Sojourner Truth
-Chrissie
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Sojourner Truth is one of the great figures in the history of abolition and women’s rights. She was born in 1797 to James and Elizabeth Baumfree, who named her Isabella. The family was enslaved by Johanne Hardenbergh in Ulster County, New York. This was a primarily Dutch community, and so she grew up speaking Dutch. At age nine she was sold to John Neely of Kingston, New York, alongside a flock of sheep. This is when she began to learn English. Two years later, she was again sold to Martin Schryver, a tavern keeper in Port Ewer, New York. The last man to claim ownership over her was John Dumont, who purchased her from Schryver in 1810. It was from Dumont’s household that she freed herself sixteen years later. While being held by Dumont, she was subjected to regular rapes by him and beatings by his wife.
In 1815, Truth began a relationship with Robert, a slave from a neighboring farm. Robert’s owner, Charles Catton, Jr., refused to allow them to marry; he did not permit his enslaved men to have any relationships with women outside his ownership, because he would not own any children produced. Robert continued to visit until he was caught and beaten severely. They never saw each other again. Her first of five children, James, was born around this time and died in infancy. Her second child, Diana, was fathered by John Dumont. Sometime before 1820, she was married to Thomas, who was also enslaved by Dumont. They had three children, Peter, Elizabeth, and Sophia.
By the time of Sophia’s birth in 1826, Truth was anticipating her freedom under New York’s gradual emancipation law, which, on 4 July 1827, was scheduled to free all those enslaved who were born before 1799. Dumont had promised to manumit her earlier, but then refused to do so. Having, in her mind, satisfied her obligations to him, she took her infant daughter out of the Dumont household. They were protected by abolitionists Issac and Maria Van Wagenen, who paid Dumont $20 in order to keep Truth and her daughter until the emancipation went into effect the next summer. They also helped her to sue Dumont over his illegal sale of Truth’s eldest son, Peter. She won the suit and regained her son, one of the first black women to win a legal case against a white man in the United States. She also had a religious conversion while living with the Van Wagenens, dedicating herself to God.
She moved to New York City in 1829, where she worked as a housekeeper, first for an evangelist minister, Elijah Pierson, and then for the self-proclaimed prophet Robert Matthews. She and Matthews were accused of killing her previous employer by poison, but were acquitted. Peter joined the crew of a whaling ship in 1839, after which they never saw each other again. She received three letters from him and, though she wrote to him, from his writing it seems he did not receive hers.
She became an itinerant preacher in 1843, at which point Isabella Baumfree became Sojourner Truth, to reflect her call to travel and speak God’s truths. This vocation led her to various Christian Utopian communities in the Northeast, including the Millerites and the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. The latter was an egalitarian community founded by abolitionists who also advocated for women’s rights and religious tolerance. While at Northampton, Truth met many prominent members of the Abolitionists community, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Her preaching centered around the abolition of slavery, using her own experiences to illustrate her points. She also dictated her memoirs to a friend, Olive Gilbert, which were published by Garrison in 1850. The proceeds from this and her paid speeches allowed her to live independently, purchasing a small home for herself and even paying others’ mortgages.
In September 1857, Truth moved to Battle Creek Michigan to join a group of Seventh Day Adventists and work with abolitionist efforts there. When the Civil War began, Truth was involved in recruitment for Michigan’s 1st Colored Regiment. Beginning in 1864, she worked with the National Freedman’s Relief Association to assist former slaves. While she was in Washington, D.C., she made a point of using public transportation in order to force the issue of desegregation. After the war, she advocated for federal land grants to be given to the formerly enslaved, but was unsuccessful.
She lent her voice to the reelection campaign of Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Despite her public work in the campaign, she was turned away from the polls in Battle Creek, as Michigan had not yet included women in voting. She continued preaching and speaking on the topics of civil rights and women’s equality, as well as prison reform and the abolition of capital punishment, until the early 1880s. Sojourner Truth died on 26 November 1883 at age 86.
Truth’s very nature represented an inherent challenge to racism and sexism. When she was speaking about the abolition of slavery, the issue of women’s rights could not help but be included, if speaking about women’s rights, the issue of civil rights for African Americans was equally incorporated. She is, perhaps, best known for a speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, in which she cited her own experiences to call for both the abolition of slavery and equality of rights for women. The speech was widely recounted at the time, with a transcript published in many newspapers. This text strays widely from the version of the speech with which most are familiar, in which Truth faces an oppositional crowd and repeats the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” to punctuate her points. This version is first seen in an 1863 book, The History of Woman Suffrage, as part of an essay written by Frances Dana Barker Gage. In this, while the overall point of Truth’s words remains, they are made to fit a stereotypical view of American Blacks at the time: her words are presented in the dialect of uneducated Southern slaves and Gage added a comment about Truth having seen her thirteen children sold away from her. The author was in attendance at the 1851 meeting, and her own notes from the time are consistent with what was then published; we cannot know why Gage made changes; perhaps she thought the point would be better made if Truth met the expectations of readers. In reality, the fact that English was Truth’s second language made her very conscious of how she sounded, and she chose her words carefully to be sure she was understood.
Her work and life have been commemorated in many ways over the last century and a half, from poetry to statuary (she was the Black first woman to have her statue placed in the American Capitol building). Her name was even given to a Mars Rover.