Sojourner Truth: Abolitionist, Suffragist, and Preacher
Sojourner Truth () was an abolitionist, suffragist, preacher, and social reformer. Sojourner caught the attention of many political leaders, and even President Abraham Lincoln was one of her admirers.
Sojourner Truth, or Isabella, was born a slave and remembers hearing her mother cry long into the night as she mourned the loss of her children who had been sold away. Isabella&#;s mother reminded her remaining children, &#;Oh my children there is a God who hears and sees you. He lives in the sky and when you are beaten or cruelly treated or fall into any trouble you must ask Him to help because he always hears you.&#;
Isabella was sold away from her parents and &#;married&#; to a slave on her plantation at the age of After giving birth to five children, Isabella decided to run away, convinced that God affirmed freedom for the slave. She hired herself out as a house servant to a Quaker couple, and for the first time, she earned money for her labor. She changed her name from Isabella to Sojourner Truth because,
My name was Isabella, but when I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I wa&#;n&#;t goin&#; to kee
The Many Lives of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth died on November 26, , aged Yet reports of her death began circulating decades earlier. Abolitionists and women’s rights advocates had built Truth into a prophetic figure, wise and therefore old. Truth, who never learned to read and write, relied on her abolitionist and feminist allies to put her life story into print, primarily through the Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Although based on Truth’s recollections, it was written by Olive Gilbert, conveying Gilbert’s interpretations and misstating some facts.
If aware of her friends’ inventions, Truth was perhaps too grateful to them to object. Sales of her Narrative provided much of her living during an activist career spanning forty years. And perhaps Truth to some extent reshaped her past as she recalled it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe called Truth “the Libyan sybil,” an epithet that stuck. Truth had a tall, erect figure and deep, authoritative voice. She enlivened her speeches by singing. Her direct colloquial style entertained audiences but also touched hearts. To abolitionists and women’s rights advocates, Truth was a godsend. They supported—and used—Truth in their a
Sojourner Truth
Edited by Debra Michals, PhD |
A formerly enslaved woman, Sojourner Truth became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Her Civil War work earned her an invitation to meet President Abraham Lincoln in
Truth was born Isabella Bomfree in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York in Born into slavery, her enslavers bought and sold Truth four times, and subjected her to harsh physical labor and violent punishments. In her teens, she was united with another enslaved man with whom she had five children, beginning in In —a year before New York’s law freeing enslaved people was to take effect—Truth ran away with her infant Sophia to a nearby abolitionist family, the Van Wageners. The family bought her freedom for twenty dollars and helped Truth successfully sue for the return of her five-year-old-son Peter, who was illegally sold into slavery in Alabama.
Truth moved to New York City in , where she worked for a local minister. By the early s, she participated in the religious revivals that were sweeping the state and became a charismatic speaker. In , she declared that the Spirit called on he
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella, the youngest of 12 children, in Ulster County, NY, in When she was nine, Isabella was sold from her family to an English speaking-family called Neely. Like many black New Yorkers, Isabella spoke only Dutch. Her new owners beat her for not understanding their commands. She was sold twice more before arriving at the Dumont farm, at There she toiled for 17 years. John Dumont beat her, and there is evidence that his wife, Sally, sexually abused her. Of this time in her life, Isabella wrote: "Now the war begun." It was a war both with her masters, and herself.
Alone on John Dumont's farm with little contact with other black New Yorkers, Isabella found her own ways to worship God. She built a temple of brush in the woods, an African tradition she may have learned from her mother, and bargained with God as if he were a familiar presence. Even though she had worked hard to please her master for 16 years, Isabella listened to God when He told her to walk away from slavery. With her baby, Sophia, Isabella left Dumont's farm in and walked to freedom.
Like thousands of slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in the early nineteenth ce
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