. While with Dumont, Isabella married a fellow bondsman named Thomas and bore five children. During this period, as Truth told her biographer, young Isabella created a sanctuary in a wooded area near a small stream, where she regularly meditated.

In late 1826 (six months before the state of New York’s emancipation statute), Isabella prayed for divine guidance and left enslavement one morning before daybreak, taking her infant daughter along with her. Sheltered by Isaac Van Wagener, who paid twenty-five dollars for her and her daughter, Isabella soon began taking charge of her life. This was most apparent in her bold socioreligious activism. Though her religiosity generally was hybridized, while living with the Van Wageners Isabella practiced Methodist “holiness,” including simple living, abstaining from alcohol, and avoiding anger. During this period she had a conversion experience that, consistent with such accounts by other enslaved persons, seems to mark a significant turning point in Isabella’s sense of empowerment. When her son (also named Peter) was sold to slavers in Alabama, Isabella determined to have him returned. Sure that “God would help me get him” (1968 [1878], p. 45) she entered a complaint with a grand jury, sought assistance from Quakers, raised funds, and hired an attorney. She prevailed in her efforts, and Peter was returned to her custody.

Shortly after this incident, Isabella left her familiar surroundings and went to New York City with son Peter, who eventually took a career at sea. For the next sixteen years, she worked as a house servant to support herself. She attended services at the famous John Street Methodist Church, then moved to the all-black Zion Church, and eventually joined the extremist Robert Matthias’s sect, a commune that practiced a more intense form of holiness. The Matthias group eventually collapsed, however, both fiscally and socially.

On June 1, 1843, Isabella changed her name to Sojourner and left New York City, saying she was following divine direction to go east and preach against enslavement. She joined the millenialist Millerite sect and became known for inspiring and cogent speaking. Sojourner honed her socioreligious rhetoric through a relationship with the cooperative Northampton (Massachusetts) Association for Education and Industry, an egalitarian commune that advocated free expression and supported women’s rights, abolition, temperance, and vegetarianism. Uniting with the group in the fall of 1843, and remaining with them over the next several years, Sojourner had access to abolitionist and suffragist lecturers, including Frederick Douglass.

At Northampton, Sojourner began to express her religious piety in a decidedly social manner, as she began to speak more forcefully against slavery and to advocate women’s suffrage. It was during this period that she took the surname Truth. When the association dissolved in 1846, she followed Douglass’s example and published the narrative of her life. Income from the project allowed her to purchase her first home.

Sojourner Truth began giving antislavery speeches in 1844, first at Northampton and subsequently in New York. Invited by William Lloyd Garrison, she later joined the antislavery lecture circuit, speaking and selling her narrative. Her reputation as a compelling lecturer grew, and by 1846 Truth regularly addressed antislavery and women’s rights gatherings, making frequent use of the Bible to argue for both. Truth delivered her famous and oft repeated “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at the 1851 Akron, Ohio, women’s rights convention. In the speech, recorded from observers’ memories, Truth rebutted social and religious objections to women’s rights. Pointing out the hard work and difficulties of her life as a woman, and observing that Christ came “from God and a woman,” Truth countered arguments against female suffrage based on women’s fragility and Christ’s maleness. Celebrated for its powerful response to hecklers and incisive critique of a narrowly defined womanhood, this speech sealed Truth’s reputation. Although she was illiterate, Truth demonstrated intellectual independence. She had scriptures read to her by children whom, she said, did not seek to interpret what they read. In a prescient 1853 speech, Truth included racial and gender analysis of the character Esther from Christian and Hebrew scripture to argue for full citizenship of white women and all black persons.

With outbreak of the Civil War, Truth moved to Washington, D.C., where she assisted blacks fleeing to the nation’s capitol. In 1867, Truth began an effort to match newly freed persons with potential employers in New York and Michigan. She also initiated a petition drive calling on Congress to settle freed people on western lands. Congress never acted on the petition, however. Truth died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1883.

SEE ALSO Black Feminism in the United States

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilbert, Olive, and Frances W. Titus. 1968 (1878). The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. New York: Arno Press.

Painter, Nell Irvin. 1993. “Sojourner Truth.” In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Carlson.

_____1996. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. 1881. History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. 1. New York: Fowler and Wells.

Rosetta E. Ross