Artist/Maker

Jacobs, Harriet Ann __author ||Child, L. Maria __pseudonym

Place Made

Date Made

1861

Medium

ink –paper

Accession Number

5831.5

Description

Harriet Jacob’s account of her life as a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, presented readers with a frank depiction of the evils faced by enslaved women. Sometimes called “the female Frederick Douglas” her story, published under a pseudonym to protect her identity, helped to galvanize the abolitionist cause in the Civil War. It was voices like Harriet’s that turned a war for Union unto a war against slavery.

In the early 1980s historian Jean Fagan Yellin established that Lydia Maria Childs was Harriet Jacobs, and that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was autobiographical. Yellin unraveled the identities of the other characters in the book as well, including that of Dr. James Norcomb who owned the house in Edenton from which MESDA acquired its Edenton rooms.

Credit Line

Gift in Honor of Anthony Parent to the Thomas A. Gray Rare Book and Manuscript Collection