Truth, Sojourner (1797-1883)

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)

Source

Abolitionist, reformer

Early Life in Slavery. Isabella was born around 1797 on the estate of a Dutch patroon in Ulster County, New York, where her parents were slaves. Her first language was Dutch, and she would speak with an accent all her life. One of the formative events of her early childhood was witnessing her parents’ grief over the loss of children who had been sold away. When she was nine Isabella herself was sold, and she was sold several more times in her early life. She worked from 1810 to 1827 in the household of John J. Dumont of New Paltz, New York. There she married a fellow slave named Thomas, with whom she had at least five children: two daughters and a son were sold away from her. When Dumont demanded that she serve another year after New York declared slavery illegal, Bomefree escaped. That year she also became a Christian; her religious commitments, combined with a deep knowledge of the Bible, would influence her profoundly throughout her life. Isaac and Maria Van Wagener took her in, and she adopted their last name. With the help of Quaker friends she successfully sued her former owner for the return of her son Peter, who had been sold illegally to an Alabama planter.

Freedom and Faith. Around 1829 Isabella Van Wagener moved to New York City with her two youngest children, Peter and Sophia. She joined the Methodist Church and adopted the evangelistic, “perfectionist” religious beliefs that inspired her own mystical faith. Throughout her life she would hear voices and see visions. In New York she met Elijah Pierson, a wealthy and erratic social reformer whose primary work was with prostitutes, and joined Pierson and his wife in preaching in the streets. In the 1830s Van Wagener moved to a commune in Ossining, New York, remaining there for five years. She eventually returned to New York City, where she lived quietly and attended the African Zion Church, until 1843, when an inner voice told her to change her name to Sojourner Truth. She became an itinerant minister, traveling around the Connecticut River valley to preach, sing, pray, and evangelize at camp meetings, in churches, or wherever she could find shelter and an audience. Her message was that God was loving and perfect, and that human beings had nothing to fear from him. She said often that “God is from everlasting to everlasting” and that “Truth burns up error.” She believed that God was present everywhere and that all beings lived in him as “fishes in the sea.” In the winter of 1843 Sojourner Truth moved to the Northampton Industrial Association, another utopian community, where she lived until 1846. There she met important members of the abolitionist movement, including Frederick Douglass and George Benson, brother-in-law of the antislavery leader William Lloyd Garrison. As a result of this experience, abolitionism and women’s rights became important to Sojourner Truth and were always expressed in her preaching. She never compromised on the importance of these causes, disagreeing with abolitionists such as Douglass, who maintained that equality for women ought to be subordinated to the elimination of slavery.

Autobiography and Speeches. In 1850 Truth published her autobiography, ghostwritten by Olive Gilbert. She supported herself by selling The Narrative of Sojourner Truth at women’s rights meetings for twenty-five cents a copy. Truth’s “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” speech at the Akron Women’s Rights Convention in 1850 has gone down in history as one of the most significant expressions of the combined abolitionist and women’s rights movement. When Truth rose to speak she was severely heckled; undaunted, she pointed out that as a female slave she had experienced the profound grief of having her own children sold away and had had to work like a man all her life; she then asked, “And ar’n’t I a woman?” She left the stage to tumultuous applause. At a women’s rights convention in Indiana she responded to charges that she was a man posing as a woman by baring her breast to her accusers.

Civil War and Freedpeoples’ Rights. In the mid 1850s Truth moved with her daughters to Battle Creek, Michigan, a center of religious and antislavery reform movements. There she joined a commune called Harmonia. During the Civil War she met President Abraham Lincoln and worked on freed slaves’ relief projects such as the Freedmen’s Hospital and the Freedmen’s Village at Arlington Heights, Virginia. One of her grandsons served in the celebrated black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers. In an article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly during the war the antislavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe immortalized Truth as the “Libyan Sybil”; the name would be associated with Truth for the rest of her life. After the war Truth worked tirelessly to assist former slaves; in 1870 she sent a petition to Congress, signed by hundreds of supporters, pleading for the allocation of government lands in the West to former slaves. Although Congress took no action on the petition, her outspoken support of western migration inspired thousands of former slaves to establish homesteads in Kansas. She traveled throughout Kansas and Missouri, exhorting the former slaves to “Be clean! for cleanliness is godliness.” She also continued to speak to white audiences in the Northeast, preaching her message of a loving God and advocating temperance, woman suffrage, and equal rights for blacks.

Final Years. In the mid 1870s Truth’s autobiography was revised and republished. She continued to travel and speak on social reform issues such as temperance as long as she was able, and she received hundreds of visitors in Battle Creek until her death on 26 November 1883. Her funeral was said to have been the largest ever held in Battle Creek.

Source

Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Boston, 1850);

Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996).