Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Ann Jacobs
b. 1813 · d. 1897
Formerly enslaved author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) who, with her daughter Louisa, worked among formerly enslaved people living in and around Union-occupied Alexandria during and after the Civil War.
Harriet Jacobs was born enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813 and escaped to the North in 1842. Her autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent and became one of the most widely read slave narratives of the Civil War era [1] LOC Prints & Photographs Photograph .
During the war, Jacobs and her daughter Louisa traveled to Alexandria to work among the thousands of formerly enslaved people who had fled to Union lines. They distributed clothing, opened a school for Black children, and reported regularly to northern abolitionist newspapers on conditions in the contraband camps and at L’Ouverture Hospital, where wounded and sick Black soldiers and civilians were treated [2] NARA Civil War records Government record . Jacobs’s dispatches are among the most detailed contemporary accounts of the Freedmen’s settlements around occupied Alexandria.
Associated places
- 1864–1866
Harriet Jacobs and other civilian workers at L'Ouverture Hospital accompanied reinterments of Black Union soldiers in 1865-66.
- 1864–1865
Harriet Jacobs worked with freedpeople at and around the hospital, distributing aid and reporting conditions to the northern press.
Sources
- 1.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (Washington: Library of Congress).
Photograph
- 2.
National Archives and Records Administration, Union Provost Marshal records and Civil War-era military correspondence (RG 109, RG 110, RG 393).
Government record
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